FIVE POINTS

The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum.

by Tyler Anbinder

Illustrated

The Free Press

532 pages

 

It is an unvarying rule that wherever New Yorkers see trash, they will throw more of it. About 200 years ago, Lower Manhattan was adorned by a pretty five-acre lake known as the Collect. The first steamboat was tested there. Locals would gather to skate on its ice in the winter and picnic along its shores in the summer.

By the mid-1700’s, however, the Collect was already rimmed with slaughterhouses and tanneries. The effusions from these bloody businesses were poured directly into the lake and more industries, more trash, quickly followed. By 1800 the Collect was a reeking cesspool. By 1813 it had been entirely filled in and by 1825 something entirely new stood on the site — America’s first real slum, the Five Points.

No other plot of land would so fire the national imagination in the 19th century. The Five Points would not only define our idea of an urban ghetto, but fix the very terms of how we argue about the poor. Yet such is the rush of American history that it is barely remembered today. As Tyler Anbinder asserts near the beginning of his valuable new history, ”Five Points,” ”The two most important works on the history of New York published in the 1990’s — The Encyclopedia of New York City and ‘Gotham’ — both misidentify something as simple as the streets whose confluence created the five-cornered intersection that gave the neighborhood its name.”

Physically, the Five Points was mostly what we now know as Little Italy, Chinatown and the blocks of monolithic courthouses that seem to anchor Manhattan. Metaphysically, it constituted hallowed ground in the American story, occupied by successive waves of freed slaves and Irish, Italian and Chinese immigrants. With the exception of its more celebrated neighbor, the Lower East Side, no part of the country has been a place of the poor, the immigrant and the aspiring for as long as the Five Points.

That is to say, we loathed it. The Five Points came into being almost at the same moment as America’s raucous new penny press, and the newspapers dwelt interminably upon its alleged violence and depravity. Readers were thrilled and repulsed by tales of murder, mayhem and sexual license. By the late 1830’s the Five Points was already infamous enough that tourists from around the world made regular ”slumming” trips; visitors included a Russian grand duke, Davy Crockett, Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln. They shivered enjoyably before the countless bars and liquor stores and brazen bordellos; the squalid, lightless tenements and — most depraved of all! — the sight of blacks and whites intermingling freely. Like every American slum since, the Five Points became a hobbyhorse for social theorists. Southern politicians blamed race mixing for its depravity. Northern Republicans pointed out that it voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Protestant missionaries scrapped over whether its failings could be attributed to poor living conditions or poor morals — or to the Roman Catholicism of the Irish immigrants who dominated the area by the 1840’s.

Was the Five Points really so bad? Those who know it at all today know it chiefly through ”The Gangs of New York,” Herbert Asbury’s 1928 collection of rollicking, hair-raising (and often fanciful) tales of old New York, or through the superb impressionistic sketches in Luc Sante’s ”Low Life.” Both works have considerable merit, yet neither goes to much trouble to sort out the lore from hard, historical fact.

Anbinder, an associate professor of history at George Washington University, addresses himself to just this question, and the results are always enlightening. Yes, the Five Points was violent and crime-ridden. Yet the neighborhood’s murder rates were probably well below what we would expect from a slum today (not least because the residents had very limited access to firearms). Yes, there was plenty of prostitution and public drunkenness. Anbinder quotes an inebriated woman telling a health official who asked her why she drank, ”If you lived in this place you would ask for whiskey instead of milk.” But most Five Points residents — like most residents of modern American slums — seem to have worked like demons, sent everything they could back to their relatives in the old country and, in at least some cases, saved up astonishing amounts of money.

The overwhelming reality of the Five Points, and the one thing that all observers seem to have gotten right, was the misery. The endless drudgery and the low pay. The appalling sanitation and the firetrap tenements. The plagues of cholera, measles, diphtheria and typhus that struck hardest at children and infants.

Still, the Five Points also produced a vibrant popular culture all its own, one that easily lived up to the colorful claims in Anbinder’s subtitle. He relates this mostly through a series of vignettes on everything from child street musicians to the notorious Civil War draft riot, from the first Chinese in New York to William Henry Lane, a k a Master Juba, the teenage African-American phenomenon who probably invented tap dancing by combining Irish and African folk traditions.

Most of these stories are fascinating, but each is followed by somewhat more diffuse, academic chapters on subjects like ”Why They Came,” ”How They Lived,” ”Vice and Crime.” At times one longs for Sante’s beautifully integrated essays — or at least a few of Asbury’s cheap thrills. Anbinder’s research is always prodigious, even if it does cause him occasionally to overreach. He writes that the environs of the Five Points today feature ”overcrowding just as astounding as that found in the Old Brewery in the 1840’s. . . . The number of laws enacted to prevent and punish such overcrowding has multiplied . . . but each successive wave of immigrants nonetheless follows the path of its predecessors.” In fact, as bad as immigrants’ living conditions can be today in New York, they do not begin to approach those of the 19th century. One reform that did work was a real commitment by government to building decent public housing — a commitment that has been more or less abandoned during this conservative era.

None of this, though, subtracts significantly from what is a careful, intelligent and sympathetic history on a neglected subject. ”With its energy, brutality, enterprise, hardship and constant dramas,” Anbinder writes with typical balance, ”Five Points was an extreme case, yet still a deeply American place.”