Everything about Five Points Manhattan totally explained
Five Points (or
The Five Points) was a notorious
slum centered on the intersection of Anthony (now Worth), Orange (now Baxter), Mulberry (still the same name), Cross (now Mosco St./Park Row) and Little Water (which no longer exists) and the eastern corner of a public park called “Paradise Square”, on
Manhattan island,
New York City,
New York, in the
United States. The name
Five Points derived from the five corners at this intersection.
The neighborhood features heavily in the book
The Gangs of New York by
Herbert Asbury, published in 1928. In the 1970s, the book inspired director
Martin Scorsese to make a film set in The Points, but he wasn't able to accomplish it until 2002’s
Gangs of New York.
History
The neighborhood took form by about 1820 next to the site of the former
Collect Pond, which had been drained due to a severe pollution problem. The landfill job on the Collect was a poor one, and surface seepage to the southeast created swampy, insect-ridden conditions resulting in a precipitous drop in land value. Most middle-class-and-up inhabitants fled, leaving the neighborhood completely open to the influx of poor immigrants that started in the early 1820s and reached a torrent in the 1840s due to the
Irish Potato Famine. It was situated close enough for a walking commute to the large mercantile employers of the day in and around the dockyards at the island’s southern tip, but it was far enough away from the built-up Wall St. area to allow a total remake of character.
At Five Points’ “height”, only certain areas of
London’s East End vied with it in the western world for sheer population density, disease, infant and
child mortality, unemployment, prostitution, violent crime, and other classic ills of the destitute. However, it was the original American
melting pot, at first consisting primarily of newly emancipated
African Americans (gradual emancipation ended in New York on July 4, 1827), and newly arrived Irish.
The rough and tumble local politics of “the ould Sixth ward” (The Points’ primary municipal voting district), while not free of corruption, set important precedents for the election of non-Anglo-Saxons to key offices. Although the tensions between the African Americans and the Irish were legendary, their cohabitation in Five Points was the first large-scale instance of volitional racial integration in American history, and arguably the first in world history. In the end, the Five Points African American community moved to Manhattan’s West Side and to the then-undeveloped north of the island.
Crime
Five Points is alleged to have sustained the highest murder rate of any slum in the world. According to New York legend, The
Old Brewery, an overcrowded tenement housing 1,000 poor, is said to have averaged a murder a night for fifteen years, until its demolition in 1852. Many other sources dispute these figures, describing them as gross exaggerations of actual sustained averages.
Five Points was dominated by rival gangs like the
Roach Guards,
Dead Rabbits, and
Bowery Boys. According to Herbert Asbury's book "The Gangs of New York," police arrested 82,072 New Yorkers in 1862, or 10% of the city. In 1864, five police officers were murdered. To give a sense of the era, Asbury's book tells the story of a little girl who lived with 25 people in a small basement room, and was stabbed to death for a penny she'd begged. Asbury reports that the girl's body lay in a corner for five days before her mother dug her a shallow grave in the floor.
In the twentieth century, the
Five Points Gang recruited members from the toughest gangs in the city. Five Points mobsters included
Paul Kelly,
Giovanni "Johnny" Torrio and
Frankie Yale. Recruits included
Charles "Lucky" Luciano and
Al Capone. Capone received his nickname "scarface" from a knife fight at The Harvard Inn, in Coney Island. When Capone was finally convicted for tax evasion in 1931, he was quoted in newspapers saying, "I shoulda never left Five Points." (meaning his New York gang of that name). . This music and dance had spontaneously appeared on the street from competition between African-American and Irish-American musicians and dancers, spilling into Almack's where it gave rise in the short term to
Tap Dance (see
Master Juba) and in the long term to a music hall genre that was a major precursor to American
Jazz and
Rock and Roll. This ground is today occupied by Columbus Park, used primarily by residents of modern
Chinatown.
Demolition
Between 1885 and 1895, slum clearance efforts (promoted in particular by
Jacob Riis, famed author of
How the Other Half Lives) succeeded in razing Five Points and re-purposing the land—a
pyrrhic victory in that the masses of the indigent simply moved to the nearby
Lower East Side. What was Five Points is today covered mostly by large city and state administration buildings known collectively as
Foley Square, plus Columbus Park, Collect Pond Park and various facilities of the New York City Department of Corrections clustering around lower Centre Street. The corrections facilities are the most direct link to the neighborhood's past, as the infamous
Tombs Prison, which housed many a Five Points marauder from 1838 on, stood near the site of the current "City Prison Manhattan" at 125 White St.
The most enduring description of the neighborhood was penned by
Charles Dickens in his 1842 work
American Notes. As he strolled about Manhattan in his first visit to the United States he didn't shrink from the worst areas of town. His account of the filth and wretchedness characterizing so much of the Five Points was balanced by an admiring description of the patrons of Almack's.
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