Five Points, Manhattan

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Five Points (or The Five Points) was a notorious slum centered on the intersection of Worth St. (originally Anthony St.), Baxter St. (originally Orange St.) and a now demolished stretch of Mosco St. (formerly Park St.) 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 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 and upper-middle class inhabitants fled, leaving the neighborhood 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.

At Five Points' height, only certain areas of London's East End vied with it in sheer population density, disease, infant and child mortality, unemployment, violent crime, and other classic ills of the destitute. But to characterize Five Points as a pure wasteland would be misleading, for it had a certain rough vibrancy that gave rise to some of the more admirable aspects of modern American life. It was the original melting pot, at first consisting primarily of newly emancipated African Americans and newly arrived Irish. The confluence of African, Irish, Anglo and, later, Jewish and Italian culture, seen first in Five Points, would be an important leavening in the growth of the United States.

Poor tenements near Five Points in an 1872 sketch

The fusion of the Irish jig with the African shuffle 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 fusion occurred in Five Points, almost certainly at Almack's dance hall (also known as "Pete Williams's Place") on the east side of Orange St. (today's Baxter St.) just south of its intersection with Bayard St., circa 1840. This ground is today occupied by Columbus Park, used primarily by residents of modern Chinatown.

The rough and tumble local politics of "the ould Sixth ward", 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 example of grassroots racial integration in American 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, but the years spent pursuing daily life alongside the Irish in Five Points and, later, alongside Jews and Italians in the same neighborhood, helped create a sense of common purpose among these minorities which even today manifests itself in the liberal wing of the American political spectrum, most noticeably in the Democratic Party.

Summer scene at the Five Points in 1872

About 1880, slum clearance efforts 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.

Charles Dickens, in his 1842 work, "American Notes", wrote about the filth and wretchedness of the Five Points section ^[1]

The neighborhood was the subject of Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York.

A comprehensive history of Five Points is Professor Tyler Anbinder's 2001 book: Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum.

[edit] Notes

^ American Notes by Charles Dickens, Chapter 6, "New York":

"There are many by-streets, almost as neutral in clean colours, and positive in dirty ones, as by-streets in London; and there is one quarter, commonly called the Five Points, which, in respect of filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles's ..." [1]

[edit] Bibliography

Anbinder, Tyler, "From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne’s Irish Tenants Encounter North America’s Most Notorious Slum", American Historical Review 107 (April 2002): 351-387.
Anbinder, Tyler, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum. 2001 ISBN 0-684-85995-5.