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. 519 pp. New York:
The Free Press. $30
By
Kevin Baker
It
is an unvarying rule that wherever New Yorkers see trash, they
will throw more of it. About two hundred years ago, lower Manhattan
was adorned by a pretty, five-acre lake known as "the Collect."
The first steamboat was tested there, and the locals would gather
to skate on its ice in the winter and picnic along its shores
in the summer.
By
the mid-1700s, though, the Collect was already rimmed with slaughterhouses
and tanneries, servicing the great herds of cattle necessary to
sate the ever-growing appetite of the city below. 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 by1825 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
nineteenth century. The Five Points would not only define our
idea of an urban ghetto, but fix the very parameters of how we
argue about the poor and poverty. Yet such is the rush of American
history—such was the determination of New York’s city
fathers to physically eradicate the Five Points—that it is
barely remembered today. As Tyler Anbinder asserts near the beginning
of his valuable new history, "The two most important works
on the history of New York published in the 1990s…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 occupied 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 this 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 dwelled interminably upon its alleged violence
and depravity. Readers were thrilled and repulsed by their tales
of murder, mayhem, and sexual license. By the late 1830s the Five
Points was already infamous enough that tourists from around the
world made regular "slumming" trips; visitors included
Russian dukes, Davy Crockett, Charles Dickens, and Abraham Lincoln.
They shivered enjoyably before the Five Point’s countless
bars and liquor stores and its brazen bordellos; at its herds
of pigs running loose in its streets, its squalid, lightless tenements,
and—most depraved of all!—the sight of black and white
Five Pointers intermingling freely.
Like
every American slum since, the Five Points became a hobbyhorse
for social theorists. Southern politicians blamed its depravity
on race mixing, and held it up as an example of abolitionist hypocrisy.
Northern Republicans pointed out that it voted overwhelmingly
Democrat. Protestant missionaries scrapped over whether its failings
could be attributed to poor living conditions or poor morals—or
to the Catholicism of the Irish immigrants who dominated the area
by the 1840s. Later, Progressives would try reforming its housing
laws, its sanitation, its politics.
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
1927 collection of rolicking, 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 Five Points
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,
with a particular penchant for rioting. Yet the neighborhood’s
murder rates were probably well below what we would expect from
a slum today (not least because the residents had a 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".
Yet 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 got right, was the misery. The endless
drudgery, and the low pay. The appalling sanitation and the firetrap
tenements, freezing in the winter and suffocating in the summer.
The plagues of cholera, measles, diptheria, typhus that struck
hardest at children and infants. The hunger that was a real threat
whenever work became scarce.
Yet
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 Lincoln’s visit to the Five Points to
a famous prizefight, from the frenetic reformer Jacob Riis to
the first Chinese in New York to William Henry Lane, a.k.a. "Master
Juba," the teenaged, African-American phenomenon who probably
did invent tap dancing by combining Irish and African folk traditions.
Most
of these stories are fascinating, but they are each followed by
somewhat more diffuse, academic chapters on subjects such as "Why
They Came," "How They Lived," "Play,"
and "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 to
occasionally overreach. Citing the failure of various housing
reforms, for instance, he writes that "the persistent reappearance
of squalid tenements whenever new groups of immigrants arrive
in New York has led me to conclude that overcrowded, unsanitary
housing is an inevitable by-product of the immigrant experience."
In fact, as bad as immigrants’ living conditions can be today
in New York, they do not begin to approach those of the nineteenth
century. One reform that did work was a real commitment by government
to building decent public housing—a commitment that has,
to our shame, 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."
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel, Dreamland.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
