Five Points : the 19th-century New York City neighborhood that invented tap dance, stole elections, and became the world's most notorious slum / Tyler Anbinder.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Anbinder, Tyler.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National Book Committee.

City and town life.

History.

Ethnic neighborhoods.

Slums.

Five Points (New York, N.Y.)--History.

Five Points (New York, N.Y.).

Five Points (New York, N.Y.)--Social conditions.

New York (N.Y.)--History.

New York (N.Y.).

New York (N.Y.)--Social condiions.

Slums--New York (State)--New York--History--19th century.

Ethnic neighborhoods--New York (State)--New York--History--19th century.

City and town life--New York (State)--New York--History--19th century.

New York (State)--New York.

Physical Description:

viii, 532 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Free Press, [2001]

Summary:

"The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented.

All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. Yet it was also a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters and dance halls, prizefighters and machine politicians, and meeting halls for the political clubs that would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich.

Tyler Anbinder offers the first-ever history of this now forgotten neighborhood, drawing on a wealth of research among letters and diaries, newspapers and bank records, police reports and archaeological digs. Beginning with the Irish potato-famine influx in the 1840s, and ending with the rise of Chinatown in the early twentieth century, he weaves unforgettable individual stories into a tapes-try of tenements, work crews, leisure pursuits both licit and otherwise, and riots and political brawls that never seemed to let up.

Although the intimate stories that fill Anbinder's narrative are heart-wrenching, they are perhaps not so shocking as they first appear. Almost all of us trace our roots to once humble stock. Five Points is, in short, a microcosm of America.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Prologue: The Five Points Race Riot of 1834 7

The Making of Five Points 14

Chapter 2 Prologue: Nelly Holland Comes to Five Points 38

Why They Came 42

Chapter 3 Prologue: "The Wickedest House on the Wickedest Street That Ever Existed" 67

How They Lived 72

Chapter 4 Prologue: The Saga of Johnny Morrow, the Street Peddler 106

How They Worked 111

Chapter 5 Prologue: "We Will Dirk Every Mother's Son of You!" 141

Politics 145

Chapter 6 Prologue: "This Phenomenon, 'Juba'" 172

Play 176

Chapter 7 Prologue: The Bare-Knuckle Prizefight Between Yankee Sullivan and Tom Hyer 201

Vice and Crime 207

Chapter 8 Prologue: "I Shall Never Forget This as Long as I Live": Abraham Lincoln Visits Five Points 235

Religion and Reform 241

Chapter 9 Prologue: "He Never Knew When He Was Beaten" 269

Riot 274

Chapter 10 Prologue: "The Boy Who Commands That Pretty Lot Recruited Them for the Seceshes" 297

The Civil War and the End of an Era 303

Chapter 11 Prologue: "So It Was Settled That I Should Go to America" 337

The Remaking of a Slum 343

Chapter 12 Prologue: "These 'Slaves of the Harp'" 362

Italians 367

Chapter 13 Prologue: "The Chinese Devil Man" 389

Chinatown 396

Chapter 14 The End of Five Points 424.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 511-515) and index.

ISBN:

0684859955

OCLC:

46828959