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Dunbar, Caoilthionn P.

The Five Points neighborhood, located within the Sixth Ward of New York city in southern Manhattan, began to grow in the mid 1820s, following the filling of Collects Pond. The neighborhood gained notoriety as a slum by the 1830s, and the neighborhood and its denizens received substantial attention from journalists, popular authors and experts in poverty and crime throughout the nineteenth century. Journalists and authors such as the famous Jacob Riis, for example, successfully sold this image of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods to middle and upper-class readers, many of whom supported reform efforts to deal with the problems of crime and poverty. This presentation will discuss how nineteenth-century authors and reformers such as Jacob Riis, Charles Loring Brace, and William F. Barnard depicted the Five Points in a specific way, in order to justify reform initiatives in the Five Points specifically, and in New York City in general.

Text

University of British Columbia. HIST_O 499

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0448930

Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan); History and Sociology, Department of (Okanagan)

Undergraduate

DSpace