Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
History and Sociology, Department of (Okanagan)
DSpace
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.
The Five Points: Moral Perceptions of Poverty in Nineteenth Century New York by Caoilthionn P. Dunbar Submitted in parti al fulfillment of the requirements of the Honours Program in History University of Bri tish Columbia, Okanagan 2025 Faculty Supervisor: Dr. Julien Vernet, Department of Hi story Author's Signature: Date: Supervisor's Signature: Date: Honours Chair's Signature: Date: 1 Abstract 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. 2 Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Julien Vernet for his invaluable guidance in the research and writing of this paper. I would also like to thank Dr. Ruth Frost for her assistance in proofreading and finalizing this paper. A further thanks to Dr. Tim Paulson, for his guidance in the preparation for and completion of this program. I am grateful to the New York Public Library for allowing access to their archived material and to the staff of that institution for their assistance in research. Lastly, I am deeply grateful to my family for their gracious emotional and financial support of this project, without which its completion would never have come. I am especially thankful for my father, Rowan Dunbar, in accompanying and indulging in my expedition to New York. 3 Table of Contents Introduction_______________________________________________________5 Chapter One: Crime_________________________________________________15 Chapter Two: Poverty________________________________________________29 Chapter Three: Reform_______________________________________________43 Illustrations Map of the Five Points_______________________________________________4 4 John F. Harrison, Map of the City Of New-York Extending Northward to Fiftieth St., Scale not Given (New York: M. Dripps, 1852). Map with the Location of: the Five Points Intersection (1), Paradise Park (2), the Old Brewery/Five Points Mission (3), the Cow Bay (4), the House of Industry (5), Crown’s Grocery (6), and Mulberry Bend (7). 5 Introduction In the heart of downtown New York was the Five Points, America's most notorious nineteenth-century slum. Named for the intersection of Anthony Street with Cross and Orange streets (renamed Worth, Park and Baxter in 1854), the core of the neighborhood consisted of five blocks bounded by Centre, Pearl, Chatham, Mulberry and Bayard streets; though the extent of the slums stretched through the eastern third of the Sixth Ward.1 The Five Points was located on what was once Collect Pond, which had become a center of industrial production in New York by the late eighteenth century. The pond had acted as the source of water for several potteries, tanneries, breweries, and ropemakers that were established atop the surrounding marshland.2 Many artisans out of the city established homes along the banks as well, constructing the two-and-half-story homes that would become characteristic of the neighborhood.3 The putrification of industrial waste from the area’s businesses drew complaints from the public,4 and by 1802 the pond was deemed a great enough nuisance for its filling to be necessary; the leveling of the hills surrounding Broadway providing the landfill for the project.5 Many of those landholdings in the area were sold and subdivided, converted into residences 5 Duer, New York as it Was, 18; Rebecca Yamin and Joseph Schuldenrein, “Landscape Archaeology in Lower Manhattan: The Collect Pond as an Evolving Cultural Landmark in Early New York City,” in Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage, ed. Dan Hicks et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 93. 4 Claudia Milne, “‘Slaughterhouses in Which I Labored’: Industry, Labor, and the Land from Colonial Times to 1830,” in Tales of the Five Points: Working Class Life in Nineteenth Century New York, ed. Rebecca Yamin, vol. 1, A Narrative History and Archeology of Block 160 (New York: US General Services Administration, 2000), 22-24. 3 Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 391; Cornelius, “Letter to the Editor,” New-York Evening Post, September 21, 1826. 2 William Alexander Duer, New York as it Was, During the Latter Part of the Last Century (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1849), 13. 1 Other, larger definitions of the Five Points are presented by: Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 588.n7, bounded by Canal, Chatham, Bowery, Pearl, and Centre streets; Frank J. Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies and Volunteer Fire Departments of New York and Brooklyn (New York: M. Crane, 1885), 39, Grand, Broadway, Bowery, and Chatham streets. Here, a minimal approximation of only the blocks immediately abutting Paradise Square and the Five Points intersection is used. 6 rented out to meet the swelling demand for working class housing. By the completion of the landfill project in 1811, the Collect was firmly established as a residential quarter, inhabited largely by poor artisans and labourers.6 As the neighborhood took shape, many of the earlier residents left the neighborhood for more prosperous districts, leaving much of the properties in the hands of absentee landlords. As the demand for housing continued to rise, the single-family and mixed-use homes in the Collect were replaced with or converted into residential apartments, leaving the neighborhood the most densely packed in the city.7 Conditions in the neighborhood were squalid. Poor sanitation was an issue across the city, however the Collect’s density, and the subsidence of the swampy ground exacerbated issues, preventing cesspits and gravity sewer systems from functioning and leading to a buildup of sewage that regularly flooded the neighborhood. As a result of these factors, much of the old populace fled from the area if they could afford it.8 With the movement of old New Yorkers from the nascent district, the Collect quickly developed a distinct character, becoming home to several of New York’s marginalized populations. The first amongst these to be established in the Collect was the black community. In the 1790s contentions with white congregants in the Wesley Chapel congregation over integration led to a movement to establish a separate black church. Moving uptown, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (A.M.E. Zion) was established on Cross Street in 1796, moving again to Church Street in the Fifth Ward in 1801. Other denominations soon followed,with six separate African congregations being settled in the Sixth Ward by 1820.9 By 1810, the city's black population had coalesced around these institutions in the Fifth and Sixth 9 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 398-400, 483; Claudia Milne, “On the Ground of the Fresh Water Pond: The Free Black Community at Five Points,” Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002), 135. 8 Anbinder, Five Points, 42; Milne, “‘Slaughterhouses in Which I Labored,” 32-33. 7 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 476; Milne, “‘Slaughterhouses in Which I Labored,” 26-28; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; 1785-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 92-93. 6 Anbinder, Five Points, 38-40. 7 Ward along a band from the east river to the Hudson, with the largest enclave being in the Collect.10 In spite of the city’s black population declining as a share of the total population in the city and the Collect due to increased immigration - from the city-wide peak of 10.2 percent in 1810 to 6.6 percent in 1830 - in absolute terms the city’s free black population grew considerably in the early nineteenth century, fueled by the immigration of manumitted slaves in the state’s rural communities and immigration from Hispaniola during the Haitian revolution.11 The black community at the Collect remained notable enough to see the relocation of the headquarters of the African Society for Mutual Relief in 1820 to 42 Orange Street, between Anthony and Leonard.12 A wave of immigration beginning in 1818 saw the Collect develop as a center of the Irish and, by the 1830s, Catholic and Jewish German populations,13 which would, alongside the already established black population, establish the foundations of the social fabric of the neighborhood. The Irish immigrants that came to the Collect were set apart from earlier waves of migration. The costs of transatlantic fares fell with the establishment of regular packet lines across the ocean in the late 1810s and early 1820s. This allowed for the poorer catholic Irish to make the crossing more frequently, outpacing the rate of immigration from the Ulster Scots who previously were the dominant Irish demographic in the city.14 Many of these new immigrants, having largely expended their savings on the journey across the Atlantic, found appeal in the 14 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 478-479; Jerome Mushkat, Fernando Wood: A Political Biography (Kent: Kent State University, 1990), 66; John Killick, “Transatlantic Steerage Fares, British and Irish Migration, and Return Migration, 1815-60,” The Economic History Review 67, no. 1 (2014), 170-176; Donald Akenson, “The Irish in North America: Catholic or Protestant?,” The Irish Review (Cork), no. 11 (1991/1992), 18-20; M. J. O’Brien, “Irish Colonist in New York,” Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, no. 7 (1907), 94-97. 13 Anbinder, Five Points, 66-69. 12 Anbinder, Five Points, 226-227. 11 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 479; White, Somewhat More Independent, 153-156. 10 Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 173-176; Milne, “‘Slaughterhouses in Which I Labored,” 30. In 1810, Block 160, in the Collect, nearly a third of residents were African. 8 Collect’s cheap rents and ready opportunities for employment, and as a result the population of the Ward would balloon, and properties were further subdivided, and much of the remaining industry was converted into tenements in order to maximize their capacity and potential value to landlords.15 Over the course of the next decades, the population would nearly more than double. Only the slums of London would boast a greater density of people.16 It was in this condition that the Collect would attain infamy as the Five Points beginning in the 1830s, with later commentators denouncing the neighborhood and its populace as the worst of New York.17 The Irish would remain a hallmark of the Five Points through the mid-century, however by the later decades they were superseded by new Italian migrants. The neighborhood had already become home to a number of Italians by the late 1850s. It was not, however, until the close of the 1880s that they overtook the Irish and became the dominant ethnic group in the Five Points. The Italian immigrants of this period were notable in immigrating with their entire families, distinguished from earlier immigrants who tended more often to migrate alone.18 These migrants largely hailed from Southern Italy, driven by persistent crop failure and poverty, with the poorest amongst them settling in the tenements of the Five Points.19 It was these new residents whom Jacob Riis would write about and photograph in a journalistic exposé, documenting the infamous neighborhood in its last decades before its death at the close of the nineteenth century.20 20 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 64-70; Anbinder, Five Points, 463-464, 504-508. 19 Anbinder, Five Points, 427-428. 18 Robert K. Fitts, “The Five Points Reformed, 1865-1900,” in Tales of Five Points, 1:67-69. 17 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, and the New Mission House at the Five Points (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1854), 34-35; 49-50; Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 2:601. 16 Anbinder, Five Points, 103-104. 15 Anbinder, Five Points, 42-43; Milne, “‘Slaughterhouses in Which I Labored,” 35. 9 The notoriety of the Five Points is discussed in the literary record at least as early as the mid 1820s, with the earliest archived reference to the poor reputation of “the Collect” appearing in the Ontario Repository in 1825.21 By the next year, the neighborhood had more frequent references in discussion of crime within New York City, particularly violence and theft, and the neighborhood began to be referred to by the name “Five Points”.22 1826 would also see the publication of the earliest narrative account of the Collect slum, a brief summation of a trip to the area by a man named Cornelius in a letter sent to the editor of the Evening Post.23 This work included much of the features that would characterize later descriptions, including its use of sensationalist language and an emphasis on the issues of crime, vice, and sanitation, and functions as a precursor to the later established genre. By the 1830s, the Five Points would be regularly mentioned in the papers of both the state and the city, with lurid accounts of crimes and vice remaining a common feature of coverage around the slum, especially in emerging penny papers such as The Sun. This reporting provides insight into popular conceptions of the Five Points throughout the nineteenth century, and how the narratives around it were inherently tied into the social issues of the time.24 In 1835, a description of a visit to the neighborhood was included within Colonel Davy Crockett’s North and Down East, the first such account of a visit by a famous figure, furthering - or at least revealing the scale of - its infamy. In contrast to the dramatic stories of the papers, Crockett’s account was focused upon the aesthetics of the Five Points.25 Seven years later, Charles Dickens, in his American Notes, would also detail such a visitation. Dickens' account 25 David Crockett, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835), 48-50. 24 Anbinder, Five Points, 43-44. 23 Cornelius, “Letter to the Editor.” 22 “Five Points,” New York Spy and Dramatic Repository, September 30, 1826; “Police Office Aug 21,” Kinderhook Herald, August 31, 1826. 21 “Carter’s Letters from Europe: London 15th August, 1825,” Ontario Repository, December 28, 1825. 10 would have significant influence upon the form and contents of later such accounts, and as such presents a model for such literature.26 Travel narratives in the model of Dickens would represent a notable portion of literature on the Five Points outside news coverage through the nineteenth century. Amongst others, renowned authors Lydia Maria Child, Frederika Bremer, and Nathaniel Parker Willis, as well as the poet Bayard Taylor published travel accounts of the Five Points.27 Some of the most notable of these travelogues are Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s unpublished journal, which recounts a brief conversation between Dana and a young prostitute in 1843, one of few such preserved in the literary record;28 as well as Joel Ross’s What I Saw in New York from 1851, which includes a chapter on the Five Points, providing unique insight into the early years of the reform movement and how it affected people in the neighborhood.29 By the late 1840s the Five Points’ infamy had reached a point where it proved a regular inclusion in studies on the city. Two of the first to include extensive sections covering the Five Points were George G. Foster’s works New York in Slices and New York by Gaslight in 1848 and 1850, which offer a detailed look into the state of the community immediately preceding the involvement of the major reform groups.30 The increasing media attention on the Five Points coincided with the attention of local reformists. The monthly journals published by the reform organizations that operated out of the 30 George G. Foster, New York in Slices by an Experienced Carver: Being the Original Slices Published in the N.Y. Tribune (New York: W.F. Burgess, 1848), 23-25; George G. Foster, New York by Gaslight: Here and There a Streak of Sunshine (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850), 52-71. 29 Joel H. Ross, What I Saw in New York: or, A Bird’s Eye View of City Life (Auburn: Derby & Miller, 1851), 88-104. 28 Richard Henry Dana Jr., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana Jr. Volume I (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1968), 119-121. 27 Bremer, Homes of the New World, 2:601-602; Lydia Maria Child, Letters From New York (London: Richard Bentley, 1843), 16-17; Nathaniel Parker Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis (Philadelphia: Henry C. Baird, 1855), 582-583; Bayard Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” The Nation 2, no. 36 (1866): 302-304. 26 Charles Dickens American Notes for General Circulation, Volume I (London: Chapman & Hall, 1842), 211-217. 11 Five Points from the early 1850s, the Five Points Mission and the House of Industry, form the cornerstone of reform literature, providing a regular display of reformer’s work, goals, and rhetorical strategies in attracting support to their mission, and how these shifted over time - as these works were largely published to gain and maintain financial support, they present an important window into the usage of the Five Points’ mythology amongst reformers. Amongst these early works, the Five Points Mission published The Old Brewery and the Mission House at the Five Points, which was published in the aim of raising necessary contributions and public attention. It is in particular an invaluable source on the perpetuation and manipulation of popular mythology.31 The next major development in literature on the Five Points would come in 1872, with Charles Loring Brace’s Dangerous Classes of New York, which would include the first retrospective on the reform movement in the Five Points. Brace traces and eulogizes the success of his reform school in the House of Industry in transforming the neighborhood’s population and character.32 Frank Kernan’s Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies in 1885 takes a more romantic view of the Five Points history, focusing particularly on the political regime prior to the Five Points Mission. Kernan’s more sympathetic perspective offers a counterpoint to the majority of the literary record that takes a more negative, reform-minded stance.33 The final major retrospective on the Points history by its contemporaries comes from the House of Industry director Wm. F. Barnard’s Forty Years at the Five Points, a 1893 hagiography of the House of Industry that presents it as transforming the community, and offers, together with the earlier referenced book by the Five Points Mission that displayed attitudes at the onset of the 33 Kernan, Reminiscences, 39-44, 47-55. 32 Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years Work Among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), 194-211. 31 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery. 12 reform movement, how those perspectives on the Five Points’ past had shifted with the neighborhood.34 Amongst the most influential of the reformist’s writing on the Five Points was Jacob Riis, in particular his 1890 photojournal report How the Other Half Lives, the seminal work of reform literature often credited with mobilizing the slum clearance efforts that would follow. Riis’s work pioneered the medium of photojournalism, and displays the power of photography in both overturning and enforcing myths, as Riis turned the focus of reform literature again from lauding the recent decade’s improvements in conditions back to outrage at the still impoverished state of the lives of New York’s poor.35 The last of the works on Five Points mythology, and the most influential on modern conceptions, was Herbert Ashbury’s 1927 Gangs of New York, which collates and preserves the late nineteenth-century stories of the New York underworld, and how the middle and upper class remembered the slums and their inhabitants, displaying how the mythology perpetuated in the aforementioned literature had shaped public conceptions and memory.36 The Five Points, or at least the wider Sixth Ward, would find some mention in mid-century histories of Tammany Hall or the Reform movement but remained largely uncritical of the reality presented in reformist literature; it was not until the seventies that it saw proper attention and reinvestigation to uncover its history. Carol Groneman Pernicone’s 1973 thesis The "Bloody Ould Sixth ": A Social Analysis of a New York Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century overturned the established understanding to introduce a more nuanced view on the neighborhood. Groneman utilizes census records to present a revised perspective on 36 Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York: Capricorn Books, 1970). 35 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 55-70, 93-103. 34 Wm. F. Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry (New York: Five Points House of Industry, 1893). 13 the city's poor in the 1850s, noting kinship ties and the importance of women in the workforce.37 Additional re-examinations of the history of working class New York, and especially of women and prostitution, would break further away from the traditional narratives of the Five Points.38 A second watershed in the advancement of the history of the Five Points would come in the form of a series of archaeological excavations in and around New York Block 160 throughout the 1990s, which presented insight into the home life of the Five Points inhabitants. The findings of these excavations were published in a series of works edited by Rebecca Yamin, including the six volume Tales From the Five Points from 2000 and a special issue of Historical Archaeology in 2001 titled “Becoming New York.”39 These works present the lives of the Five Points residents in great detail, analyzing in particular waste deposits to reveal the material situation, diet, and home culture of the community to be in stark contrast with the destitute conditions presented in previous literature. Contemporary to, and drawing upon, the work by the aforementioned archaeologists, Tyler Anbinder continued the new documentary tradition in collating the first complete narrative history of the Five Points, 2001’s aptly titled Five Points. Anbinder finally dispels many of the surviving myths of the Five Points and its inhabitants, and renders a picture of the community as culturally productive, economically mobile, and politically engaged. Anbinder also utilizes banking records to further elucidate the financial realities of the Five Points.40 The works of Yamin and her associates as well as Anbinder together established much of the current paradigm upon the Five Points in the early 2000s. A number of smaller works have 40 Anbinder, Five Points. 39 Rebecca Yamin, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York, 6 vols. (New York: US General Services Administration, 2000); Rebecca Yamin, ed., “Becoming New York,” Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001). 38 Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), 29-46. 37 Carol Groneman Pernicone, The “Bloody Ould Sixth:” A Social Analysis of a New York City working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Rochester: University of Rochester, 1973). 14 been published focusing on the wider Sixth Ward since then, the most recent of note being Peter Adam’s Bowery Boys.41 Since the early 2000s, the Five Points have remained peripheral to more recent scholarship on New York's urban history. While the Five Points has received significant scholarly attention in the twenty-first century, it is important to understand the goals and the motives of those who shaped their mythology in the nineteenth century. The purpose of this project is to determine how the nineteenth-century authors and journalists depicted the Five Points in a specific, negative light, and how these depictions drove the moral reform initiatives carried out in the Five Points specifically, and in New York City in general. The first chapter will discuss how the Five Points was depicted in relation to crime and immoral activities, and how these depictions of the Five Points represented the reification of what middle and upper class society saw as ‘social ills’. The Second chapter presents how the conditions endured by the residents of the Five Points were portrayed in the media, and how these conditions were attributed to the moral character of their sufferers. The third chapter will discuss how these characteristics of the literary depictions of the Five Points both justified and necessitated the moral reform movement in New York, and how reform itself functioned to further enforce those narratives. Finally, the conclusion will present how the goals and motivations of the nineteenth century reformers differed from the twentieth century movement that followed them, and how the unique character of the nineteenth century reform movement worked to reinforce dominant societal systems. 41 Peter Adams, The Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2005). 15 Chapter One: Crime The association of the Five Points with crime has been amongst the most enduring features of the neighborhood's mythology. The earliest reference to the Five Points in crime reporting comes from the Monroe Republican in 1826, reporting on a woman trafficked from the countryside to the Five Points.42 By the end of that same year, the Five Points was disparaged in sensationalist stories as a “sink of Infamy” “at the very heart of New-York.”43 The conception of the Five Points as a place of prostitution, larceny, gangs and riots, inhabited by a “peculiar” other, had arisen, and would persevere throughout the nineteenth century.44 In this conception, the Five Points functioned as an embodiment of the ‘social ills’ middle-class New-Yorkers saw in their city.45 The perceptions of the Five Points as a sink of crime have been preserved through two distinct categories of historical documents: narrative accounts, and crime journalism. Although some overlap existed between narrative accounts and crime journalism, narrative accounts are recorded observations of visits to the neighborhood that provide a generalized image of the neighborhoods' relation to crime. Rather than noting specific incidents, the narrative accounts allude to a general state of pervasive vice and crime. Even as the authors of these accounts present or imagine a specific, personal experience in the neighborhood, the narrative accounts are written to suggest the experiences are typical, and descriptive of the general state of the 45 Penny papers like The Sun were a common source of the lurid reports of the Five Points, and were largely targeted at working class readers. However, their editors and writers were a part of the middle and upper classes of New York, and as such, their presentations of the Five Points are rooted in those perspectives. 44 “Police Office Aug 21,” Kinderhook Herald, August 31, 1826; Cornelius, “Letter to the Editor,” New-York Evening Post, September 21, 1826; “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger, February 16, 1854; Theodore L. Cuyler, “A Peep into Cutthroat Alley,” The Independent, February 7, 1861; Ballington Booth, New York’s Inferno: Scenes of Pathos Powerfully Portrayed - Siberian Desolation Caused by Vice and Drink - Tenements Packed with Misery and Crime (New York: Salvation Army, 1891), 32-34. 43 “Five Points,” New York Spy and Dramatic Repository, September 30, 1826. 42 “Crime, Accidents, &c.,” Monroe Republican, February 21, 1826. 16 neighborhood as a whole. Crime reports, in contrast, discuss specific, real events that occurred in the neighborhood. These accounts are framed, both by the existing perceptions of the neighborhood and the writers themselves, to present the stories as examples of a wider phenomenon of criminality and vice, and not individual incidents. News articles often follow specific trends in their discussion of the neighborhood, either mentioning the neighborhood directly, or to use terms such as “another” or “again” to enforce the association and sense of consistency;46 and the neighborhood is frequently discussed within the report as being distinctly characterized by its criminal element.47 Beyond the ways the Five Points was discussed, perceptions of the neighborhood were also shaped by what was excluded from the narrative. Narrative accounts would focus on the poverty, the vice industry, and perception of the neighborhood as being a “sink of iniquity”.48 Coverage was highly superficial in nature; rather than discuss the causes of the various ills that affected the neighborhood - how economic disfranchisement of minorities limited their potential success, drew them towards certain denigrated careers (such as in the vice industry); how limited options forced them to congregate in specific, low rent districts; and how poverty and social ostracization engendered criminality - writers attributed these aspects to its residents' moral failings. News coverage of the Five Points was equally limited in scope, sticking to crime reporting, excepting very occasional real estate listings.49 The only cases where a different 49 “Executors Sale of Valuable Real Estate,” New-York Evening Post, July 3, 1827; “The Old Brewery to be Sold,” Evening Post, August 14, 1851. 48 This was amongst the most common appellations with which the Five Points was referred. See Richard Henry Dana Jr., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana Jr. Volume I (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1968), 119; “Highway Robbery,” New-York Evening Post, September 17, 1828. 47 “City Intelligence,” Evening Post, September 13, 1855. 46 “Another Murder at the Five Points,” Evening Post, August 29, 1859; “Another Horrible Murder,” New-York Daily Tribune, September 11, 1844; “Another,” Evening Post, August 26, 1842; “The Five Points Again,” New-York Evening Post, March 19, 1829; “Police Office,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 14, 1844. The tribune article exemplifies this fascination - whereas all other reports specify the address and street of the Crime, those that are even close in proximity to the Five Points dissuade from this and instead locate the crime by means of their proximity to the Five Points. 17 narrative was presented was in accounts of reform efforts. Reformers discussed how the neighborhood would, or had, improved under such initiatives.50 As such, when New Yorkers read of the Five Points, they were given the sense that it was either the site of crime or a place requiring rehabilitation. Vice was at the foundation of this negative mythology. Alcohol and prostitution were often suggested as the roots of sin by New York’s reformers. Saloons, dance-halls, groceries, and other establishments where alcohol was sold were ubiquitous elements of the Five Points in accounts. From its earliest description the neighborhood was said to be brimming with liquor sellers.51 Such was the reputation of the neighborhood that the regular police raids against unlicensed establishments became an expected feature of daily newspapers. One commentator noted that “we hardly take up a N. Y. paper without seeing an article headed a ‘grand haul at the Five points’ - another ‘grand haul’ - or something similar”, advancing the Five Points notoriety as a center of drunken revelry.52 For many, this intemperance was the source of all other iniquity described in the neighborhood's depictions, and it was from these businesses that such sin spread - including prostitution.53 Even beyond their role as perceived loci of moral corruption, many of these establishments across New York operated criminally in some manner, and these illegal houses were especially present in neighborhoods like the Five Points.54 By the mid-nineteenth 54 Reports varied as to the number of liquor sellers without license or in violation of liquor laws. See W.M. Bobo, Glimpses of New York City by a South Carolinian with Nothing Better to Do (Charleston: J.J. McCarter, 1852), 98-99, Stryker, Lower Depths, 13; arrests announced in the herald in 1853 suggest that 53 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, and the New Mission House at the Five Points (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1854), 39, 58-59; Joel H. Ross, What I Saw in New York: or, A Bird’s Eye View of CIty Life (Auburn: Derby & Miller, 1851), 91-95; “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger; Peter Stryker, Lower Depths of the Great American Metropolis: A Discourse (New York: Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., 1866), 12-13. 52 “Another Haul,” New-York Evening Post, March 29, 1830; “Another Great Haul,” Republican Watchman, June 15, 1830; “On Saturday Night,” Anti-Masonic Telegraph, June 8, 1831; “The Five Points,” Rochester Observer, August 20, 1830. 51 Cornelius, “Letter to the Editor,” New-York Evening Post. 50 “Ward Relief for the Poor,” New York Daily Times, January 24, 1855; “Reformation at the ‘Five Points’,” Northern New York Journal, July 31, 1850. 18 century, it was claimed that every building in the vicinity of the intersection was one of the innumerable groggeries that characterized the Five Points.55 The area around the Five Points had nearly a dozen liquor sellers on each block - forty-six such “Groggeries” lined Mulberry Street, and another fifty-three were along Orange Street.56 It was later claimed there was one such business for every hundred inhabitants of the Five Points, and if Matthew Hale Smith's account is accurate, even more.57 The various classes of these establishments were largely indistinguishable in the minds of middle-class New Yorkers, oyster cellars, gambling halls and dance-halls being granted little distinction beyond their appellations in records - all sites of gambling, dancing, drinking, and prostitution. These places were the lowliest in the city to many, dilapidated barrooms whose patrons were invariably described as either thieves, prostitutes, black, sailors or rowdies.58 Reporters would publish a variety of lurid accounts of robberies and altercations that broke out in such establishments, enforcing their nefarious reputation. These stories ranged from barroom shootouts between famed gangsters and outlaws,59 to the claims of a man that his watch had been stolen while he was passed out from drinking at a bar in Orange Street.60 60 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 76; Stryker, Lower Depths, 5; “A Night’s Adventure,” New-York Evening Post, January 8, 1829; “Robbery,” New-York Daily Tribune, October 4, 1842. 59 “Like Old Times: An Early Morning Bloody Row in the Five Points,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 2, 1879; “Extra: Driscoll Hanged,” Evening World, January 23, 1888. 58 Bayard Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” The Nation 2, no. 26 (1866), 303-304; Foster, New York in Slices, 24-25, 29, 81, 95; Stryker, Lower Depths, 5-7. 57 Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 277; Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York City (Hartford: J.B. Burr & Company, 1869), 205-206. Smith gives 1530 people in a single block, with twenty liquor stores. If this is presumed regular, that is one purveyor of alcohol for every 76.5 residents. 56 Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 231-232. 55 Charles Dickens American Notes for General Circulation, Volume I (London: Chapman & Hall, 1842), 212; Foster, New York by Gaslight, 54; Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 33. the largest concentration of illegal liquor salesmen was in the Sixth Ward. “Liquor Dealers in Trouble: Court of General Sessions Before Judge Beebe,” New York Herald, October 6, 1853. 19 Groceries were some of the most maligned liquor dens, for as they supplied much of the poor their daily essentials, the presence of a bar offered regular access to drink even for those that did not frequent saloons.61 Crown’s Grocery was one of the most well storied and popular, reportedly receiving some one thousand patrons daily.62 Said to be one of the Points' “most redoutable strongholds of wickedness,” Crown’s three-and-a-half-story grocery and saloon was at the center of the neighborhood, bordering Paradise Park on the west, at the corner of Little Water and Anthony Streets. The site was immortalized by acclaimed New York journalist George G. Foster’s 1850 account as a crowded and chaotic storeroom purveying all manner of foods, household goods, and spirits, upon whose goods the local populace was dependent.63 The nature of Crown’s reputation can be seen in its regular appearance as the setting for gruesome vignettes appearing in the city papers. In one such story, the bartender was stabbed in an altercation over alleged adultery,64 In another, Crown’s son was nearly beaten to death with a slingshot in what was likely an attempted robbery.65 It was the proliferation of tales like these that made Crown’s such a persistent feature of the neighborhood's mythology, still remembered years after its closure as “the foulest hole in the city.”66 Of the establishments of the Five Points, however, none was more famous than that of Pete Williams. Pete Williams’ dance-hall, once called Almack’s but later rechristened to “Dicken’s Place” after the eponymous author brought it international fame, was the most widely recorded establishment in the Five Points. Dickens' account presented the hall as the “assembly-room of the Five-Point fashionables,” noting the owner and many dancers as being 66 “Glimpses of Change,” Troy Weekly Times, September 28, 1872. 65 “Attempt at Assassination,” Evening Post, August 26, 1842. 64 “Serious Stabbing Affray and Probably Homicide at the Five Points,” New York Daily Times, November 20, 1856. 63 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 60-61. 62 Anbinder, Five Points, 234-235. 61 Foster, New York in Slices, 79-81. 20 well dressed, extolling in particular one skilled and lively dancer, known as Master Juba.67 The fashionability Dickens’ ascribed it was a consistent feature in descriptions of Pete Williams’ place. The whitewashed walls and starkly clean interior is in striking contrast with the dreary character granted to the rest of the neighborhood in such accounts.68 Despite this, not all accounts were as positive as Dickens; many highlighted the dancing and the readiness of black and white patrons to intermingle, viewing it as the height of vulgarity. Nor was Pete William’s place free from the ever-present spectre of prostitution and larceny - the famous author and founder of the Home Journal (now Town & Country) N.P. Willis, who earned acclaim for his accounts of daily life in Europe and America, even claims his companion was pickpocketed in their sojourn into the hall.69 One of the most common features in descriptions of the saloons and dance-halls in the Five Points was the presence of prostitutes. They were so associated with the businesses that bars were often seen as interchangeable with brothels, and when they were distinguished it was by the fact that such vices were divided between “a groggery below and a brothel above”.70 Accounts claimed that prostitutes would wait about the barroom, openly soliciting patrons to “take [them] up.”71 The pervasiveness of prostitution in such accounts was not limited to bar-rooms, and permeates through the entirety of the neighborhood's records. The prostitute was an omnipresent character in the Five Points’ mythology, with prostitution’s connection to the neighborhood being referenced from its first recorded mention in 71 “Midnight Domiciliary Visits: Another Inspection of the Five Points Brothels - A Case for the Philanthropic,” New-York Times, January 21, 1866. 70 Foster, New York in Slices, 23. 69 Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis, x-xii, 583; Bobo, Glimpses of New York City, 96; Foster, New York by Gaslight, 73-75. 68 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 73; Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis, 582. 67 Dickens, American Notes, 216-218. Juba was a well known local dancer who was known to perform at Pete Williams place. Marian Hannah Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” in Chronicles of the American Dance from Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: De Capo Press, [1948] 1978), 42-43. 21 the historical record.72 Beyond just saloons, they were a constant figure on the streets, crowding the doorways and soliciting customers, and regular inhabitants in the area's tenements, where they lived and worked.73 Famed diarist Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast,74 describes the prevalence of such women in his visit to the Five Points, and their frequent propositioning of him. Accepting one girl's offer to her room on a whim to interview her, he went with her fearfully, twice making note of his worry at the risk of robbery.75 Indeed, the robbery of clientele by prostitutes had become something of a sensationalist trope. Newspapers printed regular stories of travelers seduced and robbed, and Foster notes it was common practice for intoxicated victims to be stripped of their belongings and thrown out in the streets, to be taken in by policemen for a “loafer’s reveillé at the Tombs”.76 Some brothels, called panel houses, were dedicated entirely to this manner of thievery and operated across New York.77 Another element of the Five Points's society, treated with as much ire as the vice industry and as being as much a source of the neighborhood's poor character, was Catholicism. The neighborhood was overwhelmingly Catholic,78 an appalling state of affairs for Protestant onlookers. Writers maligned the “worse than pagan idolatry”79 that was rooted in the 79 “A Visit to the Five Points,” Franklin Visitor, May 30, 1860; “The American Bible Society’s New Location,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, August 25, 1847. 78 Anbinder, Five Points, 41. 77 Smith, Sunshine and Shadow, 390-393. 76 “Five Points,” Rochester Republican, November 16, 1830; “Court Sessions: Eliza Johnson alias Griffith,” New-York Evening Post, May 21, 1827; Foster, New York by Gaslight, 54-55. 75 Dana, The Journal, 120-121. 74 Samuel Shapiro, Richard Henry Dana, Jr.: 1815-1882 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961), 8-14. 73 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis (Philadelphia: Henry C. Baird, 1855), 582; George G. Foster, New York by Gaslight: Here and There a Streak of Sunshine (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850), 54; George G. Foster, New York in Slices by an Experienced Carver: Being the Original Slices Published in the N.Y. Tribune (New York: W.F. Burgess, 1848), 23-24; “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger. 72 Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 2:601; “Carter’s Letters from Europe: London 15th August, 1825,” Ontario Repository, December 28, 1825. The area’s Carter compares the Five Points to in London, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, were infamous for prostitution in the early nineteenth century. 22 neighborhood, and claimed the residents to be the “most irreligious population of New York.”80 The Catholic association of the neighborhood enforced the negative perspective on its inhabitants, who were seen to lack the “Protestant characteristics” of good morals, and hard work, and were instead idle and criminal, apart from good society.81 In these depictions, the only figures with acceptable careers to the middle-class New Yorker were the occasional sailor or other reveler partaking in the locals' debauchery. The Five Points residents themselves, save for scant mentions of street sweepers or day labourers,82 were not perceived as contributing to moral society. The thief, alongside the drunk and the prostitute, was constituent of the whole of the Five Points’ population.83 Thievery, as can be seen from depictions of groggeries, was the most prevalent crime outside the Five Points’ vice industry; and stories of theft were no less common in the streets than in area’s the bars and taverns. Writers published numerous stories of outsiders being waylaid in the Five Points and stripped of their valuables. Violence was an ever-present feature of these stories. In some cases, the victims were simply “knocked down” by gangs of thieves in the street, with such “audacious” robberies even occurring in broad daylight.84 In others, victims were lured into tenement houses, where they were ransacked and thrown out to the street.85 The prevalent violence in reports of these robberies was not the neighborhoods only associated with violence; it was a constant feature of the Five Points in literature. It was known 85 “A Narrow Escape,” Otsego Republican, February 25, 1833; “New York City News: A Stranger Taken in and Done For,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 19, 1860. 84 “City Intelligence,” Evening Post, August 14, 1845; “Highway Robbery,” New-York Evening Post, September 17, 1828; “Police Matters: Highway Robbery,” New York Daily Times, November 12, 1855; “Police Reports: A Peddler Blindfolded and robbed of his Pack,” New-York Times, February 12, 1861. 83 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 35; “Five Points,” New York Spy and Dramatic Repository; “Chapter II: Rather Suspicious-The Resurrectionist and his Niece,” Long Island Farmer, June 12, 1866. 82 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 49. 81 “Reform in the Five Points,” Evening Post, October 29, 1860; “Westward Ho!,” Yates County Chronicle, February 21, 1856. 80 Charles G. Finney, Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1876), 318. 23 to be “the most dangerous place in [the] city,” where “quarrels and blows, theft and even murder, belong to the order of the day and night.”86 The combative inclination of the residents in early accounts displays the popular perception of the Five Points as a gathering place for the uncivilized and barbaric.87 The frequency of violence against women in reporting would enforce this image of the Five Points as uncivil,88 and the seemingly spontaneous nature of other attacks did the same.89 In a particularly detailed account of one of these attacks, a pair of workers were assaulted by two “Italian burglars”, leaving one with a severe laceration. When the assailants fled, they continued the violence and murdered a ragpicker (a person who collects fabric scraps and the like from the street to sell)90. In the process of the murderers’ capture, one of them made further assaults upon the arresting officers. The story of this brazen attack was given the simple title “Another Murder at the Five Points,” displaying the mundanity with which even such extreme displays violence were treated in discussions of the Five Points.91 Mob violence is a pervasive feature of these stories of killings and robberies. Indeed, accounts of group assaults were their own established cliché. In the early years of the neighborhood, newspapers discussed a spate of wanton assaults about the neighborhood, ostensibly committed largely at the hands of a gang of outlaws known as the “Forty Thieves,” named for the popular theatrical play.92 In one such incident, George D. Strong, then Assistant Alderman, was attacked by a crowd, and his nose cut with a knife.93 Similar “street fracases” 93 “The Five Points Again,” New-York Evening Post. 92 “New York April 1,” National Philanthropist and Investigator, April 9, 1929; “Chatham Theatre,” New-York Evening Post, July 23, 1825. 91 “Another Murder at the Five Points,” Evening Post. 90 Ross, What I Saw in New York, 68-69. 89 “Another,” New-York Evening Post; “Police Intelligence: Homicide in the Sixth Ward - An Old Man Beaten to Death,” New-York Daily Times, February 16, 1856; “Crimes,” Troy Weekly Times, October 2, 1858; “Arrest of a Man for Scalding a Woman to Death,” New York Times, November 28, 1863. 88 “Murder,” Anti-Masonic Telegraph, May 25, 1831; “Infamy, Murder, Suicide,” New-York Evening Post, December 17, 1828. 87 David Crockett, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835), 49; Cornelius, “Letter to the Editor,” New-York Evening Post. 86 Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:602; “The Five Points Again,” New-York Evening Post. 24 were seen in reporting in later decades, and deaths arising from such incidents were not uncommon. Although most incidents resulted in a single fatality before breaking up, in one such case the would-be victim was the one to draw a knife, leaving three stabbed, two fatally.94 Nowhere was the scale and sensationalism of violence greater than in the portrayal of riots. The neighborhood was the site of no less than four major riots in the antebellum period, with three of these occurring in a two year span of 1834-35. The First of these was the riot at the Sixth ward poll during the mayoral election of April 1834, during the Bank War, in which Andrew Jackson’s efforts to prevent the rechartering of the Second National Bank raised accusations of constitutional violations from critics, who rallied under the banner of the Whig party. The riot broke out between Jackosnian and Whig toughs in an attempt to control the polling station in the Sixth Ward, culminating in some of the Whigs raiding the state armory.95 Not four months later, Reverend Doctor Cox preached a controversial sermon in which he claimed that Jesus was a black man; the subsequent controversy ignited the ongoing feud between Abolitionists and the American Colonization Society into a violent racial pogrom targeting the city's African American community. The Five Points would be home to a particularly intense bout of violence, from which a story would emerge of residents placing candles in their windows to display they were not black, to avoid the vandalism that was borne against the African American community in the neighborhood.96 The following year, when the 96 “Riots in New-York,” Delaware Gazette, July 16, 1834; “Disturbances in New-York,” Long Island Farmer, and Queens County Advertiser, July 16, 1834; “Continuation of the New York Riots,” The Corrector, July 19, 1834. For more on the Tappan Riots, see Anbinder, Five Points, 29-36. 95 “The Evening Post: Thursday, April 10,” Evening Post, April 10, 1834; “The Evening Post: Friday, April 11,” Evening Post, April 11, 1834; “Letter to the Editor of the Argus,” Freeman’s Journal, April 14, 1834; “Reign of Terror!,” Anti-Masonic Telegraph April 23, 1834. For more on the Bank War, see Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War: A Study in the Growth of Presidential Power (New York: Norton, 1967). 94 “The Geneva Gazette: Wednesday, June 16, 1830,” Geneva Gazette and Mercantile Advertiser, June 16, 1830; “Another Murder in New York,” Rochester Republican, May 3, 1849; “A Bloody Affray - Three Negroes Stabbed,” New-York Organ: A Family Companion, October 16, 1852; “City Occurrences: William F. Stivers,” New-Yorker, September 30, 1837. 25 Irish attempted to organize a militia - the O’Connell Guard - long stewing fears of a Papist plot to seize power in America boiled over, leading to confrontation with a mob of nativists on Cross Street.97 A number of smaller riots followed in the subsequent years, such as one on the Fourth of July “between Americans and the Irish” in 1838,98 and the riots of the 1842 election, over the public school controversy between Catholic and Protestant residents.99 It was the final major riot, the so-called “Dead Rabbits Riot” of July 1857, which would become the most mythologized. After the Municipal Police force was disbanded on the Third of July, many Irish New Yorkers felt bitter towards the new, Anglo-Protestant-dominated Metropolitan police, whom they saw as engaged in a nativist plot to usurp their political power.100 The Dead Rabbit riot began during the Fourth of July, with the assault of a Metropolitan police officer in the Five Points, and the storming of a saloon at no. 40 Bowery, said to be headquarters of the “Bowery Boys,” or the “Atlantic Guard”, after the officer took refuge inside. This initiated a brawl between several hundred of each crowd, with the Bowery Boys and Metropolitans engaging the “Dead Rabbits” of the Five Points at a barricade constructed at Bayard Street. The riot escalated to the use of firearms, and would result in at least eight deaths before it was put down by the military, excluding a brief postlude on Baxter Street the following day that quickly broke up.101 The “Civil 101 “New York,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 6, 1857; “Rioting and Bloodshed: The 4th and 5th of July,” New-York Times, August 6, 1857; “Frightful Riot Last Night,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 6, 1857. Tyler Anbinder outlines that the “Dead Rabbits” was not a gang, but was an invention of the newspapers, the name being a slang term for thieves in the local cant applied derogatorily upon those rioters. Anbinder, Five Points, 337-340. 100 Anbinder, Five Points, 331-334; Burrows, Gotham, 838-839; J. T. Headley, The Great Riots of New York, 1712 to 1873. Including a Full and Complete Account of the Four days’ Draft Riot of 1863 (New York: E.B. Treat, 1873), 129-131. 99 “Riots in New York,” Otsego Republican, April 18, 1842 98 “Riot,” Evening Post, July 6, 1838. 97 “Riot,” Evening Post, June 22, 1835; “The Evening Post: Thursday, June 25,” Evening Post, June 25, 1835; “Riot,” North River Times, June 26, 1835; “Letter to the Editor of the Journal of Commerce,” Republican Watchman, July 2, 1835. For more on the Anti-Catholic movement of the 1830s, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 542-546. 26 War”102 of the Dead Rabbit riot was the largest civil disturbance in American history to that point, surpassed in death toll only by the Astor Place riot massacre in 1849 in which the military had fired upon the rioters.103 Alongside riots, much of the violent crime that characterized journalism about the Five Points in the antebellum period had faded by the end of the American Civil War.104 By the 1870s, such infamous locales as Crown’s Grocery and Dicken’s Place were gone from the neighborhood, and the Five Points had lost its “prestige of being the wickedest and most dangerous place in the United States.”105 The association would remain with the neighborhood, however, and the “halcyon days” of the Five Points would continue to be a touchstone for future localities in the city known for crime.106 While much of the Five Points’ mythology recounted in the later half of the century emerged from the newspaper coverage during the Antebellum Period, the Five Points would see a resurgence in crime reporting in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In this time the neighborhood became home to a number of infamous criminal gangs, such as the Whyos107 and the nascent outfit known as the “Five Points gang;” although that organization would only reach prominence in the 20th century.108 Many members of this gang would go on to acquire great fame, including the likes of Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Al Capone.109 109 Luciano Iorizzo, Al Capone: A Biography (Westport: Greenwood, 2003), 26. 108 “Five Points Gang,” New York Times, April 10, 1882; “Battle Was Planned,” Evening World, September 30, 1902; “Five Points Gang Ends Celebration by Rioting and Assault,” New-York Tribune, July 6, 1903. 107 “The Whyo Gang,” Evening World, January 23, 1888; “Lead Lawless Lives,” Utica Observer, December 29, 1891; “Bottle Alley’s Crimes,” Sun, July 10, 1898. 106 “What the Law Could Not Do,” Republican Watchman, November 11, 1887; “Something New in Rascality,” Utica Daily Observer, May 22, 1874. 105 “Glimpses of Change,” Troy Weekly Times; “Jottings of a Holiday,” The Evening Gazette, August 29, 1872; “The Five Points: A Pest in a City - Poverty in the Midsts of Wealth,” Painted Post Times, September 3, 1874; “The Five Points,” Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat, May 22, 1844. 104 Anbinder, Five Points, 280-281. James Dabney McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York Life: Or, The Sights and Sensations of the Great City. A Work Descriptive of the City of New York in All Its Various Phases (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872), 400. 103 Anbinder, Five Points, 346-347. 102 “Awful Riots and Bloodshed: Civil War in the ‘Bloody Sixth’,” Evening Post, July 6, 1857. 27 Crime was a central part of the conception of the Five Points to New Yorkers. The sensationalism attracted popular attention and granted allure to future narratives, expediting the Five Points entrenchment in popular consciousness. Vice and crime extended the appeal of literature on the Five Points to an audience beyond the reform crowd that would otherwise be unlikely to engage as readily with the subject of a poor immigrant district. Beyond its importance in the popularization of the Five Points, the neighborhood's criminality was also invaluable in its rhetorical deployment. For middle and upper-class Protestant New Yorkers, the Five Points was a manifestation of what they saw as the moral failings of its residents. This is most clearly outlined in the symbolic weight middle and upper-class New Yorkers placed upon the Five Points’ specific location in New York City. The Five Points was located in a low depression, and thus was a drainage point which gathered a great degree of wastewater, contributing to neighborhoods’ poor physical condition.110 To New Yorkers viewing the Five Points, this drainage took on a symbolic dimension. To such onlookers, the Five Points was the bowels of New York city; the lowest place to which all the city's filth would collect, both literally and figuratively.111 This was the place where all the city's prostitutes would eventually be damned to, its groggeries were the home of the drunkard who could afford no other resort, and its penny cellars the end of every intrepid gambler.112 Nineteenth-century New Yorkers conceived of the Five Points as a place synonymous with vice and crime. The residents of the neighborhood were criminals to a man, and all those 112 Bobo, Glimpses of New York City, 12; “The Last Home of the Prostitute,” Independent, July 1, 1852; Smith, Sunshine and Shadow, 208; Foster, New York by Gaslight, 29; Foster, New York in Slices, 28; “Short Patent Sermon,” The Elmira Gazette, August 26, 1841; Cuyler, “A Peep into Cutthroat Alley,” The Independent. 111 “Fire,” Ithaca Journal & General Advertiser, June 18, 1845. 110 “Exploration about the Five Points,” Evening Post, June 22, 1860; “Reform in the Five Points,” Evening Post. 28 that partook in sin would inevitably find themselves amongst their number. The superficial portrayal of the neighborhood in such terms did much to obfuscate the reality of the Five Points. Most in the Five Points were not criminals, nor were they involved in the vice industry. By and large, they were labourers, with the clothing trades being especially prominent.113 The average resident, far from the “‘sneak-thieves,’ incipient burglars, and garroters”114 lurking in the mythological neighborhood, was a hardworking - if impoverished - manual labourer. This reality, incompatible with the image of a den of villainy painted by contemporaries, was thus left out of accounts, effectively erasing the vast majority of the Five Points’ inhabitants from the historical record, save those deemed sufficiently “immoral” in the eyes of authors writing sensationalist accounts for white Protestant middle and upper-class readers. The Five Points, in such a view, was Hell. The criminals of the Five Points were damned by their own moral failings and sins, and the Poverty of the Five Points their punishment. This depiction of the Five Points will be a focus of the next chapter. 114 Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” 303. 113 Anbinder, Five Points, 146-148, 536-639. 29 Chapter Two: Poverty The metaphor of the Five Points as a surrogate Hell was a popular element of Five Points literature.115 Such was the pervasiveness of this trope that in his study of New York Reform literature, Eric Homberg dubbed the style of narrative travel accounts popularized by Dickens employed in the discussion of the Five Points the “Virgilian Mode,” due to the stylistic and thematic likeness to Dante’s Divine Comedy.116 The first to directly reference their journey as a descent into Hell was N. P. Willis, who described his and Dickens' descents as being in the footsteps of Orpheus, a mythical Greek Poet who made a descent into Hades.117 This narrative allusion would be further utilized by the more literary writers in their own narratives, describing their own inquiries into neighborhoods like the Five Points as descents into the depths of America118 - in his own account of the Five Points, Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage, one of the most prominent preachers of his day, claimed “it was Dante’s Inferno”.119 The Five Points functioned, in this metaphor, as a prison of the damned, who were being punished for moral transgressions. The punishment for the residents of the Five Points was poverty. 119 Thomas DeWitt Talmage, Masque Torn Off (Chicago: J. Fairbanks & Co., 1879), 32. 118 Peter Stryker, The Lower Depths of the Great American Metropolis: A Discourse (New York: Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., 1866); Bayard Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” The Nation 2, no. 36 (1866); Collyer, Lights and Shadows of American Life, 7. 117 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis (Philadelphia: Henry C. Baird, 1855), 582; Virgil, Georgics, 4.453-527. 116 Eric Homberg, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (New Haven: Yale University Press), 30-34. 115 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, and the New Mission House at the Five Points (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1854), 38; David Crockett, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835), 49; George G. Foster, New York by Gaslight: Here and There a Streak of Sunshine (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850), 52; Ballington Booth, New York’s Inferno: Scenes of Pathos Powerfully Portrayed - Siberian Desolation Caused by Vice and Drink - Tenements Packed with Misery and Crime (New York: Salvation Army, 1891), 33-34; “What the Law Could Not Do,” Republican Watchman, November 11, 1887; “The Dark Side of the Metropolis Found by Strangers,” Utica Observer, October 3, 1888; Lewis M. Pease, “A Rescue,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 5 (1854), 76; “Church Monthly,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2, (1858), 34-35; Robert Hanham Collyer, Lights and Shadows of American Life (Boston: Redding & Co., 1844), 7; W. P. Strickland, “The Five Points,” Christian Advocate and Journal 38, no. 42 (1863), 330; Wm. F. Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points: a Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry (New York: Five Points House of Industry, 1893), 4. 30 Impoverishment is frequently discussed as being a result of the habits of the residents of the Five Points. Samuel Byram Halliday was amongst the most well known authorities on the slums of New York in his day, and wrote regular accounts of his experiences, which were collated in Lost and Found, or, Life Among the Poor.120 Halliday’s depictions of poverty make clear the moral failings to which he attributed the condition. The most famous of these stories is that of Mary Mullen, whose parents exemplified the sin of idleness because they were reliant upon the income of their young daughter.121 Other writers' accounts of visiting the Five Points during the day would emphasize the pervasiveness of this supposed idleness - going so far as to insist that the bars were packed with loafers sleeping on every bench when they ventured through at noon.122 Intemperance was the most common cause to which poverty was attributed by nineteenth century writers. Davy Crockett supposed that the poor of the Five Points withstood the conditions because an hour’s indulgence in vice [was] sweet enough for the bitter of the rest.”123 Halliday suggested a connection as well, stating that more than three-fifths of the patients at Blackwell almshouse were self-admitted drunkards, and that “rum is the cause of, at least, four fifths of the pauperism, vice, and crime of [New York].”, and puts “eighty out of every hundred in the almshouse,”124 a sentiment echoed by other writers.125 Rather than conceiving of alcohol dependency as a disease, most reformists in the early to mid-nineteenth century conceptualized it 125 Joel H. Ross, What I Saw in New York: or, A Bird’s Eye View of City Life (Auburn: Derby & Miller, 1851), 104; “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger, February 16, 1854. 124 Halliday, Lost and Found, 343, 356. 123 Crockett, North and Down East, 50. 122 Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: C. Scribner’s & Sons, 1890), 77-80; “The Five Points,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Kings County Democrat, May 22, 1844. 121 Samuel Byram Halliday, Lost and Found, or, Life Among the Poor (New York: Blakeman and Mason, 1859), 123. 120 Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 283-284. 31 as a self-perpetuating moral failing - a ‘bad habit’126. Alcohol was seen to induce in its consumers “an unnecessary, artificial, and very dangerous appetite; like the desire for sinning, in the man who sins, tends continuously to increase.”127 To fall victim to the temptation of intemperance would lead one inevitably to descend into immorality and poverty.128 In a particularly visceral account, Halliday describes a child from the Five Points, whose mother had driven them from affluence into poverty through her intemperance, even selling away her clothes to sell for rum, before dying of “delirium tremens” - alcohol withdrawal.129 These causes to which poverty was attributed by contemporary observers, be it the (previously discussed) criminality, intemperance, or a poor work ethic, were violations of the morality upheld by the “staid, sober, industrious, decent, law abiding and humane portion of the community.”130 As such, the conditions of the poor were portrayed as divine punishment for their sinful disposition. The punitive nature of the Five Points’ conditions is presented most frankly in its relationship to the cholera epidemics that the city faced in the nineteenth century. The first of these was the outbreak in 1832, which quickly gained an association with the Five Points due to its high concentration of cases.131 As medical knowledge related to disease transmission was still in its infancy, writers took little time to attribute this to the residents “dissolute habits,” 131 “Cholera,” New-York Evening Post, August 7, 1832. 130 “Capital Punishment: The Character of Its Opponents,” Evening Post, February 13, 1846; Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (New York: Hartford, J.B. Burr, 1869), 28-30; Booth, New York’s Inferno, 86-87. 129 Halliday, Lost and Found, 126-131. 128 Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind, with an Account of the Means of Preventing, and of the Remedies for Curing Them (Exeter: Josiah Richardson, Preacher of the Gospel, 1819), 8, 11-13. Rush was one of the few early Temperance men who conceptualized intemperance as a disease, though one which originates in and is perpetuated by immorality. 127 Justin Edwards, “On the Traffic in Ardent Spirit,” in Select Temperance Tracts ed. Justin Edwards (New York: American Tract Society, 1860), 2. 126 Scott C. Martin, “‘The Prime Minister of the Grisly King of Terrors, Death’: Alcohol in the Nineteenth-Century Reform Imagination,” French Review of American Studies 3, no. 156 (2018), 47-48, 51-53. 32 presenting it as an affliction that targeted the intemperate in particular.132 Rather than a disease, to these writers cholera was a smiting of the damned, “[striking] the drunken, the debauched and profligate, in the lower classes of society, and if it [invaded] the upper classes, the same description of people [were] its victims.”133 Again in 1849 Cholera “broke forth in that foul and loathsome tenantry called the Five Points; filth, penury, and intemperance [giving] it wings.”134 Again the disease was attributed to the filthy and crowded conditions of the Ward and the imprudent morals of its residents, proclaiming that “the disease depended in a great measure upon [the afflicted’s] own manner of living.”135 By the time of the 1854 epidemic, outbreaks were diffuse enough to no longer be associated so heavily with the Five Points, although sickness remained a ready feature of narrative accounts of the neighborhood.136 Despite the prevalence of Miasma theory in medicine during both epidemics, which held the cause of disease lay in ‘bad air;’ and the city’s clear valuing of the wisdom its proponents offered for preventative means - notably, these measures included formation of the sanitation board and the clearing of the city’s streets of the waste that had accumulated in prior decades due to neglect137 - even doctors and the city’s Board of Health were quoted as offering a moralist 137 Asa Green, A Glance at New York: Embracing the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers Rogues, dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquids, &c. &c. (New York: A. Greene, 1837), 173-174. 136 Dickens, American Notes, 213; George G. Foster, New York in Slices by an Experienced Carver: Being the Original Slices Published in the N.Y. Tribune (New York: W.F. Burgess, 1848), 23; Stryker, The Lower Depths of the Great American Metropolis, 3-4; Booth, New York’s Inferno, 34. The focus of accounts upon smells and poor ventilation in the neighborhood discussed later in this chapter are also deeply tied to the view of the Five Points as a place of disease, these believed to be causes of disease in the Miasma theory prevalent in the nineteenth century. 135 “The Cholera in New-York in 1849,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, November 3, 1849. 134 “The Cholera in New-York,” Schenectady Cabinet / Freedom’s Sentinel, July 3, 1849. 133 “Cholera Victims,” Rochester Observer, August 22, 1832. 132 “Evening Post: Wednesday, July 18,” New-York Evening Post, July 18, 1832. 33 explanation for the prevalence of disease amongst the poor.138 Protestant middle and upper-class New Yorkers perceived societal conditions as naturally emergent from moral character. The inhabitants of the Five Points themselves were described in unflattering terms which were seen to reflect their immorality. Authors and journalists present the denizens of the Five Points as ugly and miserable, their poor appearance a symbolic manifestation of their supposed poor character.139 These residents were denigrated as being without virtue, portrayed as cruel and lacking decorum, virulently hurling “drunken anathemas”140 upon the world and their fellows. They were altogether “too mean to swab hell’s kitchen."141 One of the most vulgar aspects, in the perception of the Protestant middle and upper-class, was the pervasiveness of racial amalgamation, which was exaggerated in order to highlight the terrible state of the Five Points.142 That the Irish and African American communities were able to exist in a “picture of amalgamation”143 was, to these observers, barbarous. The cohabitation and intermarriage of the the two communities was a violation of what was seen as the proper order of society in their 143 Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis, 583. 142 W.M. Bobo, Glimpses of New York City by a South Carolinian with Nothing Better to Do (Charleston: J.J. McCarter, 1852), 95. Despite these demographic assertions by writers such as W.M. Bobo, the Black population was significantly reduced in the aftermath of the 1834 Anti-Abolition Riot. Anbinder, Five Points, 69; Claudia Milne, “‘Slaughterhouses in Which I Labored’: Industry, Labor, and the Land from Colonial Times to 1830,” in Tales of the Five Points: Working Class Life in Nineteenth Century New York, ed. Rebecca Yamin, vol. 1, A Narrative History and Archeology of Block 160 (New York: US General Services Administration, 2000), 36. 141 Crockett, North and Down East, 49. 140 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 56; Junius Henri Brown, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 274-276; Ross, What I Saw in New York, 94; Collyer, Lights and Shadows of American Life, 7. 139 Bayard Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” 303; “The Dark Side of the Metropolis Found by Strangers,” Utica Observer; “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger; Collyer, Lights and Shadows of American Life, 7. The Ladies of the Mission exemplify this moral element to physical appearance, contrasting the “fair” and “well-dressed hundreds” of Broadway with “squalid looking women” and “brutal men with black eyes and disfigured faces” of the Five Points. Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 32-33. 138 “Return of Doctor Rhinelander and De Ray,” Otsego Republican, July 9, 1832; “Course to be Pursued to Prevent the Cholera,” Ithaca Journal & General Advertiser, June 27, 1832; “The Cholera in New-York in 1849,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune. 34 racist code;144 acclaimed New York writer George G. Foster went so far as to proclaim that ”the monster vice of humanity is licentiousness - the vice teeming with destruction and annihilation to the race itself.”145 Presenting much of the affluent class (relatively) of the Five Points, such as Pete Williams, as being from its African American population was even more scandalous, as it represented a complete inversion of the ‘proper’ social order.146 All of these traits were emphasized by writers as symbolic manifestations of the Five Points “outlandish and heathenish” nature.147 Discussions of the physical elements of the Five Points display this symbolism as well. The mythology of the Five Points was rooted in the aesthetics of poverty. The earliest description of the neighborhood emphasizes the poor condition of the homes, the squalid state of the neighborhood, and the “villainous smells” given off, all of which would be permanent fixtures of the literature.148 The very environment of the Five Points seemed, to many observers, hostile to life; Dickens wrote that in every façade “the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays.”149 The descriptions of the streets of the Five Points exemplify the perceptions of both the neighborhoods' condition and its roots in the lifestyles of its residents. In the Antebellum period, City of New York in its entirety was noted for the foul condition of its streets, and the Sixth Ward was said to be “the dirtiest ward of the dirtiest city in the world,”150 and the Five Points presented 150 “More About the Streets,” New-York Daily Tribune, December 15, 1848. 149 Charles Dickens American Notes for General Circulation, Volume I (London: Chapman & Hall, 1842), 211-212. 148 Cornelius, “Letter to the Editor,” New-York Evening Post, September 21, 1826; “The American Bible Society’s New Location,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, August 25, 1847; Brown, The Great Metropolis, 274-75. 147 Bobo, Glimpses of New York City, 97. 146 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 56; Bobo, Glimpses of New York City, 95. 145 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 52. 144 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 56-57; Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis, 582; Collyer, Lights and Shadows of American Life, 7. 35 as the dirtiest locality within it.151 The streets were “paved with mud knee deep,”152 and residents disposed of waste in the streets, covering them in grime and garbage,153 attracting the pigs that wandered the city to scrounge in the Five Points.154 “All manner of filth, indoor and out, [was] most freely distributed. The swarming thousands who dwell there will not even attempt to keep clean, in their persons or their houses.”155 The poor drainage, lack of sewer connections, and the amassed filth of decades of neglect saw the streets flood with fetid water, the culverts and gutters “one elongated cesspool … throwing out its noxious gasses … at every opening on the corners of the streets.”156 It is through contaminated water that Cholera spreads, and these waste water issues, though exaggerated by sensationalist writers, were likely the source of its spread during the outbreaks in the first half of the century. The conditions beneath the streets were no better. As a result of the marshy ground and the accumulation of waste water, the cellars of the neighborhood were regularly flooded with effluvia leaking in from the street. These cellars were dark, damp, and poorly ventilated, often possessing only a singular entrance to the surface.157 The noisome atmosphere of the cellars was of particular concern to many observers, carrying with it “the seeds of degradation, disease and 157 James Dabney McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York Life: Or, The Sights and Sensations of the Great City. A Work Descriptive of the City of New York in All Its Various Phases (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872), 406; Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 218; John C. Mathervet al., Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department of the City of New York (Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1859); Wallys, About New York, 62. 156 Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, Sixteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York: AIPC, 1859), 50, 52, in Anbinder, Five Points, 117-118. 155 “Filth and Pestilence,” New-York Daily Tribune, August 2, 1850. 154 Dickens, American Notes, 212; Bobo, Glimpses of New York City, 95. 153 “The Five Points,” Painted Post Times, September 3, 1874; Philip Wallys, About New York: An Account of What a Boy Saw in His Visit to the City (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857), 62-63; “Filth and Pestilence,” New-York Daily Tribune, August 1, 1850; “Streets Choked with Refuse,” Sun, March 13, 1881. 152 Dickens, American Notes, 215. 151 “Our City Welcomes Death with Festering Hands,” New-York Daily Tribune, September 19 1865; Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 274. 36 death.”158 It seemed, in their minds, that “human life must require much less oxygen than the physiologists suppose, or many of [those] dens would lose their tenants in a single night.”159 Despite the hellish conditions, the cellars were still bursting with life, hundreds of residents crowding into dense basement apartments that would house the poorest of Five Points residents.160 Reverend Theodore L. Cuyler claimed one such apartment was inhabited by twenty-five denizens packed together in the worst of conditions, with “no distinctions … made for sex or color” - or species, as he claimed the residents cohabited with goats.161 Such lodging-houses were tightly packed with beds, sometimes several bunks atop one another, in order to maximize rent, sometimes nearly two dozen packed into as many square feet.162 The tenements above were much the same in their depiction. The tenement houses were the Five Points’ most distinguishing physical feature. Following the filling of Collect Pond, the neighborhood was populated with numerous two-and-a-half-story wooden houses. As the decades went on, owners subdivided them into apartments and allowed them to fall into disrepair, and “debauchery made the houses prematurely old,” lending the neighborhood its distinctive visual character.163 Often, outbuildings were even converted or constructed ad hoc to further capacity. In later decades, purpose-built brick tenements began to supersede the older wooden buildings, though their conditions met much the same description.164 164 Anbinder, Five Points, 101-103; 406-407. See Appendix for maps of the change over time. 163 Cornelius, “Letter to the Editor,” New-York Evening Post; Crockett, North and Down East, 48; “Reform in the Five Points,” Evening Post, October 29, 1860; Dickens, American Notes, 212. 162 Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” 303-304; McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York Life, 408; “Life in New-York,” Niagara Democrat and Lockport Balance, March 9, 1838; “Life with the Rag-Pickers,” Cobleskill Index, July 24, 1879. 161 Theodore L. Cuyler, “A Peep Into Cut-Throat Alley,” Independent, February 7, 1861. 160 “Dens of Death,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 5, 1850. 159 Bayard Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” 304. 158 “A Visit to the Five Points,” Franklin Visitor, May 30, 1860. 37 Lurid accounts of life within these tenements depicted their residents as living in squalor befitting their ruinous exteriors. The apartments where small, some a few hundred square feet, others so small as to be referred to as closets,165 empty of furniture, save for the beds, stoves, and in some cases a chest or table - though the most neglected lacked for all but piles of rags that functioned as bedding. Overcrowding was rampant in the apartments described, in some cases possessing more than a dozen residents to a room.166 South Carolinian W. M. Bobo claims to have witnessed one eight-by-ten foot apartment which was shared between six people, leaving less floor space then a modern twin mattress.167 Many of these tenements would earn particular fame for their conditions or the reputation given to their residents, and were given lurid appellations in narratives and the press. An old Baptist Church on Orange Street, for instance, became known as the “Old Church,” was presented as an exemplar of the overcrowding issue: it was said to be divided into five stories, as well as a cellar, consisting of eighty-five apartments housing three-hundred-and-ten souls.168 The most infamous tenement in New York, however, was the Old Brewery. Constructed in 1792 as Coulter’s Brewery, the building was subdivided into a five-story tenement house in 1837, after which it quickly attained notoriety as the “the wickedest house on the wickedest street that ever existed in New York.”169 It was divided by two halls lined by rooms, the northern 169 Edward Van Every, Sins of New York as “Exposed” by the Police Gazette (New York: F.A. Stokes Co., 1930), 282; Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 49. 168 John M. Reed et al., Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Examine Into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New York and Brooklyn 1857 (Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1857), 17. Pictured in Jacob Riis, Battle With the Slum (New York: MacMillan Company, 1902), 15. 167 Bobo, Glimpses of New York City, 95-96. A Twin mattress is standardized at 38” x 75”, or just over twenty square feet, compared to the thirteen feet of ground area for each of the residents of the apartment Bobo describes. 166 Dickens, American Notes, 214-215; Ross, What I Saw in New York, 103-104; “Life at the Five Points: Madalina; the Rag-Picker’s Daughter,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, September 2, 1853. 165 Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years Work Among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), 204-206; Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis, 582; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 67; Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York, 205. 38 passage titled “Murderer’s Alley,” and that to the south known as the “Den of Thieves;”170 and together they were claimed to house at their peak more than twelve hundred of the most “wretched outcasts” in the city.171 As a result of its size and construction, its halls were dark and without windows, as were most of its apartments, leaving the interior “little less dark, gloomy, and terrible than the grave itself.”172 These apartments were described as horrific, overcrowded, poorly furnished and dilapidated, with the walls crumbling under neglect, leaving crevices “large enough for a man to pass through.”173 One reporter claimed to witness a single room occupied by three families, arranged around an unlit central hearth. Surrounding it, upon three beds of straw were the corpses of a mother and her still-born infant, a young child shivering in the cold, and a dying man. In the corner of the room was a drunken woman, “stranger both to the dead and dying.”174 For sixteen years the Old Brewery was known as the lowliest place in the Five Points, “the head-quarters of vice and misery” where “the old brewer of all the world’s misery, the Evil One himself, [had] dominion.”175 In 1852, it was acquired for sixteen-thousand dollars by the Ladies of the Mission, one of the major reform movements that would operate in the Five Points, and at the end of the year, the tenement was demolished, its residents long since forcibly displaced, putting an end to Five Points’ most storied locale.176 176 “The Old Brewery,” Rockland County Journal, April 24, 1852; “The Old Brewery,” Plaindealer, December 17, 1852. 175 Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 2:602; Foster, New York by Gaslight, 53. 174 “Another Brewery Picture,” Schenectady Reflector, March 5, 1847. 173 “The Old Brewery and the Five Points Mission,” Evening Post, November 30, 1852. 172 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 53; Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 47. 171 Willis, Prose Works of N.P. Willis, 582; McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York Life, 400. It was also claimed that the entirety of the inhabitants of the triangle block - demolished in 1833 and replaced with Paradise Park - took residence in the Old Brewery following the clearance of their own tenements. “The Old Brewery,” Evening Post, February 22, 1847. The Ladies of the Mission make a much more reasonable claim of some three hundred inhabitants at the time of their acquisition of the property. Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 43. 170 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 42-43, 47, 56-57. 39 After the Old Brewery, the Cow Bay was known to be the worst of the Five Points. The Cow Bay was the name given to the cul-de-sac of Little Water Street extending a hundred feet north of Anthony Street, forming a dark “‘valley of the shadow of death’.”177 The Cow Bay was home to a half dozen odd Tenement buildings,178 by their depiction perhaps the most dismal and degraded in the whole of the city, populated by the “worst sneak thieves and beggars, drunkards and disreputables in the world.”179 In reference to its terrible denizens, these tenements were given such names as “Rogue’s Run,” or “Dead Fall;” the most notorious of these, however, was one ironically dubbed “Jacob’s Ladder,” after the ladder to heaven in Genesis.180 Entered by a rotting stairwell at the end of the Cow Bay, from which its name is derived, the tenement was the home to the poorest amongst the populace, who inhabited cramped and sparsely furnished apartments, their roofs and walls offering little shelter from the elements.181 The rest of the alley was said to be of similarly poor conditions, “crazy buildings [overhanging] the sidewalk, just ready to topple into ruins, … swarming with human beings” numbering eleven hundred.182 By the 1860s, Cow Bay began to be demolished, and by the next decade remained “only in the memory of police and a few philanthropic citizens.”183 Both the Old Brewery and the Cow Bay tenements are treated in accounts as physical manifestations of the morality of their residents. Denigrations of their residents come intrinsically tied to the conditions of the properties, presenting the “noisome garret[s]” as 183 “A Visit to the Five Points,” Franklin Visitor; “The Five Points,” Painted Post Times. 182 “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger. 181 Samuel Byram Halliday, Lost and Found, 211-213; “Abodes of the Poor: Cow Bay at Midnight,” New York Times, July 1, 1859; Bayard Taylor, “A Descent Into the Depths,” 304. 180 “The Dark Side of the Metropolis Found by Strangers,” Utica Observer. 179 “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger; “The Dark Side of the Metropolis Found by Strangers,” Utica Observer. 178 John F. Harrison, Map of the City Of New-York Extending Northward to Fiftieth St., Scale not Given (New York: M. Dripps, 1852). 177 “Life at the Five Points: Madalina; the Rag-Picker’s Daughter,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune; “The Drunkard and His Story,” Kinderhook Herald, October 25, 1855. 40 emblematic of the “wretched creatures” that inhabited them.184 They are simultaneously the most impoverished and run-down, as well as the most infested with criminals, reflecting the punitive nature ascribed to poverty: the worst conditions must reflect the worst reprobates. This portrayal of tenements being reflections of their inhabitants would continue even after these dens were pulled down. With the disappearance of its most infamous rookeries, it was the block bounded by Mulberry, Bayard, Baxter, and Park Streets, dubbed “the Bend,” which would be the new heart of poverty for sensational journalism on the Five Points in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as Cow Bay and the Old Brewery had been in the neighborhood's zenith.185 Since at least the late 1840s, the Bend had been associated with second-hand stores, an association which would remain with it, appearing more “the market-place in some town in Southern Italy than a street in New York.”186 Just as with its predecessors, accounts claimed the bend to be rife with crime, “murder is everyday crop.”187 The Bend was immortalized in the photojournalism of Jacob Riis, one of the pioneers of the medium and the premier reform journalist of his day.188 Riis captured the market and tenements, as well as such locales as the “Bottle Alley,” and “Bandits Roost,” named for intemperance and crime respectively.189 These alleys and the tenements around them were remembered in much the same terms as their antebellum 189 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 59, 63, 66. 188 Anbinder, Five Points, 496-500. 187 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 55, 61. 186 Foster, New York by Gaslight, 57-59; Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, 195-196; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 56-57. 185 “The Five Points,” Painted Post Times; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 55-56; Booth, New York’s Inferno, 32-33; “The Dark Side of the Metropolis Found by Strangers,” Utica Observer. 184 “A Peep at the Five Points,” Rockland County Messenger; “Life at the Five Points: Madalina; The Rag-Pickers Daughter,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune; “the Old Brewery and the Five Points Mission,” Evening Post, November 30, 1852. 41 predecessors, recalled as “dark, damp and dismal” “dens of death … into which sunlight never enters.”190 Narratives of the Five Points were not universally bleak. Amidst these scenes, residents perceived as being of good moral character were depicted in far superior conditions by moralist writers, enforcing the relation of morality to physical conditions. New York writer Joel Ross, in his description of the Five Points, recounts a trip to the Old Brewery. Ross depicts the temperate and intemperate denizens and their apartments in starkly different words. While the intemperate are described in a familiar fashion - miserable, ugly, and drunk, residing in desolate, pestilent abodes - the members of the temperance society were clean and happy, and in their apartments “the floors were carpeted, the beds were tidy, the furniture clean, and on every face, a smile.”191 Of the Cow Bay, much the same can be seen - Ross met a woman of relative prosperity and health amidst that “modern Sodom.”192 Other such depictions share the same features, contrasting the moral residents with those of more typical character for narratives.193 The conception that material conditions emerge from morality is integral to these portrayals. In demonstrating that improving the poor’s moral character alleviates the ills of poverty, that those ills emerge from sin is taken as self-evident. The reflection of morality in the physical characteristics of the Five Points is central to the construction of moralist narratives. The disease, poverty, and desolation of the Five Points is taken as emerging from the residents of the Five Points transgressing the moral standards of the Protestant middle and upper-class; as moral New Yorkers would not be subject to such abject circumstances but rise above them on account of their industriousness, fiscal responsibility and 193 Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, 206-207; “Our Street Musicians,” Tri-States Union, September 20, 1872. 192 Ross, What I Saw in New York, 96-99. 191 Ross, What I Saw in New York, 93-96. 190 Riis, Battle with the Slum, 14, 39-40. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 64; “A Hot Night in the City,” Evening Post, July 13, 1876. 42 sobriety. Only through correction of their moral deviancy and submission to the social order, it was argued, could the people of the Five Points improve their circumstances. 43 Chapter Three: Reform The popular nineteenth moralistic conception of the Five Points as the aggregation of New York’s ills was widely perpetuated in newspapers and magazines as it was a comfortable narrative for middle and upper class readers in New York City. If the conditions of a person's life reflected their moral disposition, then it justified the social hierarchy and encouraged orthodox adherence to the societal norms of the Protestant middle and upper-class. These New Yorkers supported reform in the form of moral suasion and the dispersion of immoral influences to induce residents from the city’s poorest neighborhoods such as the Five Points to adhere to a sober and faithful industrious lifestyle. This allowed affluent New Yorkers to distance themselves from issues such as widespread poverty, addiction, and urban decay, and enabled them to attribute those problems to the moral failings of the Five Points rather than structural issues. The Reformers legitimized this perspective with their writings about the Five Points, and offered a means of rectifying the problems perceived by their peers without dramatic alterations to society. A number of significant urban reform efforts across the city were also borne out throughout the nineteenth century. The century saw the establishment of street cleaners in the aftermath of the 1832 Cholera Epidemic,194 the push for the regulation of tenements and rental regulations,195 and the early prohibition movement,196 among other reforms. These efforts had 196 Peter Stryker, Lower Depths of the Great American Metropolis: A Discourse (New York: Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., 1866), 13-16; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 838. 195 John M. Reed et al., Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Examine Into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New York and Brooklyn 1857. (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1857), 51-53; John H. Griscom, The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of New York with Suggestions for its Improvement (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845) 6-12, 44-49; Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 134-136. 194 Asa Green, A Glance at New York: Embracing the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers Rogues, dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquids, &c. &c. (New York: A. Greene, 1837), 173-174. 44 significant effects on the changing face of the city through the century, including the Five Points; however such work and its effects were scarcely mentioned in media coverage of the Five Points. The motivations of these reform efforts centered around the fears of the middle and upper class - such as the spread of disease or crime.197 The reform work that was perceived as relevant to the sensationalist narratives of the Five Points was thus the moral reform efforts, which targeted the immoral behavior associated with the populace. This negative behavior was perceived to be the root of the social issues represented by the Five Points. It is of note that, unlike much of the other reform efforts in the nineteenth century, which targeted concrete, systemic issues, the issue targeted by moral reformers - the epidemic immorality amongst the impoverished found in the Five Points narrative - was largely a fiction, created in the popular literature of the era. As such, their actual goal - whether recognized by the reformers or not - was not the aid of the poor (although they did so as a result of their work) but the production and alteration of narratives to reassure the middle and upper classes and quell fears around the threat seen in New York’s underclass. The earliest reform efforts in the Five Points occurred in the 1830s, as the neighborhood's reputation began to be established. These early efforts were spearheaded by Protestant evangelists like John McDowall of the American Tract Society, who preached and distributed evangelical tracts to the denizens of the Five Points, and established a Sabbath school in the area.198 These early efforts focused most prominently on the women of the Five Points, and 198 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: the New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 98-100; John R. McDowall, Memoir and Select Remains of the Late Rev. John R. M’Dowall, The Martyr of the Seventh Commandment, in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Leavitt, Lord, & Co., 1838), 101, 103, 115-118, 127-131. 197 Griscom, Sanitary Conditions, 24-25; “Our City Welcomes Death with Festering Hands,” New-York Daily Tribune, September 19 1865; “Have you a Boy to Spare?,” Voices from the Old Brewery 28, no. 4 (1889), 1. 45 rehabilitating the city's prostitutes in the model of Mary Magdalen.199 Temperance societies, though well established elsewhere in the city, only rarely made “novel” incursions into the Five Points,200 which remained firmly in the influence of liquor dealers during the first half of the nineteenth century. The scope of these early efforts was limited, and failed to receive much notice from general society, and were largely absent from depictions of the neighborhood and discussions of its conditions. The most famous of these early reform efforts amongst contemporary New Yorkers was the campaign of mass arrests, or “hauls”, carried out by Alderman George D. Strong, which earned him a reputation as a “corrector of public morals.”201 The alderman’s efforts played into the sensationalist literature around the Five Points and reinforced the immoral association of the impoverished district, thus coverage of his work proliferated alongside the popular narratives of the Five Points. Moral reform efforts began to find traction with the rise of large missionary organizations with significant financial backing. Beginning with the interdenominational Five Points Union Mission, a series of Protestant evangelist groups were attracted to the Five Points as a permanent site for preaching and aid, and began to investigate the potential of constructing permanent missions at the Five Points.202 The reform efforts in the Five Points were soon dominated by two institutions, the Five Points Mission and the Five Points House of Industry. Both institutions emerged in the 1850s, and their operations in the Five Points were initiated under the guidance of 202 “The American Bible Society’s New Location,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, August 25, 1847; “The Old Brewery and the Five Points Mission,” Evening Post, November 30, 1852. 201 “Another Haul,” New-York Evening Post, March 29, 1830; “Another Great Haul,” Republican Watchman, June 15, 1830; “On Saturday Night,” Anti-Masonic Telegraph, June 8, 1831; “Arrests,” New-York Evening Post, January 23, 1832; “Arrest of Vagrants,” Corrector, June 19, 1830; “Letter to the Editors of the Evening Post,” New-York Evening Post, April 11, 1831. 200 “A Novel Meeting,” Columbia Washingtonian, August 25, 1842. 199 Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City, 109; New York Magdalen Society, Magdalen Report: First Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the N. Y. Magdalen Society (New York: New York Magdalen Society, 1831), 5-6. 46 Reverend L. K. Pease.203 Pease was initially contracted by the Ladies‘ Home Missionary Society in 1850 to manage their efforts to convert the populace to Methodism and their moral system. Pease made his focus the relief of the poor, believing it a necessary prelude to the moral improvement of his subjects; Pease provided, in addition to the Sabbath School and preaching he was assigned to undertake, material assistance and labour opportunities through the establishment of a workhouse at the Chapel he founded at the corner of Cross and Little Water streets.204 The Ladies Society by whom he was employed, however, was focused upon “the spiritual interests of that heathen population,”205 focusing upon the work of preaching and conversions as the path to moral rehabilitation. The two parties' differing priorities put them in conflict, and by 1851, Pease and the Ladies Society’s interests had proven irreconcilable. Pease and the society separated their operations, and Pease founded the House of Industry and continued his reform efforts.206 By the close of 1852, the two organizations, the House of Industry under Reverend Pease, and the Ladies Society’s Five Points Mission, were operating in the heart of the Five Points, out of a complex on Worth Street beside the Cow Bay and the Old Brewery respectively.207 Despite their differences, the two organizations established similar rosters of services. Both the Five Points Mission and the House of Industry operated Sabbath Schools and Prayer-Houses, housing facilities, industrial schools, orphanages, and provided clothing and meals to their subjects.208 208 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, and the New Mission House at the Five Points (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1854), 37-41; “Items,” Voices from the Old Brewery 22, no. 3 (1882), 293; “Sewing School,” Voices from the Old Brewery 22, no. 4 (1882), 297; “Waifs of the Five Points,” Voices from the Old Brewery 31, no. 5 (1892), 3; Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points, 19-23; “Description of the House 207 Wm. F. Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry (New York: Five Points House of Industry, 1893), 14-15; “The Old Brewery and the Five Points Mission,” Evening Post. The Episcopalian efforts to found a third Mission in the area mentioned in the Evening Post failed to come to fruition. 206 “Efforts for Outcasts,” Oneida Telegraph, July 17, 1852; “Five Points Mission,” Evening Post, November 6, 1852. 205 “Five Points Mission,” Evening Post, April 12, 1852. 204 “Reformation at the ‘Five Points’,” Northern New York Journal, July 31, 1850. 203 “Five Point Reformers,” New York Reformer, October 10, 1850. 47 The proliferation of these Protestant conversion efforts amongst their congregants saw the Catholic Church work to establish systems providing the same services, in an effort to counteract the lure of Protestant aid services.209 As such aid work did not fit within the mythology of the Five Points, it was largely overlooked by narratives of the neighborhood. Middle and upper class audiences were not concerned with the conditions of the poor; their concern was the immorality of the denizens of the Five Points depicted in sensationalist accounts, and the program of moral suasion which was used in an effort to change their behavior. These organizations and their supporters were largely composed of middle and upper-class churchgoers, and it was from the same population that the missionaries attained much of their external funding through donations and membership dues.210 The House of Industry, however, however due to its proclaimed “non-denominational”211 Protestantism received additional financial support from the city government as well.212 As such the missionaries presented their efforts in such a way as to justify the classist, anti-catholic, and nativist perspectives of their supporters, and alleviate their fears around the Five Points and the moral corruption it was seen to represent in their society. For these New Yorkers, such charities offered a means of affecting positive change without resorting to structural means such as worker protections or a social safety net that they would find inconvenient, expensive, or distasteful. 212 Anbinder, Five Points, 318-319. 211 “Are We Denominational?,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 21, no.4 (1877), 53-54; “Not Denominational,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 31, no. 11 (1888), 166. 210 Henry R. Remsen et al., Incorporation of the Five Points House of Industry: Articles of Incorporation, By-Laws and Addresses of the Trustees and Superintendent (New York: Five Points House of Industry, 1854), 7; “The Accounts of the Rev. L. M. Pease, at the Five Points,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 1, 2, & 3 (1854), 32-41. 209 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 776; Anbinder, Five Points, 315-317; John Gilmary Shea, The Catholic Churches of New York City, with Sketches of their History and Lives of the Present Pastors (New York: L.G. Goulding, 1878), 692-693. of Industry,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 14, no. 1-2 (1870),1-5; “The Five Points House of Industry,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 30, no. 7 (1886), 105. 48 In soliciting support for their efforts, the Five Points Mission and the House of Industry produced a significant body of literature. Despite the differing approaches to reform by the missionary institutions, the rhetorical usage of the Five Points remains consistent across their media. As with other depictions, in the reform institutions portrayals the Five Points remained a “tout ensemble of horrors”213 and “the residence of the worst elements of society,” “its name … the synonym for wretchedness, vice, and crime.”214 In presenting the Five Points, the institutions’ offer no challenge to the popular literary image, reprinting popular works such as Dickens' account of the Five Points in their entirety within their works, presenting them as reliable and demonstrative accounts of the conditions in the Five Points.215 Sensationalist tropes of ubiquitous crime, filth, and the ruinous environment pervaded through the missionaries’ literature;216 maligning the “the extremest wretchedness,” “noisome streets and foul alleys, amid intolerable stenches” and “horrors no infernal imagination could heighten [sic.].”217 These salacious descriptions were accompanied with tales of intemperate falls from grace and senseless violence, enforcing the view that the plights of the impoverished were the result of their immorality.218 As is noted by historian Robert K. Fitts, the missionary literature focused upon vignettes of the transformation of their subjects' lives, intent on imparting in their readers the value of a moral lifestyle.219 The story of “the Lost Children and their Lost Father” is an exemplar of this style, presenting the story of a family fallen into poverty due to its patriarch’s alcoholism, pawning off their belongings for rum, taking up residence in a dismal cellar on the Cow Bay 219 Fitts, “The Rhetoric of Reform,” 120-121, 126-127. 218 T. S. E., “The Temperance Meeting,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 5 (1854), 72; “The Fourth,” Voices From the Old Brewery 14, fragment, (1874), NYPL, call no. ZKXD++. 217 “The American Bible Society’s New Location,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, August 25, 1847. 216 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 66. 215 Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points, 3; Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 17-20. 214 Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points, 2. 213 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 20. 49 “among beggars and thieves.”220 After the mother is sent up to Blackwell, however, and the children were taken into the House of Industry, the father repented and took a temperance pledge. The father then became “now a man again, engaged in business, earning ten dollars per week;” presenting a striking contrast with the “deformity and squalor” of the “degraded original.”221 Another such parable recounted in the records of the Five Points Missions follows the same trope, presenting a tale of a repentant alcoholic given room and board at the Mission after his conversion to Methodism and restoration to sobriety, from which he went on find work to support his family and pay his debts. His moral recovery also was claimed to have brought about his miraculous recovery from consumption, the physical being treated in the narrative as manifested from his moral illness.222 Stories of failures of individuals to reform are told as well - in one oft-repeated example, a woman fell from affluence to abject destitution due to her intemperance, sought repentance, and received board at the Five Points Mission. Contrary to other such stories, the woman from Cow Bay relapsed into alcoholism and was once again entrapped in Cow Bay.223 These narratives reinforced the conception that the failure to follow the specific Christian values of the Reformers was at the heart of the issues of the Five Points. These stories were designed to demonstrate that even the inhabitants of the Five Points could be redeemed if they adhered to the principles of hard work and sobriety. This assured faithful readers that their way of life was the proper one in the eyes of God.224 224 Fitts, “The Rhetoric of Reform,” 126. 223 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 198-202. 222 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 94-103. 221 T. S. E., “The Lost Children and their Lost Father,” 47. 220 T. S. E., “The Lost Children and their Lost Father,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 1, 2, & 3 (1854), 46-47. 50 The project of moral suasion was not limited to the adult population of the Five Points, but was also directed to the saving of the neighborhood's children from bad examples.225 By the end of the 1850s, their work with children became the primary focus of these institutions, and the stories of children’s aid they printed were amongst the most plentiful of the vignettes produced by reformers in the nineteenth century, and elicited the most sympathy from readers.226 These efforts would come to characterize the goals of these institutions, the greatest effort was upon seeing “the next generation, at least of the Five Points, start better.”227 The work done with children also presented advantages within the narrative of reform; in focusing on children the point at which the missionaries' work would be complete was cast into the nebulous future of when the children were grown, a point which would never arrive as the organizations continued to take in more children. A depiction of the Five Points could eulogize the work done for the neighborhood's children, without contradicting sensationalist elements of their narrative and making moral reform appear ineffectual. The stories of the work done with children present a tragic image of the conditions of the youth in the Five Points, and the virtue of the missionaries efforts to rehouse them, as well as the transformative power upon them that can be had by the influence of Protestant moral instruction in the betterment of their prospect based on the missionaries improvement of their moral code.228 Many of these stories are amongst the most famous from Reform literature, including that of Mary Mullen, and her adoption by a family in the country.229 ‘Wild Maggie’ would be the story 229 Samuel Byram Halliday, Lost and Found, or, Life Among the Poor (New York: Blakeman and Mason, 1859), 118-123. 228 “Life at the Five Points: Madalina; the Rag-Picker’s Daughter,” New-York Semi Weekly Tribune, September 2, 1853; “Life at the Five Points: The Half Orphans,” Spirit of the Times, November 22, 1853. 227 “Efforts for Outcasts,” Oneida Telegraph. 226 “Extracts From Our Record,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 3, no. 12 (1860), 269-271; “Description of the House of Industry,” 1-5; “Two Five Points Institutions,” Voices From the Old Brewery 29, no. 2 (1890), 2. 225 “Thanksgiving-Day,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 5, no. 8 (1861), 179-182; “A Feast for the Poor: A Letter of Thanksgiving,” Evening Post, November 24, 1869. 51 to earn the most fame though.230 Writer Solon Robinson initially published the two stories of Wild Maggie Reagan in the New York Tribune, later republishing them in his book Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated alongside a number of other famed tales of the reform movement. Wild Maggie tells the story of “the smartest, brightest, most intelligent girl in [that] God-forsaken neighborhood,” and Reverend Pease's success in taming her and taking her on as an inmate of the Mission, later arranging her adoption to the family of a physician in the countryside, where she began education as a teacher.231 The Story of Wild Maggie was perhaps more famous than any other contemporary account of the Five Points, and its popularity ensured the publication of a sequel focused upon her parents' struggle to maintain a temperance pledge.232 A number of imitators even presented a series of alternate tales claimed to be the “real” story of Wild Maggie, namely that of Maggie Ryan and Maggie Carson, both of which were presented by the Five Points Mission.233 These reform narratives together present a particular image of the characteristics of a proper subject of conversion - one who is repentant, strong willed, humble, and with a good work ethic.234 Unlike sensationalist narratives, in missionary literature the lurid depictions of vice and sin form a backdrop for sympathetic accounts of ‘unfortunates’ who desire to repent and improve their station.235 Even in narratives of children's aid the writer would often invoke their innocent nature or denote their central character as particularly remarkable for their beauty or wit 235 Henry R. Remsen et al., “The Trustees of the House of Industry, to the Public,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 1, 2, & 3 (1854), 22. 234 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 94-103, 239-244; “The Two-Cent Marriage,” Dansville Herald, September 28, 1853; T. S. E., “The Lost Children and their Lost Father,” 46-47. 233 Ladies of the Mission, The Old Brewery, 162-167, 182-190; The claims of the Ryan Family, at least, drew public controversy over the veracity of the claim. “Letters From the People: Wild Maggie,” New-York Daily Tribune, February 13, 1854; “Rev. Mr. Pease and his Traducers,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 1, 2, 3 (1854), 15-16. 232 Robinson, Hot Corn, 75-90. 231 “Life at the Five Points: Wild Maggie,” New-York Daily Tribune, October 12, 1853; Solon Robinson, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1854), 50-75; “Wild Maggie,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 4 (1854), 60. 230 Anbinder, Five Points, 310-311. 52 amongst the children of the Five Points.236 This characterization of the subjects of reform in narratives worked to both elicit the sympathies of readers as well as display the selectivity of the Reformers in their distribution of aid. These organizations were explicitly opposed to “indiscriminate charity” and almshouses, deriding them as producing a plague of pauperism and a waste of monetary resources.237 Targeted aid was more easily utilized by reformers as a means of social control, providing subjects of reform an incentive to adopt and obey the moral principles of the missionary institutions which controlled the distribution of clothing, food, and pecuniary support they were reliant upon. The House of Industry proclaimed that limiting the aid to only those who displayed the proper attitude and commitment to reforming would allow for the maintenance of the whole of the city's poor with half the money given annually to almshouses.238 This focus on the relative value of charity highlights the centrality of the interests of the social elite, who were not so concerned with the improvement of the conditions of their subjects as they were with their moral character and the preservation of their own position within the social order. As a result of sensationalist depictions of the Five Points, the neighborhood’s residents gained a reputation as being of a particularly immoral character, embodying the societal threat the upper and middle classes feared. The successes that reformers proclaimed themselves to have had within their narratives exemplified to their supporters the viability of their model of reform and aid. The conception of immorality upon which these arguments are based is largely contiguous with that upheld by the popular media mythology from newspapers and magazines around the Five Points. Immorality was considered a social contagion, which contributed to the 238 “What is Done for the Poor,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 4 (1854), 49-50. 237 “Indiscriminate Charity,” Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 37, no. 7 (1893), 99. 236 “Life at the Five Points: Wild Maggie,” New-York Daily Tribune; “Hot Corn; Or, Life in the City,” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, August 19, 1853; “Love at First Sight,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 1, 2 & 3 (1854), 45-46; A. E. P., “A Change of Scene,” Five Points Monthly Record 1, no. 4 (1854), 57-58.. 53 impoverishment of the neighborhood. Any persons who indulged in vice were degraded socially and economically and eventually drawn into poverty, worsening conditions of the neighborhood.239 Culpability for the conditions was consequently not attributed to the landowners to whom the appeals were addressed, but upon the poor who in the eyes of the upper class failed to adhere to the values necessary for them to thrive and live their lives in an orderly fashion.240 The treatment for the social ills of the Five Points, thus, was not a comprehensive and nuanced scientific treatment of the issues favored by twentieth-century progressives, but a program of moral suasion aimed at the implementation of a moral lifestyle. In changing the residents’ behaviors to conform to the values of the work ethic and temperance valued by the upper and middle class Protestant citizens of the city, it was seen that the denizens would thus be integrated into the moral population. The unspoken alternative was that these residents would perish or relocate out of the city, thus purifying New York society. In this rhetoric the Five Points functioned as a symbolic heart of New York’s social problems, and the removal of immoral residents would thus positively affect the character of the entire city. 240 “Letter to the Editors of the Evening Post,” New-York Evening Post, August 24 1829; “Letter to the Editors of the Evening Post,” New-York Evening Post, October 15, 1829. 239 “Letter to the Editors of the Evening Post,” New-York Evening Post, August 21, 1829. 54 Conclusion The rhetorical application of the Five Points as representation of the societal problems of New York emerged from the reputation it had garnered over the nineteenth century for disorder, vice, and violence, all of which was blamed on the moral failings of the neighborhood's residents. Throughout the century the Five Points was amongst the most infamous locales in New York. Nineteenth-century popular media portrayed the Five Points as the city's most terrible slum, whose poor conditions at its nadir would be the point of reference for the city's press and literary circles for decades afterwards. Authors of this narrative characterized the Five Points as a neighborhood of dilapidated, overcrowded tenements; dark, claustrophobic alleyways; filth, and a noxious atmosphere. The residents of the district were presented as the worst of the city's criminals, drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes and their clients, and other undesirables. These depictions, together with sensationalist stories of vice and crime, created a popular mythology of the Five Points as a manifestation of the woes of urban life in New York for the city’s elite. These accounts represent the perspective and values of the primarily Protestant upper and middle classes of New York who dominated the production of this literature, either as authors themselves, or as editors of the newspapers. This media catered to the middle and upper classes, and represented a top down distribution of moral standards from the upper and middle classes who controlled the city’s media down to the underclasses. These writers depicted the conditions of the Five Points as being rooted in the immoral conduct of its denizens, and these failures were perceived as threats to the dominant social order. All of the problems associated with vice and crime, including prostitution, gambling, alcohol consumption, and even the squalid conditions of the neighborhood itself, were considered connected to the moral failings of its residents, and the misery and disorder 55 associated with these problems was considered a threat to the social order of New York. Whereas the threat posed by theft, criminal violence, and rioting was readily apparent, those of the vice industry were more abstract. Prostitution was an infringement on the virtues of the middle and upper class and their conception of proper families, while gambling represented a waste of resources. Alcohol consumption was condemned both for its reputation for inciting violent and disorderly conduct, breaking up families and inciting abuse, and the perception that it compromised the productivity of the workforce and inspired idleness, another sin projected upon the Five Points in media depictions. The physical conditions of the Five Points were themselves seen as connected to the moral corruption of the residents. The middle and upper classes worried of the frightful possibility that the conditions of the overcrowded, filthy and disease-ridden tenements of the Five Points would not be contained to the neighborhood, and would spill out into the rest of the city alongside the criminal elements that were associated with it. The nineteenth-century media’s portrayal of the Five Points was an amalgamation of elements in urban society deemed immoral by the middle and upper class and their writers and editors who produced the media images of the neighborhood as they were seen as threatening their social order. Through attribution of the problems present in the Five Points to the moral character of its residents, the solutions to such issues were reduced to the residents personal improvement, rather than complex and costly systemic changes that might negatively impact the upper classes. Reform in the nineteenth century was thus directed towards a campaign of moral suasion and the correction of vices that threatened the social order. Reformers prescribed a regime of sobriety and adherence to religious principles, and preached of the redemptive power of labour. These Reformers idolized the conception of the Protestant way of life, and sought to demonstrate 56 through their work how adherence to the ideals of temperance, faith, and a strong work ethic were determinate of a person's quality of life. This perspective differentiates the reformers from the later progressives of the early twentieth century. Unlike the progressives who followed them, the nineteenth-century reformers maintained that the issues of society were threats to or corruptions of the social systems that ought to be preserved, whereas progressives saw those same systems as broken and unjust, and causative of the problems they and the reformers perceived in society. The work of Jacob Riis, in many ways, heralded this shift, with his photographic exposé demanding a more sympathetic and systematic response to the city’s poor then previous literary accounts could. Progressives’ narratives increasingly turned away from anecdotes of individuals' experiences to the grand narratives told by statistical data. With the coming of the progressive movement, the systemic nature of poverty could no longer be ignored, and conditions could not be blamed upon their sufferers given how apparent the problems had become. Progressives, unlike the earlier reformers, saw the denizens of the Five Points as victims of society, and called for institutional oversight of the conduct of the upper class over the working class, the expansion of governmental responsibility to ameliorate such societal conditions, and the protection and expansion of citizens’ rights. The villains of the progressives’ narrative of poverty were not the poor, but the ones responsible for the perpetuation of poverty: ward bosses, slumlords, and the political bureaucracy.241 This march for progress would only find popular acceptance within New York society with the beginning of the twentieth century, however; the popular view in the nineteenth century was characterized by the reformers efforts to incite moral repentance amongst the sinful poor. 241 Paul M. Kaplan, New York in the Progressive Era: Social Reformers and Cultural Upheaval, 1890-1920 (Charleston: History Press, 2021), 45-49. 57 The reformers offered solutions to the issues of society seen by the Protestant middle and upper classes that legitimized the social hierarchy, and did not challenge the comfortable narratives they constructed about their society. When sensationalist media in the early decades of the nineteenth century began to construct the mythology of the Five Points, the Protestant elites built a narrative of the neighborhood and its residents as responsible for the conglomeration of all the ills they saw in their society. Reformers legitimized those narratives. The reform movement demanded that the residents of the Five Points repent for their sin, and worked to bring the residents up to reformers’ moral standards, reassuring their audience that correction of the immoral behaviors of the poor would resolve the danger they were seen to pose to the upper and middle classes. The mythology of the Five Points perpetuated by nineteenth-century popular media and validated by reformers justified the project of moral suasion as a means of defusing the threats to the dominant social order in New York society, rooting problems to morality and placing the onus for their repair upon personal repentance. 58 Bibliography: Primary Sources: Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927. https://archive.org/details/gangsofnewyorkin0000herb. Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor. Sixteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. New York: AIPC, 1859. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100854194. Barnard, William F.. Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry. New York: Five Points House of Industry, 1893. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008420734. Bobo, W.M.. Glimpses of New York City by a South Carolinian with Nothing Better to Do. Charleston: J.J. McCarter, 1852. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009568862. Booth, Ballington. New York’s Inferno: Scenes of Pathos Powerfully Portrayed - Siberian Desolation Caused by Vice and Drink - Tenements Packed with Misery and Crime. New York: Salvation Army, 1891. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100322329. Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years Work Among Them. New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872. https://archive.org/details/dangerousclasses00bracuoft. Bremer, Frederika. The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America in Two Volumes. Vol. 1. Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853. https://archive.org/details/homesofnewworldi011853brem. Browne, Junius Henri. The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869. https://archive.org/details/greatmetropolism00brow. Child, Lydia Maria. Letters from New York. London: Richard Bentley, 1843. link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0112406785/SABN?u=ubcolumbia&sid=bookmark-SABN&xid=ca111f9c. Collyer, Robert Hanham, Lights and Shadows of American Life. Boston: Redding & Co., 1844. link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0102940758/SABN?u=ubcolumbia&sid=bookmark-SABN&xid=e5fc8b4e. Crockett, David. An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, in the Year of Our Lord one Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-Four. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009585819. Dana, Richard Henry, Jr.. The Journal of Richard Henry Dana Jr.. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1968. https://archive.org/details/journal0001dana. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. Vol. 1. London: Chapman & Hall, 1842. https://archive.org/details/cihm_61628. 59 Duer, William Alexander. New York as it Was, During the Latter Part of the Last Century. New York: Stanford and Swords, 1849. https://archive.org/details/newyorkasitwasd00duergoog. Edwards, Justin. “On the Traffic in Ardent Spirit.” in Select Temperance Tracts, edited by Justin Edwards (New York: American Tract Society, 1860), 1-32. https://archive.org/details/selecttemperance01amer. Fairclough, H. Rushton. transl. (1916) Virgil: Georgics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Finney, Charles G.. Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney. New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1876. https://archive.org/details/memoirsofrevchar1876finn. Foster, George G.. New York by Gaslight: Here and There a Streak of Sunshine. New YOrk: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006784572. Foster, George G.. New York in Slices by an Experienced Carver: Being the Original Slices Published in the N.Y. Tribune. New York: W.F. Burgess, 1848. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001873889. Green, Asa. A Glance at New York: Embracing the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers Rogues, Dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquids, &c. &c.. New York: A. Greene, 1837. https://www.loc.gov/item/01014361/. Griscom, John H.. The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Populations of New York with Suggestions for its Improvements. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/63140820R. Halliday, Samuel Byram. Lost and Found, or, Life Among the Poor. New York: Blakeman and Mason, 1859. link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0100583370/SABN?u=ubcolumbia&sid=bookmark-SABN&xid=4dee9630. Harrison, John F.. Map of the City of New-York Extending Northward to Fiftieth St. Map, Scale not Given. New York: M. Dripps, 1852. From Library of Congress, Cities and Towns. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.ct004055. Headley, J. T.. The Great Riots of New York, 1712 to 1873. Including a Full and Complete Account of the Four Days’ Draft Riot of 1863. New York: E.B. Treat, 1873. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/101745438. Kaplan, Paul M.. New York in the Progressive Era: Social Reformers and Cultural Upheaval, 1890-1920. Charleston: History Press, 2021. Kernan, Frank J.. Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies and Volunteer Fire Departments of New York and Brooklyn. New York: M. Crane, 1885. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100561825. Ladies of the Mission. The Old Brewery, and the New Mission House at the Five Points. New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1854. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/0076489. Mather, John C., Smith Ely Jr., Richard Schell, John Doherty, and Benjamin Brandreth. Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department of the City of New York. Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1859. https://archive.org/details/63020340R.nlm.nih.gov. 60 McCabe, James Dabney. Light and Shadows of New York Life: Or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City. A Work Descriptive of the City of New York in All its Various Phases. Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872. https://archive.org/details/lightsshadowsofn00mccauoft/lightsshadowsofn00mccauoft. McDowall, John Roberts. Memoir and Select Remains of the Late Rev. John R. M’Dowall, The Martyr of the Seventh Commandment, in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Leavitt, Lord, & Co., 1838. https://archive.org/details/memoirselectrema00mcdo. New York Magdalen Society. Magdalen Report: First Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the N. Y. Magdalen Society. New York: New York Magdalen Society, 1831. https://archive.org/details/ldpd_6629272_000. Reed, John M., A. J. H. Duganne, Eli Curtis, WM. J. Shea, and Samuel Brevoort. Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Examine Into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New York and Brooklyn 1857. Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1857. https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101208328-bk. Remsen, Henry R., Charles Ely, George Bird, Edward G. Bradbury, Archibald Russell Thomas S. Eells, Charles B. Tatham, William W. Cornell, and George G. Waters. Incorporation of the Five Points House of Industry: Articles of Incorporation, By-Laws and Addresses of the Trustees and Superintendent. New York: Five Points House of Industry, 1854. https://archive.org/details/incorporationoff00five. Riis, Jacob A.. How the Other Half Lives: a Study Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890. https://archive.org/details/howotherhalfliv00riisgoog. Riis, Jacob A.. The Battle with the Slum. New York: MacMillan Company, 1902. https://archive.org/details/battlewithslum00riisiala. Robinson, Solon. Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated. New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1854. https://archive.org/details/hotcornlifescen01robigoog. Ross, Joel H.. What I Saw in New York: or, A Bird’s Eye View of City Life. Auburn: Derby & Miller, 1851. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008618174. Shea, John Gilmary. The CCatholic Churches of New York City, with Sketches of their History and Lives of the Present Pastors. New York: L.G. Goulding, 1878. https://archive.org/details/catholicchurches00shea. Smith, Matthew Hale. Sunshine and Shadow in New York City. Hartford: J.B. Burr & Company, 1869. https://archive.org/details/sunshineshadowin00smit. Smith Rosenberg, Carroll. Religion and the Rise of the American City: the New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. https://archive.org/details/religionriseofam00smit. Stryker, Peter. Lower Depths of the Great AMerican Metropolis: A Discourse. New York: Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., 1866. https://archive.org/details/lowerdepthsofgre00stry. Talmage, Thomas DeWitt. The Masque Torn Off. Chicago: J. Fairbanks & co., 1879. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001603546. 61 Taylor, Bayard. “A Descent Into the Depths,” The Nation 2. no. 36 (1866): 302-304. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=h9m&AN=57441672&site=ehost-live&scope=site&custid=s5672194. Van Every, Edward. Sins of New York as “Exposed” by the Police Gazette. New York: F.A. Stokes Co., 1930. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/aev7458.0002.001. Wallys, Philip. About New York: An Account of What a Boy Saw in His Visit to the City. New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857. link.gale.com/apps/doc/CSRCSK281838434/NCCO?u=byuprovo&sid=bookmark-NCCO&xid=b36cdca6. Willis, Nathaniel Parker. Prose Works of N.P. Willis. Philadelphia: Henry C. Baird, 1855. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011541882. Newspapers & Periodicals: Anti-Masonic Telegraph. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=at. Christian Advocate and Journal. From EBSCOhost. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=h9k&jid=6ELT&site=ehost-live&custid=s5672194. Columbia Washingtonian. From NYS Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=tcw. Dansville Herald. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=dh. Delaware Gazette. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=dg. Elmira Gazette. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ega. Evening Post. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=evpo. Five Points Monthly Record. From the Internet Archive, Seymour B. Durst Old York Library. https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Five+Points+House+of+Industry%22. Franklin Visitor. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=fv. Independent. From EBSCOhost. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=h9j&jid=6ISX&site=ehost-live&custid=s5672194. 62 Ithaca Journal & General Advertiser. From NYS Historic Newspaper. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ijg. Kinderhook Herald. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=kh. Long-Island Farmer and Queens County Advertiser. From NYS Historic Newspaper. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=lifqc. Monroe Republican. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=mr. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry. From the New York Public Library. Call no. *ZAN-8814. National Philanthropist and Investigator. From EBSCOhost. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=h9i&jid=6F5I&site=ehost-live&custid=s5672194. New-York Evening Post. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=nep. New-York Daily Times. From Proquest. https://www.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/publication/publications_11558. New-York Daily Tribune. From Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/. New York Herald. From Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/. New-York Organ: A Family Companion. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=h9j&jid=8ADG&site=ehost-live&custid=s5672194. New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=nst. New-York Spy and Dramatic Repository. From EBSCOhost. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=h9i&jid=6LTE&site=ehost-live&custid=s5672194. New-York Tribune. From Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/. Northern New York Journal. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=nnyj. Oneida Telegraph. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ont. Ontario Repository. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=onrb. 63 Republican Watchman. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=rew. Rochester Observer. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ro. Rochester Republican. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=rore. Rockland County Messenger. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=rcm. Schenectady Reflector. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=sr. Spirit of the Times. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=sotm. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=tbd. The Brooklyn Eagle, and Kings County Democrat. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=bde. The Cobleskill Index. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=cob. The Corrector. From NYS Historic Newspaper. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=cor. The Evening Gazette. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=teg. The Evening World. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=tew. The Freeman’s Journal. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=frja. The Geneva Gazette, and Mercantile Advertiser. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ggm. The Long Island Farmer. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=lif. The New-Yorker. From Proquest. https://www.proquest.com/publication/publications_35465. The New York Times. From Proquest. https://www.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/publication/publications_55428. The New York Reformer. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=tny. The Niagara Democrat and Lockport Balance. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=niadl. The North River Times. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=nrt. The Otsego Republican. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=otr. 64 The Painted Post Times. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ppt. The Plaindealer. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=tp. The Schenectady Cabinet: or, Freedom’s Sentinel. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=scfs. The Sun. From the New York Public Library. Call no. *ZY (Sun (New York, N.Y. : 1833)). The Troy Weekly Times. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ttw. The Utica Observer. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=tuo. Tri-States Union. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=tsu. Utica Daily Observer. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=udo. Voice from the Old Brewery: The Organ of the Five Points Mission. From the New York Public Library. Call no. ZKXD++. Yates County Chronicle. From NYS Historic Newspapers. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=ycc. Secondary Sources: Adams, Peter. The Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2005. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=uHzDEAAAQBAJ&pli. Akenson, Donald. “The Irish in North America: Catholic or Protestant?,” The Irish Review (Cork), no. 11 (1991/1992): 17-22.https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/29735610. Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: the 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: The Free Press, 2001. Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. https://archive.org/details/manhattanforrent0000blac. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=mObQCwAAQBAJ. Fitts, Robert. “The Rhetoric of Reform: The Five Points Mission and the Cult of Domesticity,” Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001): 115-132. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25616943. 65 Gilfoyle, Timothy J.. City of Eros: New York City Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex 1790-1920. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. https://archive.org/details/cityoferosnewyor0000gilf_d5o5. Homberg, Eric. Scenes from the LIfe of a City: Corruption and COnscience in Old New York. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. https://archive.org/details/scenesfromlifeof0000homb. Iorizzo Luciano. Al Capone: A Biography. Westport: Greenwood, 2003. https://doi.org/10.5040/9798400608889. Killick, John.“Transatlantic Steerage Fares, British and Irish Migration, and Return Migration, 1815-60,” The Economic History Review 67, no. 1 (2014): 170-191. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/42921701. Martin, Scott C.. “‘The Prime Minister of the Grisly King of Terrors, Death’: Alcohol in the Nineteenth-Century Reform Imagination.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 3, no. 156 (2018): 44-55. https://shs.cairn.info/journal-revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2018-3. Milne, Claudia. “On the Ground of the Fresh Water Pond: The Free Black Community at Five Points.” Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002): 127-142. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20852995. Mushkat, Jerome. Fernando Wood: A Political Biography. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1990. https://archive.org/details/fernandowoodpoli0000mush. O’Brien, M. J.. “Irish Colonist in New York,” Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association 7, (1907): 94-123. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/42889876. Pernicone, Carol Groneman. The “Bloody Ould Sixth:” A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Rochester: University of Rochester 1973. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/bloody-ould-sixth-social-analysis-new-york-city/docview/302733370/se-2. Remini, Robert. Andrew Jackson and the Bank War: A Study in the Growth of Presidential Power. New York: Norton, 1967. https://archive.org/details/andrewjacksonban00remi. Rush, Benjamin. An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind, with an Account of the Means of Preventing, and of the Remedies for Curing Them. Exeter: Josiah Richardson, Preacher of the Gospel, 1819. https://archive.org/details/2569031R.nlm.nih.gov. White, Shane. Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. https://muse-jhu-edu.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/book/13971/. Winter, Marian Hannah. “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” in Chronicles of the American Dance from Shakers to Martha Graham, edited by Paul Magriel (New York: De Capo Press, [1848] 1978), 39-63. https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofamer0000magr. Yamin, Rebecca, ed.. Tales of the Five Points: Working Class Life in Nineteenth Century New York. Vol. 1, A Narrative History and Archeology of Block 160. New York: US General Services Administration, 2000. https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/arch_reports/462.pdf. Yamin, Rebecca, and Joseph Schuldenrein. “Landscape Archaeology in Lower Manhattan: The Collect Pond as an Evolving Cultural Landmark in Early New York City.” in Envisioning Landscape: Situations and 66 Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage, edited by Dan Hicks, Laura McAtackney, and Graham Fairclough (New York: Routledge, 2016), 75-100. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315429533.
Graduating Project
eng
Unreviewed
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Undergraduate
University of British Columbia. HIST_O 499
The Five Points : Moral Perceptions of Poverty in Nineteenth Century New York
Text