The Infamous Five Points District in Lower Manhattan

As Italian immigrants arrived in the United States circa 1850s, (before Italy was officially a nation-state) one of the first neighborhoods that many settled in was a notorious ghetto called the Five Points.  The Five Points located in Lower Manhattan (New York City) was well known for its debauchery and squalor conditions.

 

The district, also known as the Sixth Ward, was called the Five Points because it was the intersection of streets which formed five corners.  These streets included: Little Water, (no longer exists) Anthony (now Worth Street), Cross (now Mosco Street), Orange (now Baxter Street), and Mulberry, the latter street still exists under its original name. The impoverished area was the antithesis to the American dream of abound opportunities and riches. 

 

Even before the Italian arrival, the district was where drunks, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves and murderers congregated and lived.  Police reports in the mid-nineteenth century indicated the neighborhood experienced “a murder a night.” For immigrants, America meant an immediate escape from the downtrodden experiences of their homeland.  Yet the Five Points neighborhood was turning the American dream into a complete nightmare.

 

Charles Dickens after visiting the slum in 1842 remarked in his book American Notes, “Let us go on again, and … plunge into the Five Points….We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day, but of other kinds of strollers plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now.” 

 

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, cities were expanding rapidly. This meant more and more immigrants sought work and needed a place to live.  Since there was a steady influx of immigrants arriving, most cities were unable to meet the demands of adequate living conditions.  During this time period, landlords from the Five Points rented their single family dwellings to immigrants and made the structures into multi-family homes, to maximize their profits. In some cases, these landlords (actually slumlords) increased the rents, forcing the new arrivals to have everyone in the family work, including children.

 

As more immigrants arrived, landlords tried creative ways to put families inside cramped spaces. When the space ran out, the building owners built wooden sheds on top of roofs or attached the new structures to wherever there was room.  At the time, these slumlords escaped heavy fines and imprisonment because building codes did not exist.  Even when legislation was finally passed in 1879, tenant rights were rarely enforced. The immigrants were now experiencing “the American way” rather than dream.

 

For the first time in American history the urban landscape was changing dramatically, as bridges, factories, banks and tenement buildings to house the new arrivals were being built. While the immigrant population in the Five Points increased by the tenfold, the living conditions became despicable and appalling.  One of the worst health crises in New York City surfaced almost immediately, as immigrant families were packed into small apartments without proper ventilation, leading many to endure inhumane hardships.

 

According to a New York Times article (published July 28, 1872) titled The Five Points and its Sick Poor—Suffering and Distress, “An Italian family was found early this morning, consisting of mother and three children, two of them sick, one with cholera infantum. They are destitute in the extreme.” The Italians were the last immigrant group in the 19th century to arrive in the Five Points locale.  The Irish, Germans and African Americans were already settled and living in the infamous neighborhood before the Italians arrived; and they equally suffered from the lack of urban planning that plagued the area.

 

The same article reported, “in another house in Baxter Street, where 286 persons are literally packed was found a widow with a family of six children, two of whom suffer from sickness. The mother pays $8.00 dollars a month for the room in which they try to eke out an existence.” One of the worst cases of contemptible living conditions was the Mulberry Bend. This was a street that curved to the right and had several tenement buildings on both sides. On one side of the block some of the highest cases of cholera in the city were reported.

 

The Mulberry Bend was made famous by the photojournalist and muckraker Jacob A. Riis, who documented the desolate living conditions of the Five Points. His photos put a face to these horrendous living conditions, resulting in new building laws. Eventually, the row of tenement houses along the Mulberry Bend were all demolished to prevent further diseases from spreading.

 

In addition, Jacob A. Riis also argued as more and more families moved into an urban setting, children had no recreational space to play.  The city, therefore, decided to build a park in place of the row of tenement houses that were torn down.  The park had several names before it was changed to its present name Columbus Park, to satisfy the Italian community. 

 

As Italian immigrants settled in the Five Points, there was little room for other Italian families.  Hence, in the 1880s up until the 1940s, Italians started moving north of the Five Points district, in what is now Little Italy and Greenwich Village. Originally, Little Italy was quite big until Chinese immigrants started moving in the mid 1960s. Nowadays, Little Italy is very tiny (three blocks long) but as one strolls Columbus Park and the tenement buildings built around the 1900s, the Five Points district has also been replaced by Court buildings and a detention center.

 

Ironically, the Five Points neighborhood before the 1830s was the wealthiest neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, where English aristocratic families and merchants lived before and after the American Revolution.  However, even then poor urban planning had a major impact on the area.  Apparently, a nearby pond known as Collect Pond was being contaminated by human and animal feces.  The stench became so pungent, that wealthy families decided to move away from the smell and disease ridden water, gradually transforming the area into a slum. 

 

Today, the Five Points neighborhood made popular by Martin Scorsese’s (who lived not far from the location) 2002 film Gangs of New York, is actually a combination of its past glory where wealth and poverty interact with blind justice. For instance, the Five Points (although not known as this anymore) is still dirty, smelly with alleged sweatshops and brothels; and an occasional gang fight on one side, mixed in with high rise hotels and Wall Street residents on the other. Even though some of the architectural styles and the cultural backgrounds of the inhabitants have changed, the century’s old legacy of the Five Points remains untouched.