Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood

The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented. All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. Yet it was also a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters and dance halls, prizefighters and machine politicians, and meeting halls for the political clubs that would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich. Tyler Anbinder offers the first-ever history of this now forgotten neighborhood, drawing on a wealth of research among letters and diaries, newspapers and bank records, police reports and archaeological digs. Beginning with the Irish potato-famine influx in the 1840s, and ending with the rise of Chinatown in the early twentieth century, he weaves unforgettable individual stories into a tapestry of tenements, work crews, leisure pursuits both licit and otherwise, and riots and political brawls that never seemed to let up. Although the intimate stories that fill Anbinder's narrative are heart-wrenching, they are perhaps not so shocking as they first appear. Almost all of us trace our roots to once humble stock. Five Points is, in short, a microcosm of America.

Review :
."..spares no gritty detail in this recreation of this immigrants' hell on earth... -- ""The Washington Post Book World"" "[A] fascinating book..."Five Points" provides absorbing material for anyone interested in our collective past or who loves a good human interest story." --"Sun Sentinel" "A careful, intelligent, and sympathetic history." --"The New York Times Book Review" "New York City is the capital of the world right now, and much of its greatness traces back to certain very old neighborhoods, which trace back to an even older neighborhood, whose name, nearly forgotten today, was Five Points. Here is the history of that neighborhood." -Paul Berman, author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968". "One upon a time, the Five Points was New York's most infamous neighborhood, singled out by generations of reformers and journalists as a hive of nightmarish squalor, violence, disease and crime. But as Tyler Anbinder shows in this compelling challenge to the conventional wisdom, the Five Points slum--bad as it was--was never quote so bad as outsiders wanted it to be. A first-rate history, meticulously researched and populated by an amazing cast of characters." --Edwin G. Burrows, coauthor of "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898", winner of the Pulitzer Prize "A colorful and useful look at a neighborhood which captures the melting pot at its best and worst." --"Irish America" "Fascinating...a lively history." --"New York Newsday" "Five Points has been brought back to life by Tyler Anbinder." --"The New York Observer" "The author has performed a prodigious...feat of research, leaving no original or secondary source untouched...a solid work of scholarship that deserves a permanent place in any top shelf of urban history." --"The Washington Times" "Tyler Anbinder has so thoroughly re-created Five Points that the stench of life there all but rises from the page." --"New York Daily News"