The Five Points
Even more vital as a circumscribed symbol of all the new urban dangers was New York's most notorious nineteenth-century pros-
15 and 16.
Two Views of the Five Points. These two nineteenth-century prints
of the notorious Five Points illustrate the variety of characters said to congregate
in this neighborhood, an area known for both licentiousness and poverty.
(Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, New York City)
titution area, the Five Points, a small commercial vice district in the sixth ward. Located on the site of a former swamp, the neighborhood became known throughout the United States and Europe as America's "most famous slum." To New Yorkers, it also was the symbol of all that was degenerate, debauched, and sinful in the city. The Five Points, which was formed by and got its name from the intersection of five streets, did not exist until the second decade of the century, when the Collect Pond was landfilled, and streets and structures were built over the site.[37] Attracting vice activities of all types, the Points was one of the first places to which prostitutes moved after dispersing beyond the dock areas.
Contemporaries who wrote about the Five Points could find little that was redeeming about the neighborhood. "Mere words can convey but a faint idea of the Five Points," maintained one mid-century writer, though his and others' descriptions seem to give a pretty good indication of the depth of their feelings: "sink of iniquity," "plague spot," "nest of vipers," "hell of horrors," "that infected district," "the great central ulcer of wretchedness," and "the very rotting Skeleton of Civilization, [from] whence emanates an inexhaustible pestilence that spreads its poisonous influence through every vein and artery of the whole social system."[38] Respectable New Yorkers clearly enjoyed believing that the Five Points was the receptacle housing all of the city's human garbage.
At the crossroads of the Five Points was a one-acre triangular plaza with the euphemistic title of Paradise Square. Emanating out from this park, the streets of the Five Points were lined with gambling dens, lottery offices, liquor stores, pawnbrokers, second-hand dealers, and all of the institutional forms of prostitution: brothels, cheap lodging houses, saloons, dance halls, and theaters. The concentration of this type of business establishment in the area prompted one contemporary to say that "nearly every house ... is a groggery below and a brothel above"— a comment that had some truth in it, since during the decade of the 1830s almost two-thirds of the forty-three blocks surrounding the Five Points housed prostitutes on at least one occasion.[39]
Structures at the Five Points had been crowded into every conceivable open space along the quarter's streets and alleyways, and about one-third of them were constructed of wood and were very ramshackle. Inside the buildings, prostitute and non-prostitute poor residents were crammed into every nook and cranny, giving the Five Points at mid-century the highest density of population in the city, twice as great as in the rest of the sixth ward. Because of the establishments' appearance and activities,
many of the Five Points' buildings were given sinister names by which they became well known to contemporary New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors such as Charles Dickens. Cut-Throat Alley, Squeeze Gut Alley, Bagler's Alley, Cow Bay, Diving Bell, Swimming Bath, and Arcade were some of the "hotbeds of debauchery, wretchedness, and poverty" along Orange, Anthony, Little Water, and Cross streets.[40] Philip Hone described the establishments on Orange Street as "abodes of filth, destitution, and intemperance, . . . where water was never used internally or externally, and the pigs were contaminated by the contact of the children." Using his swine analogy more than once in reference to Orange Street, Hone also said that the street's inhabitants suffered "from personal neglect and [were] poisoned by eating garbage which a well-bred hog on a Westchester farm would turn up his snout at."[41]
The descriptions of respectable contemporaries illustrate not only their objections to the immoral and vice-ridden Five Points residents but also their disdain for other large population groups that were housed in the community: the poor, blacks, and immigrants. Given the biases against these groups, it is often difficult to distinguish between situations that indicated blatant depravity and those that were indicative of extreme destitution, unfamiliar customs, and racially integrated social activities. Articles in the Sun in May 1834 illustrate this descriptive confusion. Writing about the Points during several days of May and June, an editor of the Sun noted it was a "resort of vagrants, vagabonds, and crime," "of indecency, squalid poverty, and intemperance," where people "riot and revel in continued orgies, and sober humanity is shocked and horrified. People are constantly attacked and robbed."[42] This initial appraisal was followed by a visit to the Five Points and a first-hand account of what was seen. According to the journalist, those who live in and near the Five Points "endure literally, a hell of horrors, arising from their poverty and wickedness, such as few others on earth can suffer." Houses known as the locations of prostitution activities were said to be divided and subdivided into numerous small and comfortless apartments, "the inmates sleeping or lying on heaps of filthy rags, straw, and shavings, the stench from which was almost insupportable . . . white women, and black and yellow men, and black and yellow women with white men, all in a state of gross intoxication, and exhibiting indecencies, revolting to virtue and humanity."[43] Prostitution at the Five Points was promiscuous, unrefined, and interfacial, and it thus offended respectable citizens. Sixth ward vagrancy/prostitution arrests at mid-century, which
were almost totally of immigrants and blacks, also indicate that officials saw little distinction between public immorality and the poor, the immigrant, and the black. Offering an interesting counterpoint to these descriptions is Carol Groneman-Pernicorn's analysis of the 1855 census, which reveals that the resident population of the Five Points was not primarily young, unattached individuals as one might suspect; rather, the area's residents were actually slightly older than in the rest of the city and more likely to be married.[44]
Although the Five Points retained its reputation as a "haunt of vice, debauchery, and misery" for the remainder of the century, by the Civil War many citizens became more aware of the fact that the area's population was most distinguished by its poverty. After 1850, groups such as the Ladies Home Mission Society moved into the Five Points and bought property formerly housing disreputable establishments. Offering job training and wages as well as redemption, they worked to change the Five Points. The northward movement of commercial development also helped alter the area.[45] Whatever the reasons for change, by 1860 many residents no longer viewed the neighborhood as the city's center of sin. After conducting a house-by-house survey of the major streets of the vicinity in 1860, Samuel B. Halliday, a Five Points House of Industry missionary, noted that the Five Points no longer fit its stereotype. Strangers, he said, often assume the district is simply a collection of brothels, but his firsthand observations led him to conclude that "the number of abandoned women is very much smaller than those familiar with the region have supposed."[46] Less than a decade later, James McCabe described the Five Points as "the realm of Poverty. Here want and suffering, and vice hold their courts. . .. Yet, bad as it is, it was worse a few years ago. There was not more suffering, it is true, but crime was more frequent here."[47]