Though long ago bulldozed away and remade, the rough-and-tumble lower Manhattan district called Five Points was once considered to be so representative of New York that foreign journalists traveled there to gather horrifying stories for their readers. Wrote a Swedish reporter, "lower than to the Five Points it is not possible for human nature to sink." In his wide-ranging reconstruction of Five Points's few square blocks, historian Tyler Anbinder shows that that journalist was not far off the mark. "Dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of its residents lived in windowless, teeming apartments that were unfit for habitation," he writes. Alcoholism, violence, and prostitution were commonplace. Poverty was epidemic, and living conditions were so intolerable that the reforming sociologist Jacob Riis used the area as a case study for the wretched excesses of urban life. A corrupt city government kept the police at bay, making the neighborhood safe for a succession of crime lords but woefully dangerous for residents--most of whom, in time, would be newcomers from Ireland, Italy, Russia, and other faraway lands, as well as African Americans newly arrived from the South. "Locked into the lowest-paying occupations," as Anbinder writes, they labored, saved, and eventually moved on, making room for the next wave of immigrants.
Five Points is gone, though a few of its streets remain, marking the edge of Chinatown. Anbinder's careful study brings it back to life. --Gregory McNamee
From Library Journal
In the 19th century, the Five Points district in lower Manhattan was New York City's most noxious slum, teeming with wretchedly poor Irish, German, Italian, and Chinese immigrants and African Americans who lived in densely packed rookeries sandwiched among dance halls, gambling joints, saloons, and brothels. Yet it was also humming with vibrant street life, popular theaters, and political clubhouses. Now largely forgotten, Five Points attracted many "slumming parties" and visiting celebrities such as Charles Dickens and even Abraham Lincoln. Anbinder (history, George Washington Univ.) has written a comprehensive narrative of this once blighted area. He argues that earlier accounts were superficial and biased, and he aims to set the record straight. To Anbinder, Five Points embodied the immigrant saga of enduring great hardship on the way to a better life. Recommended for public libraries with large urban history collections and academic libraries. Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A haven for hellions and harlots during the 1800s, New York's Five Points area, now the heart of Chinatown, had a notorious reputation. In researching the history of this microcosm, Anbinder faced a paradox: there is an abundance of journalistic material about Five Points, much of it sensationalistic, and a paucity of primary records about the lives of the neighborhood's almost wholly immigrant population--first Irish, then Italians and Chinese. But his in-depth research has resulted in a narrative that never stagnates, in part due to Anbinder's prefixing of each chapter with a story of an individual's experience in the milieu of depravity, crime, and opportunity that characterized Five Points. One way up from the streets was politics, a pugilistic variety from which issued many riots, rigged elections, and colorfully corrupt characters whom Anbinder profiles. A marvelously tactile work that radiates how this legendary immigrant neighborhood pulsed with schemes, dreams, and despair. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
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"
About the Author
Tyler Anbinder is a professor of history at George Washington University. His first book, Nativism and Slavery, was also a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Arlington, VA.
Joe Barrett, an actor and Audie Award and Earphones Award-winning narrator, has appeared both on and off Broadway as well as in hundreds of radio and television commercials.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Five Points
