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Tenements and Slums T iPOVERTV "All That Is Loaths< Life in the Five Points Slum Lizabeth Peak details the rise and fall of the Five Points in lower Manhattan OF ALL THE 19th-cen- become polluted by tury slums of New the effluent waste __ York City, the worst _____ by far was the Sixth neries, slaughter- Ward, commonly houses and breweries known as the Five that had sprung up Points. It was a near it. In 1802, in wretched place where response to a rapidly tens of thousands of rising population, it destitute immigrants, was recommended packed into crum- that the contaminated ned conflict — bling, vermin-infested Collect be drained tenements, existed in and filled. The project d New York, abject poverty, disease, was completed in ' titution went crime, political corrup- 1811, streets were laid T 1789, North tion and gang warfare. down through the Island The filthy streets were area and it was lew "more lined with saloons, opened for settlement. gambling houses, Photo courtesy of Alan BatL The neighborhood n Carolina The interior of a tenement apartment as preserved in the tionin dance halls and dens Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. that developed there :rsed its deci- of prostitution. was poor, but 39. Rhode • Even Charles Dickens, inti- The Origin of the Five Points respectable. Many of its residents not to send mately familiar with the horrors of The Five Points was named in the were tradesmen and craftsmen .titutional the London slums, wrote in his 1830s for the five points created who operated out of their homes. approve the American Notes of 1842 about the by the intersections of Cross (now It was a relatively peaceful place '' \d by Five Points: Park Row), Anthony (now Worth), to live until about 1820, when sev- i. We have seen no beggars in the Orange (now Baxter), Little Water eral factors led to its decline. The iftei the Con- streets by night or day; but of other (no longer exists) and Mulberry growth of factories forced out • supreme law kinds of strollers, plenty. Poverty, Streets. In colonial times, this area many of the family-centered busi- ig Union wretchedness, and vice, are rife of lower Manhattan was mostly nesses. The apprentice system dis- sident no enough where we are going now. swampland, with a large pond appeared, leaving children and rmed conflict This is the place: these narrow known as the Collect. At the time, young adults idle and free to the fact that ways... reeking everywhere with the Collect and its surroundings roam the streets unsupervised. lot univer- dirt and filth.... Debauchery has were a favorite spot for fisherman Working families were replaced rica (with the made the very houses prematurely and picnickers. Unfortunately, by by impoverished Irish and Ger- opposing it old. See how the rotten beams are the late 1700s, the water had man immigrants who couldn't :es in sup- tumbling down, and how the afford to live anywhere else. naged to patched and broken windows Unscrupulous landlords soon f nationalism. seem to scowl dimly, like eyes realized that they could profit :he expan- that have been hurt in drunken by building an addition on to the subse- frays.... Where dogs would howl their already ramshackle he persistent to lie, women, and men, and wooden buildings and by he ongoing boys slink off to sleep, forcing packing more families into agrarian the dislodged rats to move away smaller quarters. rial North led in quest of better lodgings. Here Also at this time, the land- /ar that too are lanes and alleys, paved fill on which the area had .e United with mud knee-deep, under- been built began-to decay, ground chambers, where they causing many of the buildings dance and game... ruined to sink and fall apart. Base- houses, open to the street... ments frequently flooded, out- hideous tenements which take, door privies overflowed and their name from robbery and Photo courtesy of Lower East Side Tenement Museun the streets ran with human murder: all that is loathsome, The kitchen of a tenement apartment as preserved and animal excrement and drooping, and decayed is here. in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. industrial waste. Unfit for liv- History Magazine • October/November 2006 41 POVERTY ing quarters, many basements and makers, blacksmiths, weavers, A Five Points tenement was a passage1 lower floors housed saloons or tanners, etc. Virulent bigotry and miserable place to live. Poorly Murders brothels; these became breeding mistrust, however, meant that built, vermin-infested firetraps, almost c grounds for criminals of every there were no jobs for them when they were filthy, dark and airless, that tr— sort. Respiratory diseases, poor they got to America. By 1855, freezing in winter and sweltering mure nutrition and epidemics of cholera there were nearly 10,000 Irish in in summer. The Society for the notorioi and typhus led to one of the high- the Five Points, languishing in Improvement of the Condition of as Cow est death rates in the country, par- tenements with names like the the Poor stated upon the housing of a sm£ ticularly among children. Filth, Old Brewery, Jacob's Ladder, the that they were ".. .crazy old build- where f; . disease, vice and violent crime Gates of Hell and Brick-Bat Man- ings — crowded rear tenements in water. I] soon forced out the remaining -.— sion. -—- -.— —— filthy yards; dark,-damp base- -- Points, i respectable families, and by 1850, ments; leaky garrets, shops, out- cul-de-s the Five Points had become one of Tenement Life and the "Cellar houses, and stables converted to Water S the most dismal places in Amer- Dwellers" dwellings, though scarcely fit to of the d ica. When the decrepit and decaying shelter brutes — are the habita- alley lir houses of the Sixth Ward filled to tions of thousands of fellow citi- I of the C "No Irish Need Apply" capacity with immigrants, money- zens of this wealthy city." 1 conned "All Europe is coming across the hungry slumlords created a new The typical tenement con- sages - ocean... and what shall we do kind of building — the "tenant sisted of a front and a rear build- thieves with them?" wrote ing with a square court between ever w; future New York them — a "double decker". The "If you mayor and diarist front rooms of the front building wrote t Philip Hone in 1836. were the most desirable, as they 1 of an 11 "They increase our received the most light and air. Corn, " 1 chief w taxes, eat our bread Less desirable were the back 1 and encumber our you cai streets, and not one in stench, twenty is competent to we see keep himself." By 1841, T; and di] almost 100,000 Irish •i: rum-dt Catholics had poured beings. The above floor plan is from >' into New York, spark- Jacob Riis'How the Other Half ing vicious anti- Lives, published in 1890. The 1 "Dens Catholic and anti-Irish caption reads in part: "Here are Inlr bigotry and resentment twelve living-rooms and ] Trib, among native-born twenty-one bedrooms, and on the workers. Both black only six of the latter have any | death" and white men feared provision or possibility for the I ments the loss of their jobs to admission of light and air, Built c excepting through the family grouni the Irish, who, if they sitting- and living-room; being could get hired, would utterly dark, close, and unven- often t work for lower wages. tilated. The living-rooms are stand "If I had the power," but 10 x 12 feet, the bedrooms i compl wrote one man anony- 6% x 7 feet." L stands for light, ; ventilc mously, "I would erect D for dark and H for hallways. i: cellar a gallows at every Right; the Barracks. j one w landing place... and be ope suspend every cursed Irishman as house" or tenement. Multi-family rooms of either building, and rear o: soon as he steps on our shores." dwellings had existed in New worst of all were the underground at all. Then, in the summer of 1845, York for some time, but they had cellars. often • came a crisis of catastrophic pro- been originally built for some At the heart of the Five Points •i the w; portions — the Irish Potato other purpose. The first building was the Old Brewery. Originally j throu; Famine. Over the next five years, constructed specifically as a tene- built in 1792 as Coulter's Brewery, 1 ing w thousands of starving Irish fami- ment went up in the early 1830s. on the old Collect, its name excrei lies fled across the Atlantic, with Large, flimsy, multi-storied changed when it became too rific. i as many as 700 men, women and wooden structures, they were decrepit for use as a business and is not children crammed into the cargo designed to house as many people became a dwelling. An alley on its count hold of a "coffin ship". Most had as the landlord could cram in. At north side led to a room known as aheac been tenant farmers in Ireland its peak, the Old Brewery held the Den of Thieves, in which some — oft and had no skills to offer in a city. more than 1,000 people; another, 75 men, women and children s. Many others had occupational known as The Barracks, at one lived; most of the women were kept] skills — cabinet makers, shoe time housed over 1,100 souls. prostitutes. The other side of the attrac 42 History Magazine • October/November 2006 nnent was a passageway earned the name Some cellars housed dens of pros- highly susceptible to disease and e.
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