Let us “plunge into the Five Points,” wrote Charles Dickens in American Notes, after his disagreeable 1842 trip to New York, when he toured New York’s shocking and notorious slum.
“This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere of dirt and filth. . . . Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotting beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays.”
New Yorkers at the time wouldn’t take issue with Dickens’ description. But more than a century after Five Points was wiped off the map thanks to late Gilded Age progressive ideals that fostered slum clearance and new development, where exactly was it?
The corner of Baxter and Worth Streets south of Columbus Park in Chinatown is the best modern-day approximation.
Five points formed roughly a five-point intersection at the juncture of four streets (see above 1853 map): Anthony, Orange, Cross, and Little Water Street to the north. Now, Anthony is Worth Street, Orange is Baxter Street, and Cross is Mosco Street—cut off from the others when the park was built in 1897. (Little Water was obliterated altogether.)
New York often succeeds at burying the remains of its past. Standing at the corner of Worth and Baxter, beside the bustling park and contemporary courthouse complexes, it’s hard to imagine what Five Points was like in its heyday: the rum shops and rookeries, the stifling tenements, dancers like Master Juba tapping and stepping in makeshift dance halls, the pigs roaming the streets serving as garbage collectors.
The top photo reveals what Baxter and Worth Streets looked like in 1827, when George Catlin painted this image of Five Points.
Here’s what Five Points looks like today in a very different New York City.
How did Five Points become so awful? Find out more in The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910, on sale now.
[Top photo: George Catlin painting, 1827; second photo: 1853 map from William Perris’ Atlas of New York City]
Tags: 5 Points, Columbus park Chinatown, Famous Slums, Five Points slum, Gangs of New York real life, How Bad Was Five Points, New York in the 19th Century, New York Slums
Ephemeral New York 
October 3, 2016 at 10:27 pm |
Would this be considered the very first gentrification of NYC? After the clean up I wonder if anybody longed for the good old days before the Gilded Age progressive ideals were enacted. Like they do now when a developer cleans the neighborhood of drugs, prostitution, muggers, homeless, sex shops and defecating in the streets and doorways.
October 4, 2016 at 6:09 pm |
The only physical thing remaining of the Five Points intersection is the one street corner, on the west corner of Worth and Baxter, seen in the contemporary photograph on the left.
October 5, 2016 at 2:24 pm |
In Manhattan, Five Points was cool. But if you didn’t realize it, Brooklyn’s Irishtown had a strict code of silence, and that’s why you don’t know about it:
https://artofneed.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/brooklyns-irishtown/
January 5, 2017 at 8:12 am |
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