Slum lore

Source: The Village Voice

Date: Jan 2, 1996

Document ID: SL19980508030027783

Subject(s): Neighborhoods;

Cities; Archaeology

Citation Information: ISSN: 0042-6180;

Vol. 41 No. 1; p. 34

Author(s): J A Lobbia

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[The Village Voice]

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Slum lore

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Here we are, surrounded by the "utterly profligate refuse of humanity,

...miserable looking buildings, ...squalid-looking women, brutal men with

black eyes and disfigured faces This is a square of leprous houses,"

populated by "cramped hutches full of sleeping negroes," not to mention

fecund Irish women and beautiful but hook nosed Jews.. The overall effect?

"A sight to make the blood slowly congeal and the heart to grow fear and

cease its beating....Hell itself."

More precisely, we are in Five Points, the notorious downtown neighborhood

that sprouted just northeast of City Hall in the 1800s. Though it was

leveled a century ago, Five Points's reputation has survived--flourished, in

fact--to become a fixture in the city's mythology, a stand-in for slums the

way that Tammany has become shorthand for corruption. The words of

19th-century authors, like those quoted above, have been handed down

virtually intact to modern-day writers of city almanacs and histories. Five

Points is our ancestral slum.

Five Points's reputation has even made its way into popular fiction. In

Caleb Carr's The Alienist, for instance, it is portrayed as a place of

ceaseless deprivation, where chronically drunk, abusive immigrants drive

their young sons into prostitution--left to be lured, tortured, and

slaughtered by a serial killer. Hell itself, to be sure.

Or maybe not. That, at least, is the hypothesis of a team of 14

scientists--historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists--studying an

unprecedented body of evidence: more than 850,000 artifacts recently

excavated from a swath of Five Points. And, by evaluating those artifacts

along with insurance maps, census data, and city directories from the 1850s,

they are sketching an unprecedented portrait of Five Points, One that its

chroniclers would find unrecognizable. As the scientists reconstruct pottery

from shards and pore over records, they are coming to believe that Five

Points was anything but a depraved quarter populated exclusively by perps

and victims; instead, they say, it was a vibrant community and the

birthplace of urban working-class life.

"We're trying to get beyond the prejudices that have distorted previous

accounts," says Dr. Rebecca Yamin, chief archaeologist for the project. "We

recognize that the physical and sanitary conditions were extreme, but people

were struggling to live respectable lives."

Yamin and her team, who work in the sub-basement of a lesser World Trade

Center building, are employees of John Milner Associates, a

Philadelphia-based archaeology and architecture firm. JMA was hired by the

U.S. General Services Administration to analyze the artifacts, which were

excavated in late 1991 and 1992 after a block bounded by Pearl and Worth

streets and Park Row was selected as the site of a new courthouse. Federal

and city laws require excavation at construction sites known to have

historic value.

In fact, the Five Points dig was largely overshadowed by the early 1991

discovery of the African Burial Ground just up the street at Duane and

Broadway, where a federal office building was going up. Controversy pushed

that project onto the front page, with battles erupting over who would

excavate and interpret the hundreds of graves, which revealed so much about

the life of New York's early black communities. At Five Points, scientists

are interested in comparing artifacts to the avalanche of century-old

"interpretation from missionaries, reformers, and scribes, who usually

examined Five Points with a less distorted to vindicate their many causes.

By and large, those intruders believed in a simple equation: Poverty equals

immorality, and those living in slums must be rescued, or damned. The slum

and its occupants must be destroyed to be saved.

Many of the Five Points artifacts are important not so much for the

harrowing stories they evoke, but for the normal, day-to-day life they

reflect. In a larger sense, they challenge not only the myth of Five Points,

but how we think about the neighborhoods we call slums today. In movies and

books, politics and news reports, outsiders alternately romanticize or

demonize slums, using them as iconic backdrops for any number of morality

plays. But as the Five Points dig suggests, slums are much more deeply

complicated than most outsiders fathom. They are crucibles for what is best

and worst about city life: Rife with exploitation and inequity, these

neighborhoods are also cradles of diversity and cultures that enrich a city

in subtle ways that most of us rarely notice.

It's an exaggeration to expect that a basement full of trash dug up from

cisterns and privies can fully unveil what a century of municipal mythmaking

has obscured. But even the most unsurprising finds--like dozens of packages

of straight pins and buttons in a neighborhood of tailors--undermine the

legend that Five Points residents got by solely on crime and their wiles.

More fundamentally, the Five Points artifacts beg the question: How are

slums used, by those who live in them, and those who leer at them?

To the unending parade of people who came to gawk, Five Points was a world

of mother-daughter prostitution teams, unspeakably filthy Irish, and members

of "Ethiopian tribes" who, police learned, were better tamed by a club to

their tender shins than to their padded, wooly heads. Charles Dickens--who

refused to enter the district with fewer than two policemen--suggested in

his 1842 American Notes for General Circulation that the local yard pigs

must have wondered why their masters didn't grunt and walk on all fours.

While it's true that Five Points never was much of a pious place, it did

begin on a once-rustic spot near the 46-acre Collect Pond, at what is today

the site of the criminal courts building. In postrevolutionary New York, the

Collect's shores were home to some of the country's wealthiest families,

including the Lorillards, who were tobacconists, and the Beekmans, who were

bankers. But at the end of the 18th century, tanneries and slaughterhouses

crowded the pond's shores, and by 1803, it was so polluted, the city's

Common Council ordered that it be landfilled. Ten years later, it was paved

over, with Centre Street running up its middle. Even so, the site remained

low and marshy, and buildings that were erected over the former pond began

to sink and stink. The elite fled.

But not entirely. They remained as landlords, subdividing their erstwhile

mansions and commercial buildings for rent to the growing population of

immigrants, freed slaves, and native-born workers who were moving into the

area, making Five Points residents perhaps the city's first tenants given

the time-honored privilege of lining the pockets of the rich. Five Points

was first in another way: By 1810, 25 per cent of the Sixth Ward (which

included the area that would eventually be called Five Points) was listed in

the federal census as black or "alien"--the highest concentration citywide.

New York's first multiculti community was born.

It wasn't until 1817, when the city extended Anthony Street (now Worth) east

from Centre, that the five-point intersection that came to mark the

neighborhood emerged. Landowners eventually tore down their subdivided

mansions and replaced them with even more densely populated tenements. Even

factories were converted into close, damp apartments. Shops and

manufacturing crammed back lots, but it was the first-floor groceries

(liquor stores) that became the neighborhood's trademark. Within a decade,

Five Points was synonymous with unseemly behavior.

In 1828, a city board complained that the Points had become a "rendezvous

for thieves and prostitutes In 1829, when some nearby property owners

demanded that a duster of "ruinous" buildings in the Points be razed and

replaced with a jail, the Common Council gave New Yorkers an early--and

still pertinent--civics lesson: The legislators wanted to keep the buildings

because their liquor-store tenants produced "great rent....What has been

considered as the Nuisance has in reality increased the Value of the

property."

By the 1840s, most Five Points blacks had been driven out by

nativist-inspired race riots, though famous "black and tan" bars and dance

halls flourished. At midcentury, Five Points was a haven for European

immigrants. In 1855--the period from which most of the artifacts come--the

Sixth Ward remained the most heavily alien: 75 per cent of its residents

were foreign born.

All of New York City, in fact, was undergoing convulsive growth, mostly

among immigrants. To a city that has spent much of its life struggling with

the question of otherness--foreign-born versus native-born residents,

minorities versus the majority, dominant culture versus subcultures--Five

Points quickly became New York's first and most obvious locus of outsiders.

Class distinctions grew, too. The best-paying jobs--butchering, printing,

and the skilled crafts--generally went to native-born and unionized workers.

Immigrants were more tenuously employed in jobs likely to be whisked away by

a rough winter or one of the chronic depressions of the mid 1800s. Income

disparity was becoming pronounced: Between 1843 and 1856, the annual average

per capita income in the city's three richest wards rose $300; in the

poorest, only $41. One observer warned that New York "no longer

has

a middling class."

In short, the city was becoming a complicated place, and to New York's

monied and native-born residents, this exploding, foreign-born proletariat

was its most menacing feature. Five Points was simultaneously the worst

example of its ruin and the best vehicle for decoding it.

As such, the neighborhood drew crusaders of all sorts. The Ladies' Home

Mission, a Protestant group that established its headquarters in Five Points

in 1851, blamed Catholicism and its presumed attendant drunkenness for the

ruination of the poor; hard work and conversion would be their salvation.

Civic reformer John Griscom decried the unsanitary conditions in tenements

as part of his campaign for a city health police force. New York Tribune

reporter George Foster was particularly fixated on prostitution, especially

among children. He undoubtedly sold many papers with his rants against a

dazzling array of moral turpitude.

The newsman wasn't alone in his mercenary motives. Samuel Halliday, a

missionary from the Five Points House of Industry, visited every apartment

on three key Points streets in 1860 and concluded in the mission's monthly

report: "To me it is a matter of surprise that in the majority of these

families there is so much that is decent and, even respectable, for a very

large proportion of these families, though poor, are virtuous and

comparatively cleanly. Some of them are models of neatness." In 1861,

pushing his book The Little Street Sweeper; or Life Among the Poor, Halliday

recast Five Points as a "sink of pollution....Great good has been done by

the House of Industry

, but the population about the whole neighborhood still is as bad as it can

well be."

New York in the 1850s had no shortage of slums. Due east from Five Points

was Cherry Street, which had degenerated from being the city's fanciest

colonial address to a waterfront dive. Just north from that was Corlear's

Hook, whose reputation for crowding, brawling, and prostitution could rival

that of Five Points. So why did the Points become the city's pet slum? Like

so many things in New York, one factdor was crucial: location.

Although its population was one of outsiders, Five Points was geographically

inside, sandwiched in between the popular Bowery beer gardens and elite

Broadway theaters, and sitting just atop City Hall and Wall Street. This was

the slum New Yorkers couldn't avoid. Its proximity to Park Row newspapers,

too, made it the slum editors couldn't resist, sending reporters to lurk

about its menacing and exotic quarters. With 14 competing dailies in 1850

and the penny-press war going full force, tabloid journalism spent much of

its infancy telling lurid tales of city life.

Before long, Five Points's reputation as dangerous was itself a draw.

Uptowners might "dare" themselves to tour the neighborhood, the way a bunch

of frat boys might cruise through the South Bronx or Harlem today. And

people simply looking for more raucous entertainment than their own

neighborhoods offered might end up in Five Points. It became the Times

Square of its day, a legend in its own time. By the 1850s, for instance,

lore counted a murder a night in the Old Brewery, a building that in 1837

had been converted by a wealthy family to a "rabbit warren" of apartments,

rented primarily by Irish and Italian immigrants. Storytellers apparently

disregarded facts that counted an average of only 29 murders citywide in

those years.

Five Points was not just a prototype of urban ills; it was also a laboratory

for schemes to solve them. Some reformers proposed ridding the city of the

poor by shipping them to the West; one state agency suggested that the poor

be put to work moving a woodpile from one end of an almshouse yard to

another--without pay. The state's goal was simple: "All able-bodied poor

must work whether profitable labor is available or not." Modern strategies,

like workfare or "planned shrinkage"--which aims to rid cities of their poor

by making urban life unlivable--sound not so vaguely reminiscent of early

civic "improvement" campaigns.

Underscoring these grand plans was a fundamental belief that the poor were

to blame For their condition. Ignored were some stark facts of evolving

urban life, namely, that many of these problems were social, not individual.

Personal corruption did not account for poverty; depressions, low wages,

seasonal layoffs, and outlandish rents did. Epidemics of cholera did nor

erupt because the souls of Five Points tenants were lacking; they erupted

because city sanitation was inadequate.

Coupled with these civic shortcomings were the demands of a growing urban

capitalism. By 1860, New York was the nation's top manufacturer, and its

industrialists required an easily exploited labor pool, particularly one

that could counter the growing demands of nativist trade unions. The

underclass had become as necessary as it was despised.

A city unable to cope with explosive growth; a burgeoning industrial sector

that needed abundant, cheap labor; and the seeds of a predatory real estate

market that continues to shape New York today: All these ingredients helped

create the slum at Five Points. An urban template had been made.

Anyone who knows the "history" of Five Points would expect an archaeological

dig to yield little but corpses, weapons, and liquor bottles. Instead,

Yamin's team began reconstructing several imported English tea sets and

condiment jars, matched dinnerware and serving pieces, and decorative

glassware. It's no wonder they were thrown off.

"When we first began to evaluate these things we thought, 'Are we in the

right place? Is this Five Points?" The doubt stemmed in part from the

inexactitude of Five Points's borders the name applied not only to the

intersection, but to the whole neighborhood. But it was also due to the

belief that Five Points was a community with little to leave behind--a

belief the artifacts challenged. "Clearly, this is the working class, not

the down-and-out," Yamin says. "This does not look like an impoverished

culture."

Primary documents, in particular a detailed 1855 state census, and annual

city directories that list residents by address and occupation, helped put

the artifacts in context and ultimately allowed Yamin's team to consider a

different kind of Five Points than what legend held. The pairing sometimes

confirmed past accounts of the neighborhood but, more often, cast doubts.

According to the state census, for example, Five Points was an

overwhelmingly Irish community whose residents had been here for five years

or less. Germans were also making tremendous inroads. The rest of the

population included American-born natives, blacks, "mulattoes," Italians,

Poles, and a smattering of Prussians, East and West Indians. The number of

men and women was roughly equal, and the average age was 23, undoubtedly

contributing to the area's energy. None of this disputes either contemporary

writings about Five Points or the artifacts themselves; in fact, among them

are Chinese spoons, seals with Hebrew inscriptions, pipes with Gaelic and

German inscriptions, a Spanish coin, and cowrie shells, which are usually

associated with Africans.

More at odds with images of Five Points inhabitants as thieves and beggars

is information about work life. Census records and the directories show that

most Five Points residents worked on the docks or in local factories making

carriages, umbrellas, looking glasses, shoes, segar boxes, and furniture, or

in the fast-developing ready-made clothing industry. The average monthly

wage for men was $38; women and children made much less and were even more

precariously employed. Quantities of buttons, needles, and an array of

fabrics are among the artifacts that suggest the prevalence of tailors and

home piece workers.

As for personal health and cleanliness--attributes that were supposedly

lacking in Five Points--there are medicine bottles, syringes used for

hygiene, hair combs, and toothbrushes, including one with a one handle

inscribed "Extra Fine Paris France."

Not all the artifacts contradict popular accounts of the neighborhood.

Nearly 1000 day pipes were found, fitting the profile of a working-class

neighborhood at a time when pipe smoking was so common, cartoonists used a

clenched cigar stump or pipe as an idiom for working-class immigrants. The

pipes reveal much about their owners' loyalties. Many are inscribed with

Irish nationalist symbols, some supporting, others against, home rule. While

most are day penny pipes, there are a few fancy finds, including one with a

bowl carved into a jester's head. American Eagles--a symbol of

patriotism--are common, but could mean an attempt at assimilation as well as

a wry use of a resented icon.

"Somewhere in every culture, there's a place where politics, work life, and

ethnicity meet," says Paul Reckner, who is interpreting the collection for

Yamin's team. "A lot of the time in Five Points, that's in the pipes--the

Shamrocks and harps, the home-rule slogans, the eagles. It's a question of

how you want to identify yourself in your new home."

But perhaps the best evidence to refute Five Points's reputation as totally

destitute is the abundance of artifacts and documents that suggest people

had some disposable income. City directories and maps show that hundreds of

stores and groceries lined the streets and nearby Chatham Square, at the

foot of the Bowery. Ready-made-clothes stores proliferated along the Bowery,

secondhand shops on Baxter, and cheap furniture outlets and jewelry shops

throughout the neighborhood. In fact, even the Tribune's Foster couldn't

help but enthuse about Crown's, a central Five Points store teeming with

fresh vegetables, kindling wood, and molasses. From its rafters hung hams,

sausages, and strings of onions; in one corner were "smoking hot" three-cent

pies of apple, pumpkin, or mince.

Besides buying goods, Five Pointers spent money at the beer halls, theaters,

and dime museums that rounded out a social life that centered on ethnic

societies, volunteer fire companies, and the political clubs--particularly

Tammany--that they fed.

And they obviously ate well, almost certainly much better than they had in

their native homes. The dig uncovered an abundance of professionally

butchered beef and lamb bones, suggesting that Five Pointers could afford to

eat meat regularly--a find that is backed up by many letters from immigrants

who wrote home boasting about having meat three times a day (including one

1852 letter from an Irish-born box maker bragging that he wears "as good a

suit of clothes as any Gentleman in the City of Cork, and twenty dollars'

worth of a watch in my pocket"). And the bones of a New World Cebus monkey?

"We looked in the city directories for the time," says Yamin, "and found a

dozen organ grinders living on Baxter Street."

Yamin considers a tea cup imprinted with the image of Father Mathew to be

the artifact that best disputes the Five Points stereotype. Father Mathew

founded the temperance movement in Ireland in 1838 and later traveled to New

York to spread the word.

But the cup also raises a problem at the very heart of archaeological

interpretation: The presence of an artifact doesn't necessarily reveal how

or why it was used. The Father Mathew cup could've been the cherished

belonging of an Irish teetotaler, or a whiskey cup for someone making a

little joke. Hypothesizing is at the heart of science, and results more

often in possibilities than firm conclusions. It's the possibilities that

intrigue Yamin and her staff.

In fact, in a brief paper, Yamin and assistant archaeologist Claudia Milne

use a single artifact--an English tea set--to pose an intentionally unlikely

prospect. Citing a Foster passage in which he declares that "it is not

unusual there for a mother and her two or three daughters--all of course

prostitutes--to receive their 'men' at the same time in the same room,"

Yamin and Milne suggest this scene: ":We must, therefore, imagine the

thieves and prostitutes serving tea to their visitors on Staffordshire with

the image of Lafayette contemplating Franklin's Tomb."

Five Points began to come to an end in 1894, when reformer Jacob Riis

convinced the city to undertake one of its first slum clearance programs.

The project was intended to eradicate "the Bend"--a crook in lower Mulberry

Street that was home to throngs of Southern Italians and literally around

the corner from the Five Points. In 1897, the city replaced the packed

tenements with Mulberry Bend Park, "reforming" thousands of immigrants out

their homes. In 1911, the name was changed to Columbus Park in their honor.

In 1919 the heart of Five Paints was demolished when the New York Country

Courthouse (now the state supreme court) was built on Worth and Baxter

streets (previously the site of the Ladies' Home Mission and, before that,

the Old Brewery). In 1928, Governor Al Smith laid the cornerstone for the

New York State Office Building across Worth. With the criminal courts on the

site of Collect Pond, and a new federal courthouse atop the Five Points

excavation, a neighborhood that came to stand for lawlessness has been

replaced by institutions of order. In the end, the ideology of reformers and

ministers prevailed. They had "healed" poverty by eradicating a

neighborhood.

But even a century later, Five Points continues to hold its allure. There

are occasional Sunday-afternoon walking tours, brisk sales of Luc Sante's

Low Life, lurid descriptions in city guidebooks, and a nearby plaque on the

New York City Heritage Trail commemorating Five Points as once the "most

dangerous" part of the city.

Surrounding Columbus Park are some tenements that survived Riis (who is

himself part of the city's mythology, with his unwavering insistence on

reforming how the other half lived overshadowing the fact that the Dane was

no small bigot who didn't seem to much like the people he purported to

help). Now, the neighborhood is part of Chinatown, a community whose

"otherness" is perhaps more impenetrable than any other in the city. Every

morning, elderly Asians come to the park to practice tai chi or mind their

infant grandchildren, whose parents are away, presumably at work, many in

sweatshops doing the same jobs that once occupied Five Points residents.

The cycle is ironic: Scientists study excavated trash trying to decipher one

culture at the same time that another, very similar one thrives in the same

space. As the work on Five Points proceeds, it's hard not to ask what

primitive notions continue to shape our ideas about poor people and their

communities.

Indeed, the lessons of Five Points are not merely historical. When Newt

Gingrich calls for the comeback of a sense of public shame for teenage

mothers, or when Rudy Griuliani devises policies intended to drive out the

city's underclass, they are taking aim at people who live in modern versions

of Five Points, from Mott Haven to Red-Stuy. Here once again is the

intractable instinct to see the underclass in caricature rather than in

complexity. The politics of today's right have not advanced over the

rhetoric of the 19th century.

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