Five Points
Page 8
In 1850, Lansdowne hired a new estate agent, William Steuart Trench, in hopes that he might better administer relief to his suffering tenants. Trench, an experienced estate manager who probably knew about Palmerston’s emigration program, made precisely the same recommendation to Lansdowne that Kincaid had made to the foreign secretary almost three years earlier:
I showed him by the poor-house returns, that the number of paupers off his estate and receiving relief in the workhouse amounted to about three thousand. . . . [I]f left in the workhouse, the smallest amount they could possibly cost would be £5 per head per annum, and thus . . . the poor rates must necessarily amount, for some years to come, to £15,000 per annum, unless these people died or left—and the latter was not probable. . . . I explained to him further, that . . . inasmuch as the poor rates were a charge prior to the rent, it would be impossible for his lordship to expect any rent whatever out of his estate for many years to come. The remedy I proposed was as follows. That he should forthwith offer free emigration to every man, woman, and child now in the poor-house and chargeable to his estate. . . . That even supposing they all accepted this offer, the total, together with a small sum per head for outfit and a few shillings on landing, would not exceed from £13,000 to £14,000, a sum less than it would cost to support them in the workhouse for a single year. . . . I plainly proved that it would be cheaper to him, and better for them, to pay for their emigration at once, than to continue to support them at home.
Lansdowne must have been predisposed to accept Trench’s reasoning, writing him a check on the spot for £8,000 (roughly $650,000 today) to be used to initiate the project. By the end of 1851, Lansdowne had spent £9,500 (perhaps $760,000 today) on emigration.49
Trench later recalled that when he returned to the estate and announced the emigration offer, “it was considered by the paupers to be too good news to be true. But when it began to be believed and appreciated . . . they rushed from the country like a panic-stricken throng, each only fearing that the funds at my disposal might fail before he and his family could get their passage.” Each week, Trench wrote in his memoirs, he chose from the poorhouse population two hundred “of those apparently most suited for emigration; and having arranged their slender outfit,” put them in the hands of an employee, who led them on the sixty-mile journey to Cork. Some sailed from there directly to America. But most traveled first to Liverpool or London before boarding a trans-Atlantic vessel. Even the hardened Cork seamen who took the Lansdowne immigrants on board their ships were stunned by their condition. “They had seen human misery in every form,” reported the Cork Examiner, but “anything like the spectacle presented by the emigrants in question, they never before beheld.” Nonetheless, “two hundred after two hundred, week after week, departed for Cork,” wrote Trench, “until the poor-house was nearly emptied of paupers chargeable to the Lansdowne estate.” About three thousand destitute Lansdowne tenants—more than a quarter of the estate’s population—took the free passage to America. The emigration program more than fulfilled Trench’s predictions. The Kenmare workhouse, which in 1850 had housed twenty-five hundred Tuosist and Bonane paupers chargeable to the Lansdowne estate, by 1853 contained only fourteen inhabitants from those parishes.50
At first Trench allowed the emigrants to select their destination. Nearly all chose New York. Estate records indicate that seventeen hundred Lansdowne tenants left Kenmare for New York from December 1850 through March 1851. From that point, perhaps in an effort to save money, Trench no longer offered a choice, instead requiring them to sail to Qúebec. By the end of 1851, another thirteen hundred had departed for that port, though many of them soon joined their friends and relatives in Five Points.51
Lansdowne’s tenants continued to suffer during their journeys across the Atlantic. Estate records show that of the 1,700 emigrants sent to New York in 1851, Trench supplied clothing to at most 226, even though none would have owned a wardrobe suitable for a North Atlantic crossing in the dead of winter in an unheated ship. In addition, 1,350 of the 1,700 New York–bound immigrants were not provided with food for the passage. They were, in the words of one Irish journal, “obliged to subsist on the ship’s allowance—an allowance which is scarcely sufficient to keep a full grown person from starvation. God help them!” Each of Palmerston’s assisted emigrants, in contrast, had received each week, in addition to the meager ship’s allowance, six pounds of biscuit, three and a half pounds of flour, one pound of pork or beef, one pound of sugar, one pound of rice, eight ounces of treacle, four ounces of coffee, and two ounces of tea. To the charge that he had not properly supplied the emigrants, Trench publicly denied any wrongdoing, but privately admitted that “this is to a certain extent true, but it would have cost thousands more to do it otherwise.”52
Consequently, even jaded New Yorkers found the sight of the Lansdowne immigrants appalling. The New York Tribune singled them out for comment in a short story on March 19, 1851, noting that the Lansdowne immigrants “who arrived in this city a few days ago by the ship Montezuma [Ellen Holland’s vessel], from Liverpool, were found Monday afternoon in the streets, in a starving condition.” A few days after the Tribune story appeared, the Sir Robert Peel arrived in New York Harbor from London. The Lansdowne emigrants disembarking from that ship presented such a spectacle of wretchedness that it prompted an entire editorial in the Herald:
IRISH EMIGRANTS.—It is really lamentable to see the vast number of unfortunate creatures that are almost daily cast on our shores, penniless and without physical energy to earn a day’s living. Yesterday, groups of these hapless beings were to be seen congregated about the [City Hall] Park and in Broadway, looking the very picture of despair, misery, disease and want. On enquiry, we ascertained that they had arrived here by the ship Sir Robert Peel, and that they had been, for the most part, tenants of the Marquis of Lansdowne, on his county Kerry estate—ejected without mercy by him, and “shipped” for America in this wholesale way. Among them were gray haired and aged men and women, who had spent the heyday of their life as tillers of their native soil, and are now sent to this country to find a grave. This is too bad—it is inhuman; and yet it is an act of indiscriminate and wholesale expatriation committed by the “liberal” President of the Council of her Majesty Queen Victoria’s “liberal” ministry.53
Many of the Lansdowne immigrants were apparently so weakened by their voyage that they died soon after their arrival. In 1868, an anonymous critic in the Dublin Review charged that “in one of the principal hospitals of the city of New York there is a ward which is called the Lansdowne Ward; and the reason why it bears this name is that for months and months together [after they first arrived in New York], it was crowded by the emigrants from the Lansdowne estate, who left it commonly in their coffins.” The author was probably the well-known journalist John Francis Maguire, who had recently returned from the United States researching his book The Irish in America. The Lansdowne family called the Dublin Review’s charge a partisan fabrication, but others wrote to Irish newspapers to verify it. Whether or not the “Lansdowne Ward” ever existed is impossible to confirm though deaths were undoubtedly common among these immigrants. It certainly seems plausible that patients or doctors could have bestowed such a nickname on a New York hospital ward, especially one in New York Hospital, which was located just two blocks west of the neighborhood where most of the Lansdowne immigrants settled.54
By the time the potato blight struck Ireland, Five Points was known throughout the English-speaking world as a veritable hellhole. Yet the Irish who settled there during the famine years had seen far worse, going months and sometimes years without work and watching friends and family starve before their eyes. The Irish did not come to Five Points expecting streets paved with gold. They simply wanted work—work that would enable them both to feed their families and to put a little something away so that someday, their children could have a better life.
3
PROLOGUE
“THE WICKEDEST HOUSE ON THE
WICKEDEST STREET THAT EVER EXISTED”
IF FIVE POINTS as a whole was infamous for its depravity, one of its buildings in particular became ground zero for wretchedness. Here is the story of the “Old Brewery,” the most repulsive building of its day, a vast dark cave, a black hole into which every urban nightmare and unspeakable fear could be projected.
In the Old Brewery, Americans believed, lived the worst of Five Points’ population—its most hardened criminals and destitute paupers. “No language can exaggerate its filth or the degradation of its inmates,” insisted Five Points’ Methodist missionaries. “Here is vice at its lowest ebb,” agreed the National Police Gazette, “a crawling and fetid vice, a vice of rags and filth.” Solon Robinson, a reporter for the more respectable Tribune, concurred with the scandal sheet’s assessment, stating that “every room was a brothel or a den of thieves, or both combined.” In short, concluded the Police Gazette, the Old Brewery was “the wickedest house on the wickedest street that ever existed in New York, yes, and in all the country and possibly all the world.”1
As its name suggests, the Old Brewery had once produced beer, one of the many manufactories established in the eighteenth century by the shores of the Collect Pond to make use of its supply of fresh, pure water. Owned by the Coulthardt family, the brewery continued to brew beer until about 1837, when it was converted into a tenement. As part of the conversion process, the high-ceilinged floor that held the brew vats was divided in two, leaving four stories in all. Few residential buildings in antebellum New York were even half the size of the Old Brewery. Because the structure was so wide (it covered both 59 and 61 Cross Street) and so deep (it stretched back from the street at least one hundred feet on its irregular lot), it was filled with windowless apartments and pitch black, labyrinthine hallways. As a result, only the poorest Five Pointers seeking the cheapest rents took apartments there, creating a tenement so repulsive that it quickly became the most infamous in New York, “famed in song and story.”2
The supposed depravities of the Old Brewery have taken on mythic proportions. In the 1920s, Herbert Asbury, a usually careful if somewhat overly dramatic chronicler of old New York, depicted the building as a Sodom reborn:
Throughout the building the most frightful living conditions prevailed. Miscegenation was an accepted fact, incest was not uncommon, and there was much sexual promiscuity; the house swarmed with thieves, pickpockets, beggars, harlots, and degenerates of every type. Fights were of almost constant occurrence, and there was scarcely an hour of the day or night when drunken orgies were not in progress; through the flimsy, clapboarded walls could be heard the crashing thud of brickbat or iron bar, the shrieks of the unhappy victims, the wailing of starving children, and the frenzied cries of men and women, and sometimes boys and girls, writhing in the anguish of delirium tremens. Murders were frequent; it has been estimated that for almost fifteen years the Old Brewery averaged a murder a night.
When demolition crews eventually tore down the Old Brewery, insisted Asbury, the wreckers “carried out several sacks filled with human bones which they had found between the walls and in the cellars, and night after night gangsters thronged the ruin searching for treasure which rumor had it was buried there.” A contemporary maintained that “the old brewer of all the world’s misery, the Evil One himself, has dominion there at this day.”3
Could the Old Brewery really have been this bad? The tenement certainly was crowded and most of its apartments were filthy. In 1850, the New York Tribune found two and sometimes four families occupying single rooms in some of its basement apartments. Another eyewitness account described walls “once plastered, but now half the wall [falling] off, in some places mended by pasting newspapers over it, but often revealing unsightly holes.” In the basement “in a lower room, not more than fifteen feet square, twenty-six human beings reside. A man could scarcely stand erect in it . . . women lay on a mass of filthy, unsightly rags in the corner—sick, feeble, and emaciated; six or seven children were in various attitudes in the corner . . . two women were peeling potatoes, and actually pulling off the skins with their finger nails; the smoke [from their fire] and stench of the room was so suffocating that it could not be long endured, and the announcement that, in addition to the misfortune of poverty, they had the measles to boot, started most of our party in a precipitate retreat from the premises.” Others confirmed that dirt pervaded the building. In trying to describe the filth of one Old Brewery room used as a lodging house, upstate New Yorker Joel Ross wrote that “if you have ever seen farmers fix lodgings for their hogs, you will probably need no further explanation, except that the pigs have more straw, and less bugs.” Nathaniel P. Willis, the writer and critic, who toured the Old Brewery with a police escort in the early 1840s, described the following scene in one apartment:
The floor was covered by human beings asleep in their rags; and when called by the officer to look in at a low closet [i.e., bedroom] beyond, we could hardly put our feet to the ground, they lay so closely together, black and white, men, women, and children. The doorless apartment beyond, of the size of a kennel, was occupied by a woman and her daughter, and the daughter’s child, lying together on the floor, and covered by rags and cloths of no distinguishable color, the rubbish of bones and dirt only displaced by their emaciated limbs. The sight was too sickening to endure, but there was no egress without following close to the lantern. [In another apartment] six or seven black women lay together in a heap. . . . I had never before any adequate idea of poverty in cities. I did not dream that human beings, within reach of human aid, could be abandoned to the wretchedness which I there saw.4
Whether this crowding was typical is difficult to determine. The only thorough census of the building, taken in 1850, lists 221 people living in thirty-five apartments, an average of 6.3 persons per apartment. The census enumerator, who conducted his survey in late spring, did not find twenty-six persons inhabiting any room or apartment, but he did note sixteen in one, fourteen in a second, and thirteen in a third, numbers rarely found in other buildings in the neighborhood. It is not inconceivable that twenty-six could have squeezed into a basement lodging room at some point, especially in the winter, when the homeless were most likely to splurge on indoor accommodations.5
As with most legends, some staples of the Old Brewery story are obvious fabrications. In an era when fewer than thirty murders per year were committed in the entire city, Asbury’s daily murder toll was ridiculous. Charges of rampant incest also are unfounded. Furthermore, at least some of the building’s residents were not the depraved souls denigrated in the press. On his visit to the notorious tenement, Joel Ross met John Burke, who called himself the “Old Man of the Brewery and Father of Temperance.” Burke, a fifty-four-year-old chair maker who had lived in the Old Brewery for thirteen years, took Ross upstairs from his shop to his apartment. Much to Ross’s surprise, he found that “the floors were carpeted, the beds were tidy, the furniture clean, and on every face, a smile.”
This print of the Old Brewery dates from about 1850, when the Five Points Mission bought the building. The numbers in the first-story doorways identify certain particularly notorious parts of the building, such as “Murderer’s Alley” (number 1) and the “Den of Thieves” (3, 4, and 5). Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
The Scandinavian writer Fredrika Bremer also found that the Old Brewery did not quite live up to its reputation. Although she and her female companion found much evidence of debauchery, “neither did we meet any instance of rudeness nor even of incivility. We saw young lads sitting at gaming-tables with old ruffians; unfortunate women suffering from horrible diseases, sickly children, giddy young girls, ill-tempered women quarrelling with the whole world, and some families, also we saw, who seemed to me, wretched rather through poverty than moral degradation. . . . Every grade of moral corruption, may be found festering and fermenting in this Old Brewery; filth, rags, pestilent air, everything is in that Old Brewery, and yet after all, I did not s
ee anything there worse than I had seen before in Paris, London, and Stockholm.”6
Bremer was right. Conditions in the Old Brewery were not uniformly squalid, nor were the tenants habitually murderous and dissolute. Yet dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of its residents lived in windowless, filthy, teeming apartments that were unfit for habitation. Everyone, from lawmakers to ordinary citizens, was aware of the conditions. But no government agency made the slightest effort to do anything about them. In an era of laissez-faire, decades before the country’s first housing codes had been written, city officials could not control where or how people lived. Before mass immigration, when abject poverty was rare in America and its cities were relatively free from congestion, housing codes were not necessary. But the desperate newcomers who poured into New York in the famine years were willing to live in conditions unimaginable to previous generations of Americans. A charitable group, the Five Points Mission, eventually bought the Old Brewery, and in December 1852 had it torn down. But tenements with conditions nearly as bad would persist in Five Points for another half century.