Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  CHAPTER THREE

  How They Lived

  FROM HENRY ROTH to George Bellows, American writers and artists have made the tenement a central symbol of immigrant life in America. Today, even many city dwellers who walk by tenements every day would be hard-pressed to identify them by the name. Yet not long ago, the word fairly pulsed with meaning, conjuring visions of teeming, reeking, sweltering brick boxes bursting with hyphenated Americans.

  Accounts of Five Points had not always focused on its tenements. In the 1830s, the press had concentrated on the supposed moral degradation of the neighborhood—the prostitution, the crime, the drunkenness. But the neighborhood’s already inferior housing deteriorated significantly during the 1830s and ‘40s, due to lack of maintenance and overcrowding. By the 1850s, exposés of Five Points life increasingly concentrated on the tenements. These buildings—“worn out, . . . disgustingly filthy, and unhealthy beyond description”—became just as infamous as the Five Pointers themselves.7

  “THESE TUMBLING AND SQUALID ROOKERIES”

  There were two types of tenements found in Five Points—those of wood and those of brick—and they were in many ways dramatically different. Wooden tenements were generally two or two and a half stories tall. Most had been designed to hold an artisan’s or shopkeeper’s place of business, his family, and perhaps a few of his employees. These buildings, dozens of which still stood in the 1850s, generally measured about twenty to twenty-five feet wide and twenty-five to thirty feet deep. Other wooden structures had been built as workshops, stables, or for mixed commercial/residential use, and might be three stories tall and up to forty feet deep. Sometimes two or three of these were crowded into a single 25-by-100-foot standard lot. By the 1850s, landlords had carved most of them into tenements, creating in each building two to five apartments plus commercial space for a shop or saloon in the front of the house on the ground floor.8

  Before the Civil War, these wooden tenements—“so old and rotten that they seem ready to tumble together into a vast rubbish-heap”—were considered Five Points’ worst, “the oldest, most ricketty, wooden buildings” in the city. Many apartments in these structures consisted of a single room, which often had to provide shelter for an entire family. A Health Department investigation noted that in some dwellings, especially those in attics and basements, “the ceilings . . . were too low to allow the inmates to stand erect.” The bedrooms were typically windowless, and the resulting lack of ventilation and air circulation created an “atmosphere productive of the most offensive and malignant diseases.”9

  The wooden tenements also typically failed to keep out the elements. They were so drafty that tenants commonly posted handbills on the walls, not for decoration but as insulation. “Open to the wind and the storm—and far less comfortable than the buildings used as barns or cattle-stalls,” Five Points’ “wretched dens” of wood were “exposed to all the rigors of inclement weather, and to every possible cause of wretchedness and suffering,” complained the Courier and Enquirer. “We have known cases in which nearly a dozen persons were forced to live in one small room, less than ten feet square, immediately under an old, dilapidated roof, which let in a full tithe of the rain that fell upon it, and entirely destitute of any means of keeping warm.” Visitors commonly found snow drifting in the entranceways, halls, and sometimes even the apartments themselves. Even if the snow could be kept outside, it might make its way inside in another form, for “most of the roofs were leaky, and the basements, after every rain were flooded with filthy water.”10

  Water was not the only thing that spilled into these tenements when it rained. Because their original owners had designed these small frame buildings for far fewer people, the hordes now occupying them severely overtaxed the backyard outhouses. A Health Department report noted that the commodes of these wooden tenements “were in a most filthy and disgusting condition; in several places there were accumulations of stagnant fluid, full of all sorts of putrefying matter, the effluvia from which was intolerable.” Few of the wooden tenements were connected to sewers in the antebellum years, so heavy rains tended to wash outhouse “effluvia” into Five Points basements.11

  By 1855, brick tenements outnumbered those of wood in Five Points by a ratio of about three to two. Much taller and deeper than frame structures, the brick buildings housed in that year 76 percent of the neighborhood’s residents. Many brick tenements were just as offensive. In the four-story brick building at 17 Baxter,* for example, legislative investigators found “walls damp, rooms dark, passages filthy, and with no sort of ventilation.” These brick tenements were built in one of two patterns. The most common design in the antebellum years called for a structure twenty-five feet wide by fifty feet deep. Such buildings generally reached three, four, or (especially after 1845) five stories in height. Each floor above the ground floor usually contained four two-room apartments; the front half of the ground floor generally housed a store or saloon. Apartment dimensions tended to be identical. The main room of each two-room apartment, which served as kitchen, living room, and dining room, usually measured about twelve feet square and typically had two windows, facing either the street or the yard. The second room, known as the “sleeping closet,” was aptly named, for it was windowless and hardly bigger than a modern walk-in closet, usually about eight by ten feet. Thus the entire apartment covered just 225 square feet.12

  In a triumph of efficiency over humanity, landlords often built a second brick tenement in the backyard behind the front building. These rear tenements generally measured twenty-five by twenty-five feet (precisely half the size of the front buildings) and were divided into two two-room apartments per floor. Anticipating that other rear tenements would be built adjacent to their own, landlords put no windows on the backs or sides of these structures. The only windows overlooked the outhouses in the yard, “thick with mephitic gases, and nauseous from the effluvia of decaying matter and pools of stagnant water.” As a result, rear tenements were “suffused with the odor emanating from the cesspools.” Rarely did enough fresh air reach them to allow these noxious odors to escape. “These tumbling and squalid rookeries,” concluded an investigative committee, are “. . . the most repulsive features of the tenant-house system.”13

  Some landlords, not satisfied with two tenements, sought to cram even more dwelling space into their lots. “The crazy pigeon-holes of the Five Points,” as Harper’s Weekly described them, were legendary throughout the city. “Every inch . . . is covered by structures of various kinds and degrees of discomfort, into which is crowded the reeking, seething mass of poverty, vice, sickness, and wretchedness.” Some property owners managed to fit a third tenement onto their lots. Others converted cellars, attics, and even storage areas into apartments. Still others erected tiny shacks in yards in order to squeeze a few extra dollars in rent from their property.14

  Whether brick or frame, front or rear, most Five Points tenements were terribly overcrowded. Press reports described seven, ten, or even fifteen people living in a single room. But how typical were such horror stories? According to the census, the typical two-room dwelling held on average “only” five people per apartment. Yet 46 percent of these apartments housed six or more people, and one in six accommodated eight or more. With so many people per apartment, and so many buildings per lot, the population density of the Sixth Ward in the 1850s (310.4 per acre) exceeded that of any other district in the city. With the possible exception of one or two sections of London, antebellum Five Points was the most densely populated neighborhood in the world.15

  Five Pointers adjusted to this crowding in a number of ways. Squeezing in enough beds for all the inhabitants always presented a challenge. Sometimes a bed doubled as a couch or was covered with a board for use as a table or countertop during the day. In many dwellings, the “beds” were merely piles of rags or straw covered with “bed clothes” (sheets), which could easily be pushed out of the way when the room was too crowded. Children especially slept on such bedding. In the apar
tment of one Italian family, one child slept “under the bed, another under the table, a third by the stove, and the fourth at liberty to roll over any of her sisters.” Children lucky enough to have beds usually shared them with their siblings. One remembered sleeping head to toe with his four brothers and sisters so they could all fit in the single bed allotted to them. Sometimes squeezing an extra bed into the apartment to reduce such overcrowded sleeping arrangements meant partially blocking a door, which might prove deadly should fire break out. Beds that folded into the wall or stacked on top of each other would have significantly reduced such crowding, but such luxuries were beyond the means of most Five Pointers.16

  Privacy in such conditions was virtually impossible. Families strategically hung curtains, prints, and handbills to create private spaces within the tiny apartments, especially around the parents’ bed. But since these added to the clutter and often made the small spaces seem even tinier, not everyone bothered. Given that many of the immigrants, especially the Irish and the Italians, had lived in one-room huts in Europe, these conditions were at least familiar to them. But as they adapted to nineteenth-century American ideals of decorum and separation of the sexes, this lack of privacy must have been mortifying, especially for women.17

  A crowded apartment was not necessarily a cluttered one. Visitors to Five Points usually found the dwellings rather bare by middle-class New York standards. One investigator asserted that each abode featured “the same bare floors, the same blank walls, the same pine tables, broken chairs and ragged bedding.” For the most destitute, this certainly would have been the case. They often had to pawn their possessions to buy food and fuel. Impoverished widows with many children to support and families whose main breadwinner could not work for long periods due to illness were most likely to live in this state. Others kept possessions to a minimum because they moved so frequently, changing apartments once a year or even more often as their employment fortunes rose and fell.

  But more often than not, Five Pointers did what they could to give their rooms a comfortable, homelike quality. An 1859 survey of tenement apartments in the New York Times found that most contained “lithographs, in high colors, of the crucifixion, Christ in the manger, Mary at the Annunciation, the Parting Lovers, and JAMES BUCHANAN.” Many had “broad posters” bearing slogans such as “‘True Democrats meet here’; or, ‘Friends of good oysters call in,’ pasted over the bed,” a reference to the free food offered at political rallies. The same reporter noted mantels filled with bric-à-brac in many apartments. An archaeological dig in Five Points in the 1990s uncovered toys of every description, commemorative cups and saucers, cologne and hair tonic, all indicating that the majority of the neighborhood’s residents could afford more than the barest necessities. Five Pointers did not usually live in the utter destitution that most often attracted the attention of the press.18

  “THE MOST REPULSIVE HOLES THAT EVER A

  HUMAN BEING WAS FORCED TO SLEEP IN”

  Five Points’ unusually high population density resulted not merely from landlords’ greed but also from the custom of some tenement dwellers to sublet space in their apartments to non-family members. Twenty-eight percent of Five Points families took in boarders. Of those who did, twothirds rented space to only one or two non-family members. But in the most decrepit parts of the neighborhood, such as Baxter and Mulberry Streets between Park and Bayard, boarders abounded. Three-quarters of the sixteen apartments at 31 Baxter Street, for example, had lodgers in 1855. Boarders lived in ten of the fourteen apartments in the rear building at 51 Mulberry in that same year. Those who rented space to outsiders generally offered two types of arrangements. A “boarder” paid for both food and a place to sleep, while a “lodger” paid for sleeping space only. Lodging and boarding allowed recent immigrants to save money while seeking work to pay for the emigration of other family members. But many who had no such obligations chose to board anyway. Young immigrants often lived in boardinghouses until they got married. For older bachelors, living in someone else’s home was a convenient means to obtain both shelter and meals. Widows often could afford no other kind of living arrangement. All told, one in seven Five Pointers lived in a non-family member’s apartment.19

  Widows were most likely to take in lodgers; nearly two in five widows did so. Barbara Sullivan, a forty-six-year-old widow from the Tuosist portion of the Landsdowne estate in Kerry, lived in the rear tenement at 39 Baxter in the mid-1850s with her six children, who ranged in age from four to sixteen when they arrived in New York in 1851. In 1855, Sullivan, her children, and her son-in-law shared her apartment with six lodgers: a forty-year-old widowed ragpicker, her fifteen-year-old newsboy son, a forty-year-old widowed peddler, and the peddler’s three children. Johanna McCarty, a forty-five-year-old widow with five children, took in eight lodgers in her three-room apartment at 31 Baxter in 1855.20

  Many non-widows took in boarders as well. In the rear building at 51 Mulberry Street, Patrick Hogan and his wife Mary took in one boarder; the Fox family rented space to two lodgers; the Shields, McCormacks, Mullins, and McManuses had three lodgers each; the Kavans and Conways four lodgers each; the Hanlans eight lodgers and a boarder; and widow Mary Sullivan one lodger. Yet 51 Mulberry and 31 Baxter held many more boarders than average. The front and rear buildings at 65 Mott were more typical. Seven of the sixteen apartments did not house any lodgers in 1850. Of the nine that did, five had just a single boarder.21

  Although most Five Points lodgers lived in private homes, some patronized commercial boardinghouses. In New York City, these ran the gamut from elegant establishments catering to professionals, to modest mechanics’ boardinghouses that were crowded but clean and respectable, to basement flophouses overflowing with people and filth. Five Points, of course, contained none of the refined residences, only a sprinkling of the mechanics’ abodes, and dozens of the worst class.

  Most of the seediest boardinghouses were located in cellars, where rent was cheapest and there were few other uses for the space. Cellar dwelling peaked in the early 1850s, as desperately poor immigrants flooding into the city sought to save every possible penny in order to finance the emigration of spouses, children, parents, and siblings. A New York Tribune exposé at midcentury found that the Sixth Ward contained 285 basements with 1,156 occupants, meaning that approximately 1 in 17 residents lived in a basement. At least half that number probably lived in Five Points, many in cellar-level lodging houses.22

  The overcrowding in Five Points boardinghouses was terrible. Even before the heaviest immigration had begun, a friend of minister Samuel Prime saw lodging houses in Five Points where the rooms were “as thickly covered with bodies as a field of battle could be with the slain.” In many of these establishments, lodgers slept on two-tiered bunks, which often consisted of canvas stretched between two wooden rails. When business was brisk, proprietors created a third tier by placing other customers on the floor underneath the lowest bunk. Others slept on bed frames covered with straw. Cellar lodging rooms were both crowded and, with so many dirty lodgers squeezing into windowless bedrooms, filthy and smelly as well. “Without air, without light, filled with damp vapor from the mildewed walls, and with vermin in ratio to the dirtiness of the inhabitants,” commented the Tribune, “they are the most repulsive holes that ever a human being was forced to sleep in. There is not a farmer’s hog-pen in the country, that is not immeasurably ahead of them in point of health—often in point of cleanliness.” Doctors who worked in the tenement districts could immediately spot the cellar dwellers among their patients. “If the whitened and cadaverous countenance should be an insufficient guide,” explained one, “the odor of the person will remove all doubt; a musty smell, which a damp cellar only can impart, pervades every article of dress, the woolens more particularly, as well as the hair and skin.” In a neighborhood filled with hardship and privation, the suffering of these cellar dwellers was perhaps the worst of all.23

  Other dives in Five Points were mere flophouses for drunks and
street people, charging as little as three cents for a bed or even one cent per night for a place on the floor. Beds pushed against the walls of saloons and dance halls also catered to the lowest of the low, men and women who paid two or three cents to sleep in full view of the other customers. A basement lodging house at 35 Baxter, “one of the filthiest, blackest holes” the Times reporter had ever seen, nonetheless charged six cents per night or “three shillings” (371/2 cents) per week excluding food, a sure sign that it was at least a step or two above those catering to the most down-and-out.

  Basement boardinghouse at 508 Pearl Street, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (March 18, 1882): 56–57. Collection of the Library of Congress.

  There were cleaner, less crowded boardinghouses in Five Points too, but they received far less attention in the press. Many were large operations, occupying whole buildings and employing cooks and servants. In Five Points, these establishments especially catered to Christian Germans and tended to locate on Mott and Elizabeth Streets. One such boardinghouse was at 66 Mott, run by thirty-six-year-old Ignatz Kunz. Seventeen young German-speaking artisans boarded there in 1855, including carpenters, blacksmiths, gas fitters, and a goldbeater. Few had lived in the city long and none was married. They undoubtedly enjoyed flirting with the establishment’s two young German “servant girls,” Christiana and Presence, who had immigrated to New York in 1854. Kunz, who had himself emigrated from Germany in 1845, also ran a porterhouse on the premises. If Kunz organized his concern like most of its type, the boarders would have slept two to a bed, and four or six to a room. At breakfast and dinner, they could look forward to hearty meals. A British immigrant described the typical breakfast as consisting of “coffee, bread and butter, beefsteaks, pork or mutton chops, sausages, pickles, and buckwheat cakes with molasses. This is the boarding house mode of stuffing.”24