As tall brick tenements replaced small wooden hovels, heat became the greater issue. In order to support themselves, five- and six-story tenements were generally constructed with one-foot-thick exterior brick walls which kept out the cold fairly well, though these buildings were still not comfortably warm. But a brick tenement “in a hot spell becomes something little more tolerable than a sweat-box,” noted Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Poor ventilation and air circulation contributed to the oppressive temperatures. Open windows brought no relief to the stifling apartments, as cooler outdoor air stubbornly refused to flow inside. Those living on the upper floors suffered most in the summer, as the heat wafted persistently upward. During the day and evening, tenement dwellers poured into the streets to escape the indoor infernos, but at night there was little relief. Referring to the tiny windowless bedrooms that predominated in these buildings, a reporter from Frank Leslie’s asserted that “the very idea of refreshing slumber in one of the seething little ovens which must usually shelter not one, but several persons, and sometimes a whole family, appears ridiculous.” Many moved their beds near the living-room windows, but for half the tenement residents this meant confronting the stench emanating from the outhouses. Those lucky enough to have fire escapes slept on them during heat waves. Others sought relief on roofs, stoops, and even sidewalks, “until it is almost impossible to pass along without stepping upon a human body.” Occasionally, newspapers would report an injury or even a death as a sleeping tenement dweller fell from a window ledge or fire escape.40
The fire escapes where so many Five Pointers spent sweltering summer nights were only erected at about the time of the Civil War. In 1860, the New York legislature enacted the first New York law mandating their installation, though the legislation stipulated only that landlords put them on new buildings housing eight or more families. A horrible Sixth Ward fire during the 1860 legislative session had helped convince the lawmakers to enact this limited statute. It broke out on the night of Thursday, February 2, just a block west of the Five Points neighborhood at 142 Elm Street. The blaze started in the basement wood bins of the four-year-old, six-story brick tenement and spread quickly up the steep stairwell, trapping many of those living in the uppermost apartments. Of the nine people killed in the blaze, one had lived on the third floor, two on the fourth, and five on the fifth. Many of those on the top floors survived only by jumping twenty-five feet from a fifth-floor apartment window down to the roof of a two-story building next door.41
As deadly fires continued to plague the city’s tenement districts, the legislature in 1862 enacted a law mandating that all buildings housing eight or more families install fire escapes. By 1865, nearly half the Sixth Ward’s tenements had them, although many landlords ignored the requirement, and smaller buildings were still exempted. One of these was the two-and-a-half-story wooden tenement at 15 Baxter Street, where in 1863 a fire killed three women and one child. The blaze started late at night and spread upstairs to the crowded attic, whose inhabitants “became frantic with fear, and rent the stillness of midnight with their piercing shrieks, rendering the scene one of horror and despair.” Mrs. Collins and her lodgers, Mr. and Mrs. Sands, jumped safely to the street from their front attic room, though Mr. Sands suffered serious burns. In the other attic rooms, where Bridget Tierney kept eleven boarders, four died in the blaze. The dead included Alice Murphy, thirty-five, and her daughter aged four; Sarah Gray, thirty-five, and Mary Jane McMasters, about thirty, found dead in her bed. Gray’s eleven-year-old son and McMasters’s fifteen-year-old son survived by jumping to the roof of a rear building. The Herald reported that “Hugh Devier and his wife Catharine, who is blind, embraced each other and jumped from the window together, and miraculously escaped with only a few bruises.” Tierney later testified that those who perished could also have jumped “had they not been under the influence of liquor.” An African-American man living in a first-floor rear apartment and a female Irish immigrant living above him blamed each other for starting the blaze. Other tenants testified that both had been drunk and therefore could not be trusted to remember what had happened. Fire was a constant threat and concern to Five Points residents, one they knew could end their lives at any moment.42
Sleeping outdoors to avoid the tenement heat. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 12, 1882): 392–93. Collection of the Library of Congress.
“FOR MISERY, DEGRADATION, FILTH, AND MULTITUDES THEY CANNOT BE EXCEEDED”
The worst tenements in Five Points were the Old Brewery and those in Cow Bay. As one antebellum writer noted, the Old Brewery and Cow Bay together comprised “the two most famous spots in this dark region. For misery, degradation, filth, and multitudes they cannot be exceeded.”43 Cow Bay was the nickname of the portion of Little Water Street (later Mission Place) that ran north from Worth. It was actually a cul-de-sac, thirty feet wide at the entrance, but “narrowing, with crooked, uneven lines, back to a point about a hundred feet from the entrance,” where the street abruptly ended surrounded by decrepit wooden tenements. Reputed to have once been a cow path used by local cattlemen to reach the Collect Pond, Cow Bay by the late 1840s rivaled the Old Brewery for “the extreme wretchedness which abounds on every hand.” After the demolition of the Old Brewery in 1852, journalists could describe Cow Bay as “the very lowest and worst place in New-York.”44
Saloons frequented by the most dangerous characters, even by Five Points standards, occupied the front ground-floor room of virtually every building in Cow Bay. In addition, the tenements were home to an especially heterogeneous mixture of races and nationalities. Blacks had originally dominated the infamous block, especially chimney sweeps, who constituted a significant portion of the city’s African-American population. As late as 1849, one newspaper claimed that four hundred blacks lived in five Cow Bay tenements. While this was probably an exaggeration, it nonetheless indicates their long-standing presence there. At midcentury, journalist George Foster noted that Cow Bay “is chiefly celebrated in profane history as being the battle-field of the negroes and police. . . . Two memorable occasions, at least, have recently occurred in which ‘Cow Bay’ was rendered classic ground by the set fights which took place within its purlieus between the police and the fighting-men of the Ethiopian tribes.” During the 1850s, however, the black presence at Cow Bay diminished rapidly. The number of African Americans recorded by census takers fell from one hundred twenty in 1850 to thirty-five in 1855. During the 1850s, Italians and Kerry Irish, “the poorest of the city poor,” filled these “dens of misery” left vacant by the black exodus. The prostitutes, thieves, alcoholics, and interracial couples who concentrated in Cow Bay added to its scandalous reputation.45
Cow Bay horror stories abounded. The superintendent of the Five Points House of Industry led a tour of Cow Bay that found “a number of both sexes, huddled together like swine—some almost in a state of nudity. Not the slightest shame was apparent at their exposure before each other, nor before the visitors. The stench in this garret was most intolerable,” caused by “a perfect cesspool of ordure, in a corner.” Violent fights, sometimes ending in death, and typically alcohol-induced, were also common.46
The poor found Cow Bay equally offensive. Tom Nolan told those attending a Five Points temperance meeting that if they wanted to see the Cow Bay building he had lived in during his drinking days, “saturate your handkerchief with camphor, so that you can endure the horrid stench, and enter. Grope your way through the long, narrow passage—turn to the right up the dark and dangerous stairway; be careful where you place your foot around the lower step, or in the corners of the broad stairs, for it is more than shoe-mouth deep of steaming filth.”47
Cow Bay may have been as crowded as the Old Brewery. Two married couples plus a female lodger who “sometimes has company” lived in the ten-by-twelve-foot back room of one three-room apartment. Five men and women lived in the front room, which measured eight by fourteen feet. The windowless middle room, a mere six by seven, was occ
upied by a lone woman. In the apartment above this one, with identical dimensions, the back room held a German widow with two boys, a black husband and wife, and a female lodger. The dark, tiny center room held a German woman, her black husband, and a four-year-old white “lodger,” perhaps an orphan. Incredibly, these were not even the most crowded Cow Bay dwellings. An 1857 inspection found 23 families—179 people in all—living in just 15 rooms.48
Although they received far less publicity at this point than the Old Brewery or Cow Bay, the tenements along the east side of Baxter Street just north of the Five Points intersection were nearly as miserable. After demolition crews tore down most of the Cow Bay hovels to make room for an expanded Five Points House of Industry in the 1860s, this became the most notorious portion of the neighborhood. The block where these tenements were located, bounded by Baxter, Bayard, Mulberry, and Park Streets, would eventually become known as “Mulberry Bend.” Mulberry Bend represented to postbellum Americans the same depravity and squalor that prewar New Yorkers associated with Cow Bay and the Old Brewery. But even in the 1850s, conditions in Mulberry Bend were already miserable. Bottle Alley, the courtyard at the rear of 47 and 49 Baxter Street that Harper’s Weekly and Jacob Riis would make famous in the 1880s and 1890s, had a nasty reputation in the antebellum era. Longtime New Yorker Charles Haswell remembered that even in the 1840s, Bottle Alley had been a favorite haunt of murderers and thieves. No descriptions of the Bottle Alley tenements themselves survive from the antebellum period. We do know, however, that recent Sligo immigrants concentrated there.
Conditions deteriorated as one moved down Baxter Street from Bottle Alley toward the Five Points intersection. At 39 Baxter, whose front and rear wooden tenements were dominated by Lansdowne immigrants, an investigative committee in the mid-1850s found fifteen people living in a single room measuring fifteen by fourteen feet and with a ceiling only seven feet high. Yet that was an improvement over the late 1840s, when 106 hogs had lodged there along with the human tenants. One Lansdowne immigrant, laundress Barbara Sullivan, squeezed herself, six children, a son-in-law, and six boarders into a single apartment. Ellen Holland lived here as well.49
Next door, at 371/2 Baxter, the legislative inspectors discovered the usual windowless bedrooms and destitute tenants. Particularly appalling were the circumstances of Honora Moriarty and her teenaged daughters Margaret and Mary, also probably Lansdowne immigrants. The “old dame of sixty” and her two daughters, the legislators reported in horror, “supported themselves by picking curled hair” out of city garbage barrels and then selling it to wigmakers or other manufacturers. By scouring the streets sixteen hours a day, they managed to find enough hair to earn five dollars per week.50
A few doors down, at 35 Baxter, the dreadful conditions continued. “Down half a dozen ricketty steps, the door was already open to one of the filthiest, blackest holes we had yet seen,” wrote a Times reporter in 1859 of a nocturnal tour he took of the tenement’s basement boardinghouse with a journalist from the Express and a police escort. The proprietor of this “damp and filthy cellar . . . with much loquacity, assured them that the bed-clothes were all ‘clane and dacent sure,’ that they were washed ‘onst a week,’ every Thursday, and that the place was quite sweet.” Around the main room they saw “a number of wretched bunks, similar to those on shipboard, only not half as convenient, ranged around an apartment about ten feet square. Nearly every one of the half-dozen beds was occupied by one or more persons. No regard was paid to age or sex; but man, woman, and child were huddled up in one undistinguishable mass. . . . The most fetid odors were emitted, and the floor and the walls were damp with pestiferous exhalations. But this was not all. There were two inner apartments [i.e., bedrooms], each of which was crowded to the same capacity as the outer one. Not the slightest breath of air reached these infernal holes, which were absolutely stifling with heat.” Inquiring about two small children sleeping soundly in one of the “hideous beds,” the manager told the reporters that their older sister, who cared for them, “was out begging, even at this hour.” The lodging house at 35 Baxter was actually superior to many others in the neighborhood. It charged six cents a night, far more than the worst dives. The landlord told the Times that he “lodged none under any circumstances but honest hardworking people—which statement the police received with smiles and without contradiction.” “To do them justice,” agreed the Express reporter, “such as were awake seemed to be quite sober.” This was probably the establishment sarcastically referred to by the New York Illustrated News as “Mrs. Sandy Sullivan’s Genteel Lodging-House on Baxter Street,” operated by Lansdowne immigrants Sandy and Kate Sullivan. Former Lansdowne tenants occupied most of the other apartments in this wretched building and next door at 33 Baxter as well.51
Just before the corner, at 31 Baxter, one of the first five-story brick tenements in this part of the neighborhood towered over the surrounding wooden hovels. The investigators who detailed conditions in the neighboring tenements did not consider this relatively new building noteworthy, perhaps because it had not had much time to deteriorate. Yet the terrible crowding in its three-room apartments boggles the mind. Above the first two floors, most of the tenants were Lansdowne immigrants and Italians. Cornelius Shea and his wife Ellen, Lansdowne immigrants from Kenmare parish, shared their apartment with three children and four lodgers. Widow Johanna McCarty squeezed her four children (ranging in age from six to twenty) and eight lodgers into their three-room flat. McCarty’s next-door neighbor, Italian widow Rose Ralph, took in only four lodgers. But another Italian, musician John Baptiste, housed his wife, five children, and four lodgers in a single three-room flat. Three other dwellings, including that of Tuosist native Daniel Haley, held nine persons each. Not all Lansdowne immigrants took in so many lodgers. Mary Shea of Kenmare and her husband Jeremiah, a Cork native, who had immigrated together in 1852, lived at 31 Baxter with their twenty-three-year-old servant daughter Margaret and just a single lodger. The combined incomes of father and daughter, plus the rent from the one lodger, allowed them to avoid the intense crowding endured by their neighbors. Laborer Daniel Hagerty, another Lansdowne immigrant from Kenmare, lived with his wife Mary and his younger brother Patrick, also a laborer. Their combined incomes allowed them to shun boarders altogether.52
This 1859 view of Baxter Street above Worth shows the notorious tenements that lined the east side of that street. The large brick building at the center is 31 Baxter, whose three-room apartments were crammed full of Lansdowne immigrants and Italians. Sandy Sullivan’s “Genteel Lodging-house” at 35 Baxter was in one of the two-story buildings just up the street, and 39 Baxter (where Ellen Holland lived) is the first three-story building visible. D. T. Valentine, comp., Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1860 (New York, 1860). Collection of the author.
The most notorious tenements in antebellum Five Points were not typical. Conditions varied enormously from block to block, and sometimes even from building to building. Some streets—such as White and Franklin west of Baxter, and Mott south of Pell—were rarely mentioned by investigators chronicling woeful tenement conditions. On some of these streets, a lone couple sometimes occupied a building that, if located just a block or two away, would have housed six or even twelve families. Still, with six or more people occupying nearly half the district’s two-room, 225-square-foot apartments, along with a stove, a table and chairs, beds, clothing, food, and all the families’ other worldly possessions, even the “average” Five Points apartment would have been a very unpleasant place to live.
“Mrs. Sandy Sullivan’s Genteel Lodging-House” at 35 Baxter Street was one of many boardinghouses in Five Points run by Lansdowne immigrants from County Kerry. New York Illustrated News (February 18, 1860): 216. Collection of the author.
“CONSIDERABLE REMAINS OF CLANSHIP AMONG THESE MOUNTAINEERS”
I have already noted the strength of the ethnic ties that drew certain groups to certain blocks of Five Points. Even more striking is that
ethnic bands held together on a building-by-building basis. Few whole blocks were ethnically homogeneous. Each generally contained a clutch of almost exclusively Irish buildings and some others dominated by Germans. In five sample blocks, 82 percent of the buildings in which the Irish constituted a majority had no more than a single non-Irish family. And 90 percent of the buildings in which Germans made up the majority contained no more than one non-German family. In 78 percent of the tenements, one ethnic group made up 75 percent or more of the inhabitants.53
Though Irish and German tenements were often clustered together, the ethnic aggregation on one side of a street did not necessarily extend itself to the other. The most German “block” in the neighborhood, for example, was the east side of Mott between Canal and Bayard; the west side was predominantly Irish. Many Jews likewise lived on the west side of Baxter below Worth, but virtually none lived across the street.54
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