Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Despite these hardships, the newsboys relished their freedom and independence. On a typical day, they bought their morning papers at the crack of dawn and worked until they had exhausted their supply, usually around nine o’clock. They would then eat breakfast at an inexpensive restaurant, and afterward go to a ferry terminal hoping to earn tips carrying passengers’ packages to the hacks and omnibuses. After their midday dinner, newsboys purchased their supply of afternoon papers and sold them into the evening. Many then went to the working-class theaters on the Bowery or Chatham Street, after which they could often be found at midnight in a “‘coffee and cake’ cellar” taking their supper, smoking a cigar, or sipping a cup of coffee. Although Children’s Aid Society founder Charles Loring Brace started the Newsboys’ Lodging House during the 1850s to take these children off the streets, hundreds chose to continue living on their own. Newsboys came from all over the city, but poverty drove an especially large number of Five Points boys to this vocation. One was Tim Sullivan, later the Tammany Hall boss “Big Tim” Sullivan. The son of Lansdowne immigrants Daniel Sullivan and Catherine Connelly, Tim was living at 25 Baxter Street when, at age seven, he began hawking newspapers to help support his family.54

  The other trade most popular with Five Points boys was shoe shining, universally known in the Civil War era as “boot blacking.” Many newsboys had once been bootblacks. Tim Sullivan, for example, had shined shoes at the Fourth Ward police station house before peddling newspapers. Bootblacks typically ranged in age from ten to sixteen, though some (like Sullivan) started work much younger. “The headquarters of this class are in or near the Five Points district,” noted one reporter in 1868. “They form a regular confraternity, and have their own laws and customs.” Like the newsboys, the bootblacks were well organized, operating an informal trade union. “The ‘Order’ establishes a fixed price for labor, and takes care to protect its members against the competition of irregular intruders. . . . The affairs of the society are managed by a ‘Captain of the bootblacks,’ whose word is supreme, and who wields his power as all arbitrary rulers do.” Like street sweepers, bootblacks depended on bad weather to improve business, though the filth of Manhattan’s thoroughfares kept their services in constant demand. Those with regular followings set up shop in certain high-traffic locations. Others, with small wooden foot stands slung over their shoulders, chased potential customers up and down the sidewalks of the busiest streets, lamenting the embarrassing appearance of a gentleman’s footwear in an effort to win his business. Earning about the same amount as the newsboys, bootblacks who lived on their own were likewise renowned for their lavish spending on food, drink, tobacco, and entertainment. But those who lived at home would have turned most of their earnings over to their parents. Although most bootblacks were the sons of Irish immigrants, dozens of Five Points Italian boys were also working as bootblacks by the eve of the Civil War.55

  For every child who worked full time as a bootblack or newsboy, there were five or ten who helped support their families in more informal ways. The most common was to scavenge for coal, looking for chunks of the shiny, black rocks on the street near coal yards or by the docks where it was unloaded from barges. Some children collected scrap wood, which could be burned in the family stove or sold for kindling. Still others prowled the streets looking for (or stealing) scrap metal, glass, or anything that could be sold to Five Points’ many junk dealers.

  Children could scavenge for fuel or scrap metal or glass while playing in streets, alleys, and yards. Yet as the Civil War approached, it seemed that increasing numbers of New York children devoted all their energy to work. Boys bought matches wholesale and sold them door to door. Girls peddled flowers on street corners in all but the winter months. In 1860, the Children’s Aid Society found the increasing number of poor girls employed in factories especially alarming, noting that its inspectors regularly observed children making “hoop-skirts, artificial flowers, boxes, mantillas, caps, envelopes, and especially ready-made clothing.” Adolescents had been almost unknown in these fields fifteen years earlier. Although cases in which children worked to support alcoholic parents garnered the most coverage in the press, the vast majority worked out of economic necessity. Children in Sixth Ward households headed by widows were three and a half times more likely to hold steady jobs than those in homes in which an adult male worked full time. Given Five Points’ preponderance of widows, it is no wonder that so many youngsters there were forced to devote the bulk of their childhoods to street work.56

  “HARD TIMES”

  Many Five Points workers lived in precarious circumstances even in the best of economic times, and when the American economy took one of its periodic downturns, living conditions became especially bad. In November 1854, the press began to note “hard times” for city workers that far exceeded the usual seasonal slowdown. “This winter, unlike any of the fifteen preceding it, has seen thousands of able and generally industrious men and women reduced to distress and beggary by the sudden and wholesale failure of their accustomed work,” commented the Tribune. Record numbers of journeymen found themselves discharged from factories and workshops, while “even clerks” lost their jobs because so many “mercantile establishments are closed or out of business.” Thousands of laborers “hitherto employed in the vast building operations of our City, now almost wholly suspended,” found themselves destitute. Even many of those most steadily and reliably employed of immigrant workers, the “servant girls,” had been “thrown out of place by the collapsing fortunes or the vanishing of incomes.”57

  As a result, New Yorkers flocked to the city’s soup kitchens in unprecedented numbers. Relief statistics confirm the extent of the suffering. The New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, which dispensed food or fuel only to the most desperate paupers, aided nearly three times as many indigent New Yorkers in January 1855 as it had a year earlier. Many Five Pointers were among them. “The past year has been particularly marked by general pecuniary pressure, and excessive suffering among the poor,” remarked the annual report of the Five Points Mission for 1855. “The wretchedness and degradation of this locality have been made more manifest than ever before. . . . [T]he multitude . . . seemed in many instances to be on the very verge of starvation.” The mission distributed so much food in the winter of 1854–55 (providing foodstuffs to nine hundred families daily) that it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy by mid-February.58

  Just three years later, the Panic of 1857 again threw thousands of Five Pointers out of work. “The past winter [1857–58] has been one of unparalleled suffering among the poor at the Five Points,” reported charitable workers there. “Want of work has caused multitudes to ask for bread who never begged before.” This depression seemed to have a particularly devastating impact on the needle trades. The Herald estimated that half the tailors, seamstresses and cutters were unemployed and that only one in ten wholesale clothing establishments was giving out work. “It was really afflicting yesterday and the day before to see the large number of poor working women who crowded many of the down town stores early in the morning, eagerly seeking for work, and each in turn pleading their and their families circumstances, and begging for some thing to do, even at half price, or on half or quarter time.” Unable to save money due to their pitiful pay, the seamstresses were “in many instances already entirely destitute of the actual necessaries of life, although they, in some instances, have not been over a week or ten days out of employment.” The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor agreed that “there were probably none whose condition was more pitiable than that of the sewing women . . . who were suddenly deprived of work. . . . Their slavish labor and scanty compensation afforded them no reserved fund on which to fall back in time of need.” Other Five Points workers found themselves in similarly desperate straits during the Panic of 1857.59

  Such suffering must have sometimes made Five Pointers wonder if they would have been better off staying in Ireland. It was probably
easier to ride out hard times (though not actual famines) in Ireland, where winters were warmer, fuel in the form of turf was often available for free, and one could grow one’s own food. According to the Irish-American, “the ‘hard times’ and want of employment” actually drove some immigrants to return.60

  “THIS IS THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD”

  Still, return migration was exceedingly rare in the Civil War era, even though observers on both sides of the Atlantic debated whether reports of Irish success in America were exaggerated. One such debate took place on the Lansdowne estate. “The most cheering accounts are daily reaching us of their success in New York,” claimed Lansdowne’s estate agent in 1851, soon after the emigrants had left Kerry. “Every letter which arrives brings new accounts of how well they fare and urging others to come over if they can.” A few years later, Trench reported that some of the emigrants had returned to Kerry sporting gold chains. Whether or not the Lansdowne emigrants wrote glowing accounts of their new homes cannot be verified, as none of their correspondence is known to have survived. Kenmare archdeacon John O’Sullivan later complained that Trench should have been “ashamed” at the way he exaggerated the successes of “the victims of your ill-advised extermination.” Yet according to Trench, the emigrants claimed that they were “now living as well as Father McCarthy himself.”61

  The few surviving letters written by Palmerston’s and Gore Booth’s North Sligo emigrants indicate that they had few if any regrets about having moved to North America. “I can not say that I am sorry that I left home, except that my heart aches now and again, to see those faces which I loved and yet left them behind me,” wrote one Gore Booth emigrant. “Tell Mary I still feel hurt at her leaving me to come alone, altho’ I am very glad that I did come, for I do feel most happy and content here, so much so that I sometimes forget Old Ireland for a time.” Nineteen-year-old Eliza Quin, also a Gore Booth emigrant, wrote from the fringe of Five Points to her parents back in Ireland that “i am verry glad for leaving there and coming to this Country.”62

  These immigrants insisted that others should join them at their earliest opportunity. We “are fed everyday like on Christmas at home,” boasted one Palmerston emigrant living with her employer near Toronto, “& the man and master are at one table—if a man is honest he is as well thought of as if he was worth thousands.” Anyone willing to work hard could not only find employment but earn far more than in Ireland. Palmerston emigrant Pat McGowan wrote from New York that “I would advise [my brother] Mick McGowan to come out to this country & all the youngsters to come too if they are able. Let . . . them come as quick as possible.”63

  Not everyone was suited to life in America, warned the newcomers. McGowan recommended that those prone to drunkenness should stay behind. “Any person that does not think to mind himself let him stop at home for the whiskey is so cheap that it encourages the Irish fool to take it,” he advised. He would have liked his friend “James Quin to come to this country but he would be too fond of the whiskey it is so cheap.” Few of the immigrants regretted having left Ireland, and this was especially so for those who relocated to the United States. “This is the best Country in the world,” exulted Quin, despite living in New York’s most impoverished district. McGowan agreed that life in New York was far superior. Comparing his old life to his new one as he proudly sent his parents $20 (the equivalent of about $320 today) just months after arriving in New York, he could only wonder “how did we stand it so long a time?”64

  Some observers nonetheless questioned the wisdom of emigrating, given that the Irish faced discrimination and were virtually forced into low-paying manual labor. Reading such charges in the Irish-American, Five Pointer Michael Coogan felt compelled to reply. Although it was true that Irish Americans worked primarily as laborers, he wrote, the Irish were especially well suited for the work. Besides, the County Wicklow native argued, manual labor paid well compared to the options available in Ireland. “Don’t they get good value for their time and labor,” Coogan asked. “They can eat good beef, and pork, and butter, and eggs, and bread—not so at home in the old country,” even though “an Irish laborer had to work harder there than here.”65

  Those familiar with the standard version of Irish-American history might be surprised by these letters. A deep pessimism pervades this literature, assuming that the famine immigrants were a kind of lost generation fated to be victims of disease, nativism, and overcrowded tenements in America.66

  If any group of Five Pointers was going to fit this stereotype, it ought to be the Lansdowne immigrants. A full 90 percent of the Lansdowne men toiled as lowly paid menial laborers, and they lived with their families in the most filthy and overcrowded tenements. But account ledgers from the Emigrant Savings Bank suggest that these immigrants did far better than we have previously imagined. Lansdowne immigrants living in Five Points opened 153 accounts in the bank’s first six years of operation (through August 1856). In fact, about half of the Lansdowne families living there had opened accounts by mid-1855. The bank records provide a rare glimpse into the economic fortunes of a very significant number of the Lansdowne immigrants.67

  The bank ledgers suggest that even while living in Five Points, the Lansdowne immigrants were able to save far more than one might have imagined given their wretched surroundings and low-paying jobs. Take the case of the Tuosist natives who visited the bank together to open accounts on July 2, 1853. The first, Honora Shea, had been one of the earliest Lansdowne-assisted immigrants to arrive in New York, landing in March 1851 with her daughter Ellen Harrington, described by the bank secretary as “an illegitimate child, aged 14 yrs.” Although Honora apparently could not depend on a male breadwinner for her support, and lived in the decrepit tenement at 35 Baxter Street, she was able to open her account with an initial deposit of $160, the equivalent of more than $2,500 today. The next account was assigned to laborer Patrick Murphy and his wife, Mary, who lived next door to Shea at 331/2 Baxter and had also arrived in New York in March 1851. They made an initial deposit of $250, a sum worth roughly $4,000 in contemporary terms. Bank officials also gave an account to “washer” Barbara Sullivan, whose cramped apartment filled with her six children, son-in-law, and six boarders was described earlier. Sullivan, who at this point also lived at 331/2 Baxter, made the smallest opening deposit of the three, $135 (roughly $2,200 today). Later in the day, a fourth Lansdowne immigrant, Judy O’Neill, also opened an account. O’Neill lived at 331/2 Baxter as well and had arrived in New York in May 1851. She started her account with a deposit of $148 (about $2,400 today). These four Lansdowne immigrants, who had probably arrived in New York virtually penniless, had quickly managed to squirrel away substantial savings.68

  Although the Lansdowne immigrants opened their accounts with an average deposit of $102, a significant sum, many of them started with just a few dollars and closed them a few weeks later, either because they needed the money or because they did not believe that their savings were safe. Only 51 percent of the Lansdowne immigrants ever managed to increase their initial balance by 50 percent or more. It appears that most Lansdowne immigrants saw the bank as a place to safely keep (and draw interest upon) nest eggs they had already managed to accumulate before opening their accounts. This would explain why so many Lansdowne immigrants did not add substantially to their initial deposits, even when they did keep their accounts open for extended periods. Bonane native Mary Flynn, for example, was in her early sixties when she opened an account in August 1853 with $45, though in less than a year she had doubled her money. During the recession winters of 1855 and 1858, she withdrew as much as half her savings, but always worked her way back to the $90 level within a year. That was the balance, give or take $5, at which her account remained into the late 1860s. Flynn undoubtedly saw $90 (about $1,500 today) as the appropriate size for her family’s emergency fund.

  Yet in 28 percent of the Lansdowne accounts, the immigrants accrued quite substantial financial resources—at least $250 ($4,000 in modern te
rms). Consider the three Tim Sheas. The first, along with his wife, Johanna, had accumulated $495 (more than $7,900 today) by 1860. A second Timothy and Johanna Shea, who arrived in New York in 1853, a year after their namesakes, had amassed $592 (roughly $9,500 in contemporary terms) by July 1857. A third Timothy Shea (sometimes called “O’Shea”), who had emigrated from Tuosist at age forty-eight in 1851, managed along with his wife Honora to save $658 (about $10,500 today) in three accounts by July 1857, the highest sum attained by any of the Lansdowne immigrants who had opened an account by mid-1856.69

  One might argue that these Lansdowne immigrants were especially fortunate—that they must have found especially steady jobs and not had to deal with the financial crises caused by the death of a spouse or a long-term illness. But this does not seem to be the case either. Recall the story of Lansdowne immigrant Ellen Holland. Her husband and eldest son both died, leaving Nelly a widow with two children to support. One might have expected her to dip into her savings to help make ends meet during such trying times, because she could not have earned much money as a “washer.” But Nelly did no such thing. In fact, despite losing her family’s two primary breadwinners, by 1860 she had increased her bank balance to $201.20 (more than $3,200 today), quite a feat for a widow who, just eight years earlier, had been on the brink of starvation. Nor were the Lansdowne immigrants more financially successful than other immigrants. NonLansdowne Five Pointers typically saved even more money.70

  What accounts for this surprising financial success? Perhaps the privation these immigrants had experienced in County Kerry had conditioned them to practice extraordinary frugality. Living in Five Points they could pay among the lowest rents in New York, and taking in so many of their countrymen as lodgers enabled them to recoup a significant proportion of their housing expenses. Having so many of their kinsmen and former neighbors with them in New York also undoubtedly helped the immigrants. Virtually overnight, they created a large, intricate network that could be used to help find jobs, housing, even spouses. Their arrival in whole family units may have benefited the Lansdowners as well. Children could be set to work blacking boots or selling newspapers, while women could add to the family income by taking in boarders and laundry. And if someone through sickness, injury, or death became unable to work, there were plenty of relatives around to help out. There were also many Lansdowne immigrants who did not fare as well as the three Tim Sheas. For widows with young children, life was particularly hard. But the noticeable absence of Lansdowne surnames in the relief records of the Five Points Mission suggests that the Lansdowners took care of one another—helping widows find new mates and unemployed men and women new jobs.