Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  The most famous of the sporting men’s hangouts were located just south of Five Points on Park Row facing City Hall Park. The best known of these was the Arena, at 28 Park Row, a saloon in which Rynders eventually bought an interest. But many of the sporting men’s haunts, especially before 1850, were located in Five Points. Two of these, “Boss Thompson’s” and “Vultee’s old corner,” faced each other on the west side of Chatham Street at the corner of Orange. In addition, “Big Jerry Tappen” had a place on Pearl near Elm, where, according to the New York Clipper, a sporting men’s newspaper, “considerable sport could be obtained if necessary, in the way of muscular development. It was here that Country McClusky and Dave Scanlon had one of the hardest rough-and-tumble muddy fights that was ever seen. There was also a place on the Collect, or Five Points, kept by one Pete Rice, where many of the best sporting men assembled to participate with ‘pasteboard’” (playing cards). Kernan, himself an old sport, recalled years later in the sporting man’s patois that among the “good fighters who hailed from this locality” in its early days was “Eleck Fannin, at one time quite notorious to the city as a buffer. Joe Moon was some in his day, so was Siege Spears and Big-head Mat.”17

  Although we know that sporting men drank, fought, and gambled in Five Points, the extent to which they lived there is not clear. In a list of 275 or so “Old Sports of New York” published by the Clipper in 1860, there is a dearth of Irish surnames, leaving the impression that the “sporting” subculture, like that of the Bowery B’hoys, primarily attracted the native-born. Nonetheless, we know that some Irish Americans linked to the Five Points, such as Yankee Sullivan, James E. Kerrigan, and (much later) Owen Kildare, were perceived as sporting men. In general, sporting men were far less concerned about ethnicity than the Bowery B’hoys. The ultrapatriotism that characterized the Bowery B’hoy did not seem to motivate the sporting man, who above all prized one’s ability to fight, drink, and avoid regular employment. Sporting men loved a good time, and as Kernan noted, “all jovial, free, generous stripes of mankind would have their frolic[s] and sprees at the Points in preference to any other place.”18

  “THE SPORTING FIREMAN IS IN A CERTAIN CIRCLE A MAN OF CONSIDERATION”

  While the prominence of sporting men and Bowery B’hoys in Five Points may have declined as Irish immigrants came to dominate the neighborhood, the favorite pastime of both groups—service in volunteer fire companies—remained a staple of life. Firemen were the heroes of most lower-income New York neighborhoods. Young boys idolized and imitated local firefighters, while women swooned at their gallantry. “Roman gladiators and the Olympian games are brought to our mind,” wrote the young Walt Whitman after seeing firemen race by pulling their pumping “machines.” Although only volunteers, they took their responsibilities very seriously. Irish immigrant Matthew Breen recalled that “a fireman would sleep with his bedroom window partly open,” no matter what the weather, in order to hear a summons to duty. When a nocturnal alarm did sound, the fireman could be found “rushing from his bed at midnight, snatching at his clothes, tumbling down stairs, and in a half distracted condition pulling foot for the engine-house, tearing open its door, hustling out the machine, and seizing the rope, hurrying away at the rate of ten miles an hour, shouting himself hoarse by the way, ‘Fire—F-i-r-e—Fire! Fire! Fire!’—throwing himself like a salamander into the very thickest of the raging element—and in a couple of hours walking home to bed, sweating like a porpoise.” In crowded tenements full of lamps and candles, fires were common and disastrous.19

  In the antebellum years, only one fire company—Hope Hose Company No. 50 at 101/2 Mott Street—was consistently located in the neighborhood. Others came and went. But Five Pointers did join nearby units, especially Fulton Engine Company No. 21 and Brennan Hose Company No. 60, located in 1858 just west of Five Points on Worth and Elm Streets respectively.20

  Curiously, not a single laborer, tailor, or shoemaker (the three most followed occupations in Five Points) belonged to one of the neighborhood’s fire companies in 1858 when the city published a thorough survey of the department’s membership. The Five Pointers in Hope Hose Company No. 50 instead included a hatter, a saw maker, a baker, a fruit dealer, a carpenter, a picture-frame maker, a silversmith, a gas fitter, and two merchants. Why poorer Five Pointers did not join fire companies is unclear. The fire companies may have levied dues on members that precluded its less prosperous inhabitants from becoming members, or firemen may have required the job security to allow them to leave work on a minute’s notice to fight a blaze.21

  If so, these firemen need not have been financially secure for very long. Hope Hose Company’s two “merchants,” James Tucker and Edward Henry, had only recently achieved their relatively elevated occupational rank. Henry, a County Sligo native, had immigrated to New York in 1850. By 1852, the bachelor worked as a sailor and lived in a boardinghouse in the large brick tenement at 472 Pearl Street. Henry was a very disciplined saver, and by 1855, at twenty-seven, he had clawed his way up the economic ladder to become a clerk. He soon thereafter became a rag dealer, and by early 1857 had amassed savings of $511 (equivalent to more than $8,000 today). Like Henry, fireman Tucker had emigrated from County Sligo. Having arrived in New York in 1846 at age fourteen, he had undoubtedly worked in an unskilled capacity in his first years in New York. By 1855, when he lived in the heart of the Five Points Sligo enclave at 64 Mulberry Street, the twenty-three-year-old had snared one of the highly prized places on the city’s police force. Work as a policeman offered high pay ($12 per week at that point) without seasonal layoffs. Tucker used the money he was able to save while working as a policeman to become a “paper dealer” after he left the force in 1857.22

  Despite their relative prosperity, firemen were known as brawlers. In fact, it seemed at times that firemen had more to fear from their fellow firefighters than from the burning buildings they routinely entered. Firemen from different companies regularly clashed on the way to a blaze or at the hydrant nearest to it, because whichever unit reached the fireplug first had the right to pump its water. “A stranger upon witnessing the exciting races and savage howling of contending brigades . . . would immediately conclude that the town was at the mercy of an infuriated mob,” commented an English immigrant. But competing companies sometimes fought even without the impetus of a dispute over a hydrant, or even of a fire. Five Points policeman William Bell recorded in his diary that he had to remain on duty one July evening until 11:15 p.m. “in consequence of a riot being anticipated between the members or runners of Engine Co. No. 21 & 22.” This hostility may have developed out of a neighborhood or ward rivalry. Although both companies housed their engines in the Sixth Ward near Elm Street, most members of Protector Company No. 22 lived east of the Bowery in the Fourth Ward, while Five Pointer Matthew T. Brennan’s political allies dominated No. 21. Firemen also had to battle neighborhood gangs not affiliated with the department. Chief Alfred Carson reported in 1850 that “not long since, a Five Point club took engine No. 44 from the company, beat some of the company dreadfully, run it down to the Points, upset it, broke the engine, and ran away.” The same gang stole “hose carriage No. 34” while at a fire near the Bowery Theater in retaliation, said the chief, for the attack of William M. Tweed’s Engine Company No. 6 on hose company No. 31.23

  Mention of the young “Boss” Tweed (then twenty-seven years old) highlights the fire companies’ important role in politics. A French visitor to New York in the 1840s learned that “the sporting fireman is in a certain circle a man of consideration. He plays an important part sometimes in the election, and is both throne and oracle in the public-houses.” Tweed used the notoriety, respect, and friendships he earned as foreman of No. 6 to launch his political career in his native Fourth Ward.24

  Although the fire department was the most prestigious voluntary organization they could join, many Five Pointers were also attracted to the neighborhood’s militia units. In the days before the United States maintained a large stan
ding army, the nation depended on volunteer militia companies to defend it against attack. The threat of foreign invasion was increasingly remote by the late antebellum period, so in most militia companies picnics and drinking became more important than drilling. Mathews described another motive for forming a militia company. “To acquire steadiness in aiming the pipe [i.e., hoses] at fires, the Firemen often form themselves into target companies,” he reported. Others simply enjoyed “parading the streets in a half-uniform, with a target borne aloft . . . pierced to the very centre with holes.”

  Although Five Points could boast its share of militia companies, they are much more difficult to trace than the well-documented fire units. We know that in early 1850, forty Sligo natives formed the Sarsfield Light Guards (named for Patrick Sarsfield, one of the commanders of the defeated Catholic army at the Battle of the Boyne), which drilled in Five Points at 502 Pearl Street in a room above the saloon operated by its first captain. Another Irish-American military company in the neighborhood was the “Brennan Guards,” named after ward heeler Matthew Brennan and commanded by his friend and fellow fireman Joseph Dowling.25

  Irish immigrants seemed especially interested in forming militia companies when events in Europe indicated a weakening of British ability to maintain control over Ireland. In 1853, for example, when the Crimean War brought the prospect of a reduced British military presence in Ireland, the New York Irish flooded into militia organizations, demonstrating that these groups perceived themselves as more than merely protectors of the United States. “You and I will be called to the rescue” of our native land, predicted one Irish American as he described the community’s militia companies before a gathering of New York Sligo natives, “and deadly will be our vengeance on the seven hundred year oppression of old Ireland.”26

  “TO MAINTAIN AND ESTABLISH THEIR CHARACTER AS MEN”

  Of course, there were other, less political options for leisure. Some men chose athletics. Organized sports did not dominate men’s social lives in the nineteenth century as they would later on, but the existence of a “Kenmare Hurlers” club indicates that some of the Lansdowne immigrants must have enjoyed that old Irish game on occasion. More prevalent were fraternal orders. Fraternal lodges were wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, with millions becoming Masons, Odd Fellows, Sons of Temperance, and Red Men. Five Pointers joined such groups, though they left few records behind. Some undoubtedly joined the Order of Ancient Hibernians, an outgrowth of one of the largest agrarian secret societies in Ireland. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the neighborhood’s nativists probably enrolled in fraternal lodges such as the Order of United Americans. Young Tweed presided from 1848 to 1849 over one of these lodges, which met weekly at the foot of the Bowery.27

  Five Points’ African Americans had their own fraternal organization, the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. Founded in 1808 to aid members “whom the vicissitudes of time or the freaks of fortune might reduce to want,” the society moved to Five Points in 1820, purchasing the tenement at 42 Orange Street as an investment while using the rental income to pay benefits to members who were unable or too ill to find work. Members erected a wooden building behind the tenement for their meetings. They installed a trapdoor in the floor to hide runaway slaves headed north on the Underground Railroad. Religious services and social events for the Five Points African-American community were held there as well. According to the reminiscences of fireman Florry Kernan, these activities continued until “the respectable residents of Orange Street, mostly negro families, began to move away” after the race riot of 1835. Then “the bell that each Sabbath morning tolled out a call for its congregation to assemble within its walls, that stood back in the rear from Orange Street near Leonard, was hushed; and that, too, moved to another spot to ring a welcome.”28

  The best documented Five Points fraternal group was the Sligo Young Men’s Association. Formed in September 1849 by thirty men, “mostly all natives of Sligo, Ireland,” the Sligo Young Men’s Association was the first Irish fraternal order in New York to base its membership on county of origin. Its founders organized the group, they explained, for “Mutual Benefit and Protection, and for the purpose of maintaining a friendly intercourse with each other, and to maintain and establish their character as men.” After nearly one year of operation, however, only seventy of the several thousand Sligo natives living in New York had joined.29

  Perhaps the dues were too high. The semiannual “ball” organized by the society was not—at one dollar per person—outrageously expensive, though those wishing to attend did need formal attire. The society held the first of these gala events at Tammany Hall in February 1850, and the second six months later at “McCarthy’s Hoboken Chateau.” Many non-members seem to have attended these events, which received glowing reviews in the Irish-American. Its editor argued that the conspicuous consumption practiced at these events actually served a noble purpose, for it proved false “the calumnious statement that our position in America was ‘one of poverty and shame.’. . . [T]hose who spend a delightful evening in the ball room, and combine for social and intellectual improvement, testify that they not only possess position and means, but have the spirit to keep pace with their fellow citizens in this regard.”30

  Although newspapers described the Sligo association’s balls in great detail, little is known about its weekly meetings. The group did have its own song, and the officers undoubtedly organized their “well filled treasury” for the “mutual benefit and protection” of the members in case of illness or death. The society also organized the Sligo Light Guard (as the Sarsfield Guard later renamed itself), and hoped “to amend the social condition of the poorer classes of their brothers, here and in Ireland.” To this end, the Sligo association may have loaned money to members hoping to start businesses, as did the home-town societies created by subsequent Five Points immigrants from Italy and China. Five Pointers made up a significant proportion of the association’s members. Nearly one-third of the members organizing the group’s January 1851 ball lived or worked in the neighborhood. In the postbellum years, other county organizations (such as the Kerry Men’s Society, which must have attracted some of the many Five Pointers from that district) were eventually formed as well. By the 1870s, at least eighteen Irish county societies operated in New York.31

  The high costs of dues and balls may have discouraged many Five Pointers from joining one of these county societies, yet all but the most destitute could afford an occasional night out at one of the moderately priced theaters on the Bowery or Chatham Street. Bowery B’hoys and G’hals, and even bootblacks and newsboys, were devoted to the theater. They loved both lowbrow melodramas and classics such as Shakespeare. The best known of the city’s inexpensive playhouses in that era was the Bowery Theater, located on that famous thoroughfare between Bayard and Canal Streets. Working-class New Yorkers flocked to the playhouse, even though the Herald in 1836 called the theater “the worst and wickedest that ever stood a month in any city under heaven.” Foster agreed with the Herald’s assessment, remarking that its upper galleries were “filled with rowdies, fancy men, working girls of doubtful reputation, and, last of all, the lower species of public prostitutes, accompanied by their ‘lovyers’ or such victims as they have been able to pick up.”32

  Yet working-class men and women loved the raucous atmosphere of the Bowery Theater. A description of a performance in the 1870s gives a sense of the atmosphere. The featured attraction, noted Charles Haswell in his memoirs, was

  a stock Irish play, in which a virtuous peasant girl and a high-minded patriot with knee-breeches, a brogue and an illicit whiskey-still, utterly expose and confound a number of designing dukes, lords, etc. . . . We idled about behind the seats of the balcony, with audible steps among the thick-strewn peanut-shells. . . .I saw but two gloved women in the audience. . . . [B]eside the proper and prevailing peanut, the spectators refreshed themselves with a great variety of bodily nutriment. Ham sandwich and sausage seemed to have
precedence, but pork chops were also prominent, receiving the undivided attention of a large family party in the second tier, the members of which consumed the chops with noble persistence through all of the intermissions. . . . The denuded bones were most of them playfully shied at the heads of acquaintances in the pit . . . if you hit the wrong man, you have only to look innocent and unconscious.

  The audience frequently interrupted those on stage with comments about the plot. Actors expected this, and after an important line they would turn to the audience and ask, “‘Is that so, boys?’ or ‘Don’t you, boys?’ and then the outcry and acclaim were so loud and long that all babies in the house cried out, which caused another terrible din.” Patrons at least got their money’s worth. When Haswell left at eleven forty-five, a third “piece” (probably a one-act play or vaudeville routine) was just beginning.33

  These theaters catered to their customers’ interests and prejudices. In 1843, the Chatham Theater (a few blocks south of the Bowery Theater) premiered the first “blackface” musical troupe, the Virginia Minstrels. Portrayals of “Jim Crow” likewise drew big crowds at the Bowery. In the postbellum period, the Bowery staged a life of Custer in which Sitting Bull died at Little Bighorn.34

  But working-class theatergoers most loved to see themselves portrayed on stage. In 1848, actor and Five Points native Frank Chanfrau strode on stage with a fireman’s red jacket, tight pants, and “soap locked” hair. The role was “Mose, the fire b’hoy,” part of a short sketch of Bowery life meant to serve as an interlude between the full-length melodramas. The audience watched in rapt silence as Chanfrau’s Mose took the cigar from his mouth, spit, and speaking of his fire company, defiantly declared that “I ain’t a goin’ to run with dat mercheen no more!” The crowd roared its approval. The sketch was such a hit that its author, Benjamin Baker, expanded it into an entire play, A Glance at New York. Like the real-life B’hoy, Mose was a loyal fireman (“I love that ingine better than my dinner”) and was always pining for a fight (“if I don’t have a muss soon I’ll spile”). The play was so popular that Chanfrau once performed in it at midday at the Olympic Theater, in midafternoon at the Chatham, and in the evening across the Hudson in Newark. Numerous sequels followed, and dramas featuring Mose and his G’hal Lize dominated working-class theater throughout the 1850s.35