Newsboys and bootblacks were especially avid theatergoers, so much so that they founded their own theater in a Five Points tenement basement. The tiny playhouse on Baxter Street just south of the Five Points intersection attracted little notice until late 1871, when the Russian grand duke Alexis visited the neighborhood during an American tour. His “slumming party” stopped at the youths’ theater, bringing it to the attention of the general public and inspiring the lads to christen it “The Grand Duke’s Opera House.” “It is emphatically a boys’ theatre, owned, built and managed by boys,” commented Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1874. “Boys are the stage-carpenters, actors, musicians, scene-shifters, money-takers, and the audience is, for the most part, composed of boys.” An accordionist “accompanied by a bone-player” provided the music. Though the theater was supposed to hold only fifty, three times that number (mostly “bootblacks and newsboys”) had crowded in when a reporter from the Herald visited in February 1874. The theater became so famous that Horatio Alger included a chapter entitled “The Grand Duke’s Opera House” in his novel Julius the Street Boy (1904).36
“Interior of the Grand Duke’s Theatre—The Audience during the Performance of the Thrilling Spectacle of the March of the ‘Mulligan Guards,’” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (January 17, 1874): 316. Collection of the Library of Congress.
“THE MOST REDOUBTABLE STRONGHOLD OF WICKEDNESS ON FIVE POINTS, IF NOT IN NEW-YORK”
Though Five Pointers, like all working-class New Yorkers, were passionate about the theater, they spent the bulk of their leisure time drinking and socializing at one of the neighborhood’s bars. In nineteenth-century New York, both saloons and grocery stores sold alcohol by the glass, and Five Pointers had dozens of such establishments to choose from. In 1851, there were at least 252 saloons and groceries in Five Points’ 22 blocks, or about a dozen per block. The more impoverished a street’s residents, the more watering holes they had to choose from. Relatively affluent Mott and Bayard Streets contained only sixteen and eighteen liquor sellers respectively (and these were mostly grocers). Mulberry Street, in contrast, could boast forty-six “groggeries” while Orange Street had fifty-three (63 percent of which were saloons). The short block of Orange just north of the Five Points intersection, one of the most squalid in the neighborhood, had sixteen liquor sellers on its twenty lots.37
The groceries in Five Points were mostly dark, dirty, depressing-looking establishments. Because the neighborhood’s inhabitants did not generally have much money for discretionary spending, Five Points grocers specialized in “that class of commodities usually in demand where cheapness is the substitute for quality,” wrote the Clipper. They stocked virtually everything a tenement resident might need—food, fuel, soap, candles, crockery, pipes, and tobacco. Grocers typically stored food in barrels and other items “behind the counter [in] tin boxes, devoid of their original laquer from wear of age and use. . . . At the end of the grease coated counter, furthermost from the door, a portion is railed off and constitutes the inevitable bar,” behind which “are ranged some score of tall-necked bottles. A beer barrel stands in the extreme corner, and in these articles we have the most lucrative portion of the grocer’s trade, for no purchaser enters the murky store without indulging in a consolatory drink, be their sex as it may.” Some groceries were equipped with billiard tables to encourage customers to tarry and drink awhile. Prostitutes often loitered in them as well, reported Foster, looking for customers and “fortify[ing] themselves with alcohol for their nightly occupation.”38
“Crown’s Grocery” was the best known in Five Points. Located since about 1840 at 150 Anthony Street (at the southwest corner of Little Water facing Paradise Park), Crown’s was a neighborhood institution and, according to one of the Protestant charitable organizations working in the district, “the most redoubtable stronghold of wickedness on Five Points, if not in New-York.” Situated a few steps below street level in an “old dilapidated” three-story frame building, Crown’s “combined groggery and grocery” did a thriving business. According to George Foster, a cornucopia of sights and smells overwhelmed the Five Pointer who descended the stairs and entered Crown’s emporium:
It is not without difficulty that we effect an entrance, through the baskets, barrels, boxes, Irish women and sluttish house-keepers, white, black, yellow, and brown, thickly crowding the walk, up to the very threshold—as if the store were too full of its commodities and customers, and some of them had tumbled and rolled outdoors. On either hand piles of cabbages, potatoes, squashes, eggplants, tomatoes, turnips, eggs, dried apples, chesnuts and beans rise like miniature mountains round you. At the left hand as you enter is a row of little boxes, containing anthracite and charcoal, nails, plug-tobacco, &c. &c. which are dealt out in any quantity, from a bushel or a dollar to a cent’s-worth. On a shelf near by is a pile of fire-wood, seven sticks for sixpence, or a cent apiece, and kindling-wood three sticks for two cents. Along the walls are ranged upright casks containing lamp-oil, molasses, rum, whisky, brandy, and all sorts of cordials (carefully manufactured in the back room, where a kettle and furnace, with all the necessary instruments of spiritual devilment, are provided for the purpose). The cross-beams that support the ceiling are thickly hung with hams, tongues, sausages, strings of onions, and other light and airy articles, and at every step you tumble over a butter-firkin or a meal-bin. Across one end of the room runs a “long, low, black” counter, armed at either end with bottles of poisoned fire-water, doled out at three cents a glass to the loafers and bloated women who frequent the place—while the shelves behind are filled with an uncatalogueable jumble of candles, allspice, crackers, sugar and tea, pickles, ginger, mustard, and other kitchen necessaries. In the opposite corner is a shorter counter filled with three-cent pies, mince, apple, pumpkin and custard—all kept smoking hot—where you can get a cup of coffee with plenty of milk and sugar, for the same price, and buy a hat-full of “Americans with Spanish wrappers” [cigars] for a penny.39
Crown profited handsomely from his business acumen. After fewer than ten years in business on Anthony Street, the Irish immigrant could afford to establish a “drygoods” outlet on Division Street as well. Crown apparently could not resist the very spirits he peddled, however—he supposedly “died of intemperance” in late 1857. Reformers hoped that Crown’s death would lead to the demise of his “rum shop.” Instead, his wife Susan became the proprietor, and it became known as “Mrs. Crown’s.” Two years later, upward of a thousand Five Pointers continued to patronize it daily.40
Most Five Pointers chose to do their drinking in saloons rather than groceries. Though temperance advocates perceived little difference between the two, the atmosphere in a saloon varied from that of a grocery in many ways. While German grocery proprietors outnumbered their Irish counterparts by about two to one, Irish Americans were four times more likely than Germans to operate a Five Points saloon. The interior of a saloon also bore little resemblance to that of a grocery. In contrast to the crowded grocery, a saloon was a long, narrow open space, with a long bar running down one wall and an empty floor opposite it to accommodate the crowds that might visit at lunchtime and in the evening. Sawdust covered the floors to sop up spit tobacco juice and spilt beer, and a large stove stood at the center of the room to provide warmth during the winter. Only saloons catering specifically to Germans offered their patrons tables and chairs. Five Points saloons lacked seats primarily because there was no space for them. But drinkers did not linger long in a single bar anyway. After a glass or two (enough to treat and be treated), the drinker and his friends generally went up the block or around the corner to another favorite watering hole. Finally, unlike the grocery, the New York saloon was an overwhelmingly male domain. Women could drink in groceries, but were rarely found in Five Points saloons.41
Many nineteenth-century New Yorkers associated Five Points with saloons. The earliest descriptions of the neighborhood give prominent place to its “grog shops” and “tippling h
ouses.” One writer, Luc Sante, even credits Five Points with the invention of the American saloon, insisting that “the saloon, as it came to be known, loved, and reviled, was born . . . in the area of the Five Points.” No evidence exists to substantiate this claim. Saloons evolved from pubs and taverns, a feature of New York life long before Five Points’ streets were even laid out. Yet saloons did occupy an important place in the social life of the typical male Five Pointer. Newspaperman and politico Mike Walsh noted that saloons were so popular in neighborhoods such as Five Points because the immigrants had “scarcely room enough to turn around” inside their tenements. Charles Loring Brace agreed that in comparison to the depressing conditions facing the immigrant at home, in a saloon “he can find jolly companions, a lighted and warmed room, a newspaper, and, above all, a draught which . . . can change poverty into riches, and drive care and labor and the thought of all his burdens and annoyances far away. The liquor shop is his picture-gallery, club, reading-room, and social salon, at once. His glass is the magic transmuter of care to cheerfulness, of penury to plenty, of a low, ignorant, worried life, to an existence for the moment buoyant, contented, and hopeful.” The saloon also offered more tangible attractions, such as free lunches, bowling, billiards, raffles, card games like poker and faro, and even cockfights.42
The saloonkeeper himself frequently drew patrons to his establishment through his popularity or prominence. Many a Five Pointer must have found it exciting to sidle up to Yankee Sullivan’s Centre Street bar and share a drink with the famous prizefighter, or hobnob with the neighborhood’s leading politicos at Matt Brennan’s Monroe Hall. Even in the absence of a celebrity proprietor, Irish Five Pointers, like their countrymen everywhere in America, preferred “the bar-keeper whose name has in it the flavour of the shamrock.”43
But most Five Pointers respected their barkeepers primarily for their palpable power within the neighborhood. The saloonkeeper “was a social force in the community,” remembered one self-proclaimed “son of the Bowery,” Charles Stelzle, of his postbellum youth in the Five Points vicinity:
Often he secured work for both the workingman and his children. . . . [A]s a young apprentice, when I was arrested . . . the first man to whom my friends turned was the saloon-keeper on the block. And he furnished bail gladly. He was doing it all the time. He had close affiliation with the dominant political party; he was instrumental in getting the young men of the neighborhood on the police force and into the fire department, the most coveted jobs in the city among my young workmen friends. He lent money . . . [and] no questions were asked as to whether or not the recipient was deserving.
As a result of such kindness, immigrants deferred to their saloonkeepers in virtually every arena, even making them “officials in the church societies, marshals in church processions, [and] chairmen in church meetings.” Matthew Breen summed up the feelings of most Irish immigrants when he stated that “there is no more charitable man living on the face of the earth than the New York liquor dealer.”44
Gambling attracted many Five Pointers into the local saloons. Many competed at poker, but at midcentury the most popular card game was faro, a kind of card version of roulette in which players must bet on which card will be turned over next. Bars that featured these games of chance were some of the most infamous in the district. “Regular gambling-holes, they are; the dens of the Five Points!” exclaimed a shocked French actor who paid a policeman for a tour of the worst dives. “The frequenters of these dens play cards with shabby coats, sleeves rolled up, a pipe in their mouths, a loaded revolver by their sides, and a well-sharpened knife under their hands.” Despite the hyperbole, there was some truth to his statements. Stabbings—some even fatal—were a staple of the Five Points gambling den. But a neighborhood resident would have had little to fear from merely entering one of the district’s gaming saloons.45
Although no longer associated with wagering, bowling (probably the version now referred to as “duck pins”) was also a gambler’s sport in nineteenth-century New York, and many Five Points saloons featured the game. On his tour of New York in 1841, Dickens often saw at the top of cellar stairs “a painted lamp [which] directs you to the Bowling Saloon, or Ten-Pin alley; Ten-Pins being a game of mingled chance and skill, invented when the legislature passed an act forbidding Nine-Pins.” Foster reported that “there are not less than four hundred of these fruitful sources of corruption in our city, plying their detestable trade with an activity that would do honor to a better calling. . . . On Saturday nights they are usually most crowded, and often keep in hot blast until the morning bells of the Sabbath compel their frequenters to slink away to a less noisy kind of dissipation.” An 1880 insurance map shows that Five Pointers bowled in the alleys behind the saloons at 51 and 63 Baxter Street, whence the origin of the term “bowling alley.” Boys often became acquainted with bowling by working in saloons. “They wait upon the players, setting up the pins, returning the balls, fetching a light for their segars, supplying them with liquor when thirsty,” and received in return a small sum from the saloonkeeper and tips from lucky bowlers. One such “pin boy” was Timothy Harrington, a Lansdowne immigrant who came to New York with a brother and three sisters in 1851. Two years later, fourteen-year-old Timothy lived with his seventeen-year-old brother John in the heart of the Lansdowne enclave at 155 Anthony Street and supported himself setting up pins in a “bowling alley.”46
Not all Five Points gambling took place in saloons. In fact, the neighborhood’s most popular form of wagering was “policy gambling,” private lotteries in which players tried to guess which numbers would be selected in a daily drawing. The more numbers guessed correctly, the more the player won. “The evil of all other modes of gaming sink[s] into insignificance in comparison with this,” opined the National Police Gazette in an 1845 exposé on policy gambling, “as it is the only one which extends its havoc to the poor, and its corrupting mania to the females of that class.” Some made their wagers by visiting policy offices. Others placed their bets with runners who, according to the Gazette, “penetrate into their very dwellings, and dog them to their places of work, for the last few pennies which a latent sense of prudence had reserved for food.” For help in selecting their numbers, players often turned to “policy dream books,” which explained how a gambler’s dreams revealed his or her daily lucky numbers. The so-called father of the policy business, Moses Baker, based his operations at the eastern end of Five Points at 1 Chatham Square. That “prognosticators of lucky numbers were held in high repute with the denizens of the Points” also reflected the popularity of policy in the neighborhood.47
Gambling attracted many Five Pointers to the district’s saloons; music and dancing enticed other customers into dance halls. The Five Points dance halls were concentrated on Anthony Street between Centre and Orange. Kernan remembered that they “were all fitted up in the same way; that is, there was the clean sanded floor, its red bombazine curtains at the shop-windows and doors, its whitewashed walls and ceiling, from which hung a hoop chandelier, which daily was replenished with new candles.” Of course, the many dance halls located in cellars usually had no headroom for chandeliers. House of Industry founder Lewis Pease visited a dance hall in Cow Bay housed in “a low, damp, dingy basement, twelve feet wide by thirty long.” Its ceiling was so low that taller customers had to duck to avoid hitting the floor joists. “The place was jammed so full, as not to leave room for the musician to sit, or even to draw his bow standing, without hitting some one,” reported Pease, “while the steam and stench that issued therefrom was perfectly stifling.” Kernan recalled that because these dance halls were so tiny, “a long bench on each side of the room was all the seats you could find, the object being to leave as much room for the dancers as possible. Away in one corner was a small bar, or counter, from which you could purchase ale, porter, or spruce beer by the glass publicly, ardent spirits by the half-pint slyly.”48
Five Points dance halls attracted a wide variety of customers, from both wit
hin and outside the neighborhood. According to Foster, sailors and “the b’hoys, members of rowdy clubs and those who ‘run’ with the engines,” were especially loyal customers. Kernan concurred, recalling that “it was a jubilee, indeed, to the landlords of the Points when the crew of a United States ship-of-war got paid off.” Blacks and whites danced in the same basements, some wearing coats and boots while others went shirt-sleeved and barefooted. Dance halls did an especially brisk business when a favorite musician was scheduled to perform. “Jack Ballagher, the black musical wonder,” was Five Points’ “famed fiddler,” recounted Kernan. He drew a throng of dancers whenever he rosined his bow. Dancing establishments also thrived during cold weather. “The homes of the poor in the Points are not fit places in which to spend an evening pleasantly,” commented the Tribune in explaining this surge in business, “for in most of them there are from four to a dozen individuals—the rooms are dirty and unventilated, consequently the inhabitants are forced into the streets to find either pleasure or comfort. But in cold weather the streets are too bleak, therefore to find what they seek they are in many cases compelled to resort to the theater, the dance-house, or the gambling or drinking saloon.” As long as Five Pointers continued to inhabit overcrowded tenement apartments, concluded the Tribune, it would be impossible to keep them “from these wicked and degrading amusements.”49
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