Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Of the many dance halls, one—Pete Williams’s place—became by midcentury a virtual city landmark. A tourist believed that he “had not seen New York city unless he had visited Uncle Pete’s,” located at 67 Orange Street just south of Bayard. The establishment’s fame dated back to 1842, when Charles Dickens featured the saloon—then called Almack’s—in American Notes. Yet frustratingly little is known about Pete Williams himself. Foster described him as “a middle-aged, well-to-do, coal-black negro, who has made an immense amount of money from the profits of his dance-house—which, unfortunately, he regularly gambles away at the sweat-cloth of the roulette-table as fast as it comes in. He glories in being a bachelor . . . is a great admirer of the drama,” and owned a team of fast horses that he loved to race. While virtually nothing else is known about him, Williams was remembered well after his death as “a great mogul on the Points.”50

  Pete Williams’s basement differed little in appearance from other neighborhood dance halls. Despite its scandalous reputation, commented Nathaniel Willis, “really it looked very clean and cheerful. It was a spacious room with a low ceiling, excessively whitewashed, nicely sanded, and well lit, and the black proprietor and his ‘ministering spirits’ (literally fulfilling their vocation behind a very tidy bar) were well-dressed and well-mannered people.” But it was the mixing of blacks and whites on the dance floor that shocked well-to-do visitors. “Several very handsome mulatto women were in the crowd,” Willis noted in the early 1840s, “and a few ‘young men about town,’ mixed up with the blacks; and altogether it was a picture of ‘amalgamation,’ such as I had never before seen.” The New York Clipper agreed that at Pete Williams’s place, “amalgamation reigned predominant, if we may judge from appearances.” Outsiders viewed the mixing of the races—especially in the close, sweaty, and sexually charged context of the dance hall—as one of the most scandalous features of such Five Points establishments.51

  Pete Williams’s Dance Hall, 1860. New York Illustrated News (February 18, 1860): 217. Collection of the author.

  Visitors’ descriptions of the dancing at Pete Williams’s place combined this moral indignation with prurient fascination. As the dancing commenced, the proceedings seemed innocent enough. According to Foster, “each gentleman, by a simultaneous and apparently preconcerted movement, now ‘drawrs’ his ‘chawr’ of tobacco, and depositing it carefully in his trowsers pocket, flings his arms about his buxom inamorata and salutes her whisky-breathing lips with a chaste kiss, which extracts a scream of delight from the delicate creature, something between the whoop of an Indian and the neighing of a horse. And now the orchestra strikes up ‘Cooney in de Holler’ and the company ‘cavorts to places.’” But as the dancing progressed and the musicians picked up the pace, the passion of the dancers became far too palpable. “The spirit of the dance is fully aroused,” observed Reverend Pease. “On flies the fiddle-bow, faster and faster; on jingles tambourine ’gainst head and heels, knee and elbow, and on smash the dancers. The excitement becomes general. Every foot, leg, arm, head, lip, body, all are in motion. Sweat, swear, fiddle, dance, shout, and stamp, underground in smoke, and dust, and putrid air!” The fiddler compelled the dancers to quicken the tempo further, observed Foster, until “all observance of the figure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurras on his or her own hook. . . . The dancers, now wild with excitement . . . leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder.”52

  AS THIS NEARLY OVERT SUGGESTION of orgasm implies, most middle- and upper-class New Yorkers found Five Pointers’ modes of entertainment shocking and depraved. Although gambling, the theater, the fire and militia companies, the dance halls and saloons, and the subcultures that flourished in them were hardly illegal, it seemed to many New Yorkers that each of these licit activities led inexorably to others that were illicit. The fire companies brawled and rioted; the dance halls encouraged lewdness and promiscuity; the saloons and gambling dens fostered public drunkenness and crime; the sporting men promoted illegal prizefighting; and the working-class theaters (as well as the dance halls and the Bowery) were filled with prostitutes. Despite the neighborhood’s vibrant and multifaceted cultural life, these vices would come to dominate Americans’ perception of Five Points.

  7

  PROLOGUE

  THE BARE-KNUCKLE PRIZEFIGHT BETWEEN

  YANKEE SULLIVAN AND TOM HYER

  FIVE POINTERS loved a good fight. Their propensity to riot was notorious. Election day in the neighborhood rarely ended without blackened eyes and bloodied lips. When fights broke out on the street, passersby typically circled round and egged on the combatants rather than break them up. Five Pointers often agreed to settle their grudges with fights. In 1856, for example, two well-known brawlers, Jim Moroney of the Fourth Ward and Tim Connolly of the Sixth, decided to resolve their ongoing feud with a boxing match in Weehawken, New Jersey, where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had settled their differences a half century earlier. The Irish were not the neighborhood’s only brawlers. When one well-known Five Points boxer put on an exhibition in 1848, the “very promising New York novices” on the undercard included a few “Chatham street Jews.” But the greatest Five Points fight of all, one of the most famous prizefights in American boxing history, a match that until the 1880s or ’90s was the most talked about fight of the nineteenth century, was the 1849 battle between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan.1

  Yankee Sullivan was born Frank Ambrose in Bandon, Cork, in about 1807. At the age of twenty-three, the “freckled-face, ginger-haired, pug-nosed” young man with the “close-cropped, bullet-like head,” already a renowned fighter in Liverpool, was arrested for an unknown felony and punished with transportation to Australia. He escaped in 1839 and sailed for America, landing at Sag Harbor, Long Island. Returning to England in 1840 to resume his boxing career, he took the name Jim Sullivan to avoid detection by the police, adding the nickname “Yankee” (whether of his own invention or that of his fans is unclear) to stress his purported American roots.2

  Sullivan was not a big man. He stood five feet ten inches tall and had a wiry physique. Upon his return to England, he issued a public challenge to pay £100 to anyone weighing less than one hundred fifty-five pounds who could defeat him. He fought and won a number of bouts, including one in February 1841 against Johnny “Hammer” Lane that made Sullivan the English middleweight champion. Warned that the police suspected his true identity, Sullivan returned to the United States a few months later. He won a bout in Philadelphia and then secured a match against one of the best American boxers, Thomas Secor. The two squared off in January 1842 on Staten Island (the isolated location selected because bare-knuckle prizefights were illegal), with Sullivan eventually prevailing in sixty-seven hard-fought rounds.* Sullivan’s victory, according to the nineteenth-century boxing historian Ed James, forced native-born New Yorkers to “cast their eyes round the pugilistic circle to find a man capable of holding up the honor of the Stars and Stripes against the encroachments of the Green Flag of the Emerald Isle.”3

  Five Pointers of Irish descent must have cheered the news of Sullivan’s victory. In fact, as he became settled in New York, Sullivan increasingly identified himself with Five Points. His first exhibition sparring match in New York supposedly took place at Owen and Matthew Brennan’s Monroe Hall saloon. Sullivan soon opened watering holes of his own, first just east of the Five Points district on Walker and Madison Streets, then slightly south of the neighborhood on Chatham Street, and finally in Five Points itself in 1849 at 110 Centre Street (at the southeast corner of Centre and Franklin). Sullivan also joined the fire department, according to James, becoming “identified with No. 15 Engine, known as the Spartan Band, and located in [the Five Points neighborhood on] Pell street, off the Bowery. In those days the do-as-you-please racket characterized the New York fire laddies, and every company had its fighter, and Jim Sullivan was installed bully of No. 15.” Throu
gh the fire department, Sullivan became involved in local politics as well, playing a major role (as we have seen) in both the Sixth Ward election riot of 1842 and the wild race for Sixth Ward alderman in 1849.4

  Meanwhile, Sullivan’s ring exploits added to his fame outside Five Points. Boxing promoters had cannily paired him against “American” opponents so that each fight could be billed as one pitting Irish versus American pride (James noted that when Sullivan fought Irish-American John Morrissey in 1853, their “both being Irish rather mixed the gang up”). When Sullivan dispatched these American-born rivals, fight organizers imported Englishman Bob Caunt, to whom “the American boys gave their sympathies.” In a fight staged in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Sullivan whipped Caunt in just twelve minutes.

  Sullivan’s victory over Caunt left only one other top boxer for him to vanquish: Tom Hyer. Born in New York City in 1819, the one-time butcher established himself as America’s premier fighter with just one victory. In 1841, the previously unheralded Hyer defeated John McCleester, the “pride of Chatham Square,” in an epic three-hour battle that lasted 101 rounds and is still considered one of the greatest fights of all time. Sullivan, who had served as one of McCleester’s “seconds” in this contest, sought to fight Hyer soon after, but the American refused because Sullivan could not raise his half of the unprecedented $6,000 Hyer insisted upon as prize money. Seven years later, with Sullivan having defeated every other available challenger, supporters of the two pugilists insisted that “they must fight.” Sullivan finally managed to raise the required sum ($5,000 by this point) and began preparing for the bout.5

  Despite Sullivan’s bragging that no punch from Hyer could bring him down, experts made the Irishman the heavy underdog. Hyer stood four inches taller than Sullivan, weighed thirty pounds more, and had a much longer reach, all vital factors working against the Cork native, though these were not necessarily insurmountable handicaps under the permissive boxing rules of the day. Handicappers also speculated that at age forty-one, Sullivan was too old to keep up with a rival twelve years his junior. On the other hand, Sullivan did have far more experience than Hyer. The Irishman had never lost a bout, defeating a dozen top boxers over the course of his career, while Hyer still had only the one major victory to his credit. Sullivan was also an expert at the wrestling holds and throws then permitted in boxing matches, and his backers believed he could use these skills to compensate for Hyer’s height and weight advantage.

  In order to evade any law enforcement officials who might try to prevent or interrupt the contest, the combatants initially exercised the utmost secrecy about the date and location of the contest. On the eve of the fight, however, word of the impending clash leaked out. When news spread that the day of the fight was finally at hand, it created a “perfect frenzy of excitement” throughout the nation, and especially in New York. “Nothing has been heard of or talked about for several days past but the fight,” marveled the Herald. “Urchins in school could not be kept at their lessons, but insisted upon their right to talk of what the whole town talked about. . . . At the courts, in the public offices, at steamboat landings, at hotel dinner tables, in counting rooms, and even in the sick chamber, everybody talked about the prize fight.” Both men narrowly escaped Maryland law enforcement officials who sought to arrest them on the eve of the bout—Sullivan climbed out a window and hid in a tree to avoid detection.6

  The contestants finally squared off before just one hundred witnesses on a snow-covered field overlooking the Chesapeake in the late afternoon on February 7. Playing the ethnic angle to the hilt, Sullivan chose green and white as his colors, while Hyer, the hero of the “native boys,” chose red, white, and blue. In the first round, Sullivan charged at Hyer, who was able to use his superior reach to land the most damaging blows. Seeing that he could not fight Hyer at arm’s length, Sullivan tried to crowd his opponent, but this was ineffectual as well. Sullivan then “rushed in at the body,” wrote James, “and after two or three ineffective exchanges clinched his antagonist with the underhold and struggled for the throw,” a reference to Sullivan’s vaunted “tumble-down tactics.” “This was the great point on which was to depend the result of the fight,” explained James. “Sullivan relied mainly for success upon his superior wrestling, and it was calculated by his friends and backers that a few of his favorite cross-buttocks would break his young antagonist . . . and not only render him limpsey with weakness, but stun him with the falls.” From the clinch, Sullivan attempted to lift Hyer and throw him to the ground. “Two or three times did Sullivan knot his muscles with an almost superhuman effort,” but to no avail. He could not budge Hyer. When Sullivan had thus “spent his power by these terrible impulsions,” Hyer used an “upper-hold” maneuver to throw his antagonist to the ground, falling heavily on top of the prone Irishman.7

  The 1849 prizefight between Yankee Sullivan (left) and Tom Hyer. Collection of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD.

  Virtually every subsequent round was a repeat of the first: Sullivan attacking but taking more punishment than he could mete out; Sullivan moving in to fight at close range yet unable to land any damaging blows; Sullivan clinching and attempting in vain to throw Hyer; Hyer tossing Sullivan to the ground and “falling upon him, as before, with his entire weight.” After a half dozen such rounds (each one lasted about a minute), Sullivan began to show the effects of the beating. His legs became weaker. His eyes began to swell shut. Blood flowed profusely down his face. His punches began to lose their sting. After sixteen rounds, Sullivan was reeling and staggering, and his second, McCleester, refused to let him continue. “Thus ended a contest,” wrote James, “which had, up to that time, excited more interest than any other pugilistic encounter that ever took place in this country; but which, though it engaged thousands of minds for a period of six long months, was done up when once begun in [just] seventeen minutes and eighteen seconds.”8

  Despite Sullivan’s ignominious defeat, the Hyer-Sullivan contest went down in boxing history as one of the most memorable and important fights of the century. “The result . . . has become as familiar as the Declaration of Independence,” remarked the Clipper fifteen years later. Even a half century after the contest, Tammany ward boss George Washington Plunkitt said of the saloons in his Upper West Side district that “the only ornaments is a three-cornered mirror nailed to the wall, and a chromo of the fight between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan.” Even today, memorabilia of the Sullivan-Hyer fight circulate and recirculate, including whiskey mugs, playing cards, and prints.9

  In the aftermath of the contest, the two fighters became close friends. Hyer became proprietor of the bar at the Branch Hotel at 36 Bowery (where he had also lived before the contest) while Sullivan opened his saloon at 110 Centre Street. By 1852, Sullivan had abandoned his Democratic allies and began lending his support to Hyer’s Unionist Club, the pro-Whig organization that used its influence and muscle to counterbalance the efforts of Isaiah Rynders’s Empire Club. Hyer, who refused to consider another bout for less than $10,000, never fought again. He did, however, impress Whig leaders with his intelligence and political savvy. Though he turned down many requests to run for office, he eventually became a confidant of the most powerful Whig and Republican politicians in the state. In 1864, he died of heart disease in New York at age forty-five.

  Sullivan, in contrast, continued his brawling ways. He joined many of his fellow sporting men in California in 1850, but not satisfied there, soon returned to the East Coast. He fought John Morrissey in Boston in a much-anticipated bout, and though he apparently whipped his opponent, he was declared the loser for refusing to continue the fight when pandemonium broke out at ringside. He went back to California, where he quickly became involved in San Francisco politics. But the authorities there would not countenance the political tactics that Sullivan had perfected in Five Points. In 1855, they arrested him for ballot box tampering and other, more violent crimes. Threatened with a long prison term, the despondent Sullivan slashed his wrist
s in his cell and bled to death.10

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Vice and Crime

  FOR MOST AMERICANS, Five Points was the epitome of vice and lawlessness. The neighborhood “was, for years, the synonym for wretchedness, vice, and crime,” wrote a superintendent of the Five Points House of Industry. The Herald labeled the district a “nest of drunkenness, roguery, debauchery, vice and pestilence.” “If there is a spot in our city where vice reigns unchecked, and moral pollution is the unmixed atmosphere of immortal souls,” agreed a magazine writer in 1853, “surely all will admit it to be in that vicinity.” Could Five Points really have been so crime-ridden? Could prostitution, robbery, murder, and drunkenness—the crimes and vices for which Five Points was renowned—really have been so common? An analysis of the historical record reveals that some facets of the stereotype have been grossly exaggerated. But others, such as those concerning the pervasiveness of drunkenness and prostitution, were far closer to the truth than not.11

  “EVERY HOUSE WAS A BROTHEL, AND EVERY BROTHEL A HELL”

  There was no vice more synonymous with Five Points than prostitution. The reputed pervasiveness of the sex trade, the conditions under which the prostitutes supposedly worked, and the purported extent to which the young and innocent were forced into the business appear absurd to the modern reader. “Every house was a filthy brothel, the resort of persons of every sex, age, color, and nationality,” wrote a nineteenth-century historian of Five Points. George Foster agreed, writing in 1849 that “nearly every house and cellar is a groggery below and a brothel above,” while House of Industry founder Lewis Pease remembered that at his arrival there, “every house was a brothel, and every brothel a hell.” Bordellos were believed to be family-run businesses in every sense. “[I]t is no unusual thing,” insisted Foster, “for a mother and her two or three daughters—all of course prostitutes—to receive their ‘men’ at the same time and in the same room—passing in and out and going through all the transactions of their hellish intercourse, with a sang froid at which devils would stand aghast and struck with horror.” The tender age of Five Points’ courtesans also consistently shocked New Yorkers. The Evening Post reported that girls of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen were commonly “enticed” from their homes and taken to Five Points “dens, where they are kept until they are become so in love with the sin, that they can neither be persuaded nor forced to leave their wretched abodes.”12