Shaarey Zedek was at first more receptive to intermarriage than New York’s other synagogues. When the city’s second oldest congregation, Bnai Jeshurun, refused to convert one member’s non-Jewish wife to Judaism, he tried to complete the process himself by sneaking her into its mikvah, a ritual bath for women. He was caught and expelled from the congregation. He joined Anshe Chesed, the city’s third synagogue, but it also refused to recognize his wife as Jewish. The desperate man then became a founding member of Shaarey Zedek. Its leaders declared his wife (as well as the non-Jewish wives of other founding members) officially converted and full congregation members. Yet even Shaarey Zedek’s relatively liberal congregation apparently felt pangs of guilt about its decision. Thereafter, the synagogue’s board declared, Shaarey Zedek would only certify conversions approved by a rabbi.12
The congregation also struggled with the observance of the Sabbath. Many of its members operated their businesses on Saturdays, a prime shopping day for most New Yorkers. The temple’s leaders tried to encourage members to keep the Sabbath holy, decreeing in 1841 that no member could become an officer of the congregation “if he keeps open his Shop on Sabbath.” But the Five Pointers who dominated Shaarey Zedek apparently valued business over religious fidelity, as a few years later the rule was no longer enforced. In fact, Shaarey Zedek had trouble attracting men to services at all. Like other New York synagogues, it resorted to hiring “minyan men,” Jews paid to attend synagogue to ensure that ten men—the minimum required under Orthodox law—appeared at each service. But not all men were welcome. In 1844, its board of trustees declared “that no man can become a member hereafter what was a Russian subject except which are members at present—they the Russians are allowed to be seatholders only.”13
New York synagogues relied so heavily on minyan men in part because ethnic rivalries and liturgical controversies continually prompted secessions from the existing congregations. In 1843, a group left Shaarey Zedek to form Beth Israel. In 1845, those seeking to exclude all Sabbath breakers from their midst created Shaarey Tefilah at 67 Franklin Street. Another splinter group founded Beth Abraham in the tenement at 63 Mott Street in 1850, the same year that Shaarey Zedek moved across Chatham Square to 38 Henry Street. In 1852, a dozen Russian Jews formed their own Five Points congregation, Beth Hamidrash, in an apartment on the top floor of the tenement at 83 Bayard Street. A year later, as membership increased (including German and Polish Jews), the congregation moved to 514 Pearl Street, paying twenty-five dollars per month to lease the top floor of Monroe Hall, Matthew Brennan’s saloon. Beth Abraham already occupied space in the same building. The last Five Points congregation created in the prewar years was founded in 1853, when Polish members of Beth Hamidrash seceded to form Beth Hamidrash Livne Yisrael Yelide Polin (“House of Study for the Children of Israel Born in Poland”), located by 1860 at 8 Baxter Street among the Jewish-run second-hand clothing shops. Though a number of congregations would remain in Five Points until the end of the nineteenth century, most Jews were beginning to settle east of the Bowery on the Lower East Side, and they brought their synagogues with them.14
“THIS IS EMPHATICALLY ‘MISSION GROUND’”
The rise of Judaism in Five Points did not herald a burst of reform, because these congregations were devoted to worship. “Reformers,” in those days, were almost always Protestants, especially members of proselytizing denominations. Beginning in the 1830s, a variety of evangelical Christian groups attempted to win converts in Five Points. The New York City Tract Society distributed its literature there, while members of the American Female Moral Reform Society handed out tracts, read Bible passages on the streets, and urged those entering brothels to repent.15
Almost from the start, a split between spiritual and worldly assistance rent the reformers. The American Female Moral Reform Society began giving out food and clothing in 1839, with their missionary, Samuel B. Halliday, sometimes seeking jobs for the unemployed and shelter for the homeless. But the Tract Society, in order to differentiate clearly between its religious and temporal work, in 1843 created a separate organization, the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), to distribute aid to the needy. The AICP quickly became the most important and influential organization of its kind in nineteenth-century New York. Its executive secretary, Robert H. Hartley, believed that “the chief cause of [pauperism’s] increase among us is the injudicious dispensation of relief.” According to Hartley, “the most clamorous and worthless” beggars secured the lion’s share of New Yorkers’ charity, while “the most modest and deserving” received none. Consequently, he instituted an elaborate system for the equitable distribution of relief. Hartley divided the city into hundreds of relief districts, each with its own “visitor.” Anyone seeking charity from his organization had to submit to an investigation by a visitor, who would inspect the applicant’s home and query the neighbors about his or her employment history and drinking habits. Those passing muster would then be added to the association’s register of “worthy” poor, who could receive food, clothing, or fuel from one of its distribution centers. Hartley asked that any New Yorker hoping to relieve poverty should not give one cent to beggars on the street, but instead donate to the association, which would distinguish the frauds from the truly needy. Hartley’s methods were adopted by most charities in the Civil War era.16
Soon several charities emerged that focused their efforts solely on New York’s most infamous slum. Like the Tract Society and the Female Reform Society, these groups believed that religious renewal was the key to any temporal improvement in Five Pointers’ lives, and that any distribution of food or clothing should be rigorously rationed. The first was the Five Points Union Mission, so called because a coalition of Protestant denominations funded and operated it. Founded in the 1840s and located at 42 Orange Street, the Union Mission opened its doors for only a few hours each week.17
Recognizing that the Union Mission could not effect significant change in Five Points, the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church established in 1848 a continuously operating mission with a resident staff to offer religious services and seek conversions. The married middle- and upper-class women who ran the society did not live in their missions—paid “missionaries” assumed that role. But the “ladies” did occupy all the positions on the institution’s board of directors, serve as “managers” of their various missions, visit neighborhood residents in an effort to convert them to Methodism, and administer the various philanthropic programs eventually organized by the society.18
Although the society originally intended to locate its mission on Centre Street, it ultimately rented a former “gin shop” in the heart of Five Points at 1 Little Water Street, directly across from the Old Brewery and Paradise Park. “This is emphatically ‘mission ground,’” exclaimed the society optimistically when it announced its intention to create the Five Points Mission, which began operations in May 1850. During the mission’s first weeks of operation, its organizers were shocked by the neighborhood’s poverty, public drunkenness, and prostitution. One mission “lady” present at the group’s first Sunday service said of the motley adults and unruly children in attendance that it was “a more vivid representation of hell than [I] had ever imagined.” One year later it was proudly noted that the churchgoers could now be kept orderly “without the aid of the Police.”19
Luckily for the mission, its organizers had selected as resident missionary Lewis M. Pease, an innovative and persevering minister who was willing to go to almost any lengths to improve life in Five Points. Thirty years old in 1850, when he arrived in New York with his wife, Ann, and two-year-old adopted daughter, Pease had previously served as minister of a Methodist church in Lenox, Massachusetts. A year after his arrival, when Pease and the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society were feuding bitterly, its “presiding Elder” nonetheless conceded that “Mr. Pease is one of the most indefatigable and daring missionaries I have ever seen.”20
The dispute between Pease and the Missionary Society arose from a disagreement over the mission’s goals. The mission’s organizers sought merely to convert sinners to Methodism and expected Pease to utilize, in his words, only “the instrumentalities . . . ordinarily used in the awakening and conversion of sinners.” These included visiting potential converts, explaining to them the “errors” of Catholicism and the superiority of Methodism with its emphasis on the biblical “Word of God,” praying with them, cajoling them, even shaming them. Yet Pease found that these traditional methods of proselytism had little impact on Five Pointers. “When a Tract or a Bible was offered to these unfortunates, they would ask for bread,” Pease recalled two years later, “and when warned of the consequences of their lives, and urged to return to the path of honesty, sobriety, and virtue, they would reply: ‘We do not live this life because we love it, but because we cannot get out of it.’” Pease informed the society’s board that he could not convert Five Pointers unless the mission found some way, in the words of Pease’s subsequent benefactors, “to remove the compulsory alternative of vice or starvation, and make a virtuous life by honest labor possible.” The mission board replied that if Pease wanted to offer Five Pointers non-spiritual aid, he would have to do so on his own time and at his own expense.21
The headstrong Pease was determined to try. Locating a clothing manufacturer willing to supply him with material if he would vouch for its safe return, Pease hired destitute Five Points women to sew shirts for him. According to the ministers who later financed Pease’s efforts, the first thirty or so women appeared for work in the mission chapel “in all the filthiness and raggedness of their every-day condition, and what was worse, in the disorderly, drunken, profane and savage habits which none had ever taught them to lay aside.” Pease consequently established strict ground rules for his employees. He required them to come to work sober, to pledge to abstain completely from the use of alcohol while employed by him, and to “attend regularly some place of worship on the Sabbath.”22
Even with these restrictions, Pease later recalled, his workers’ “first efforts at the use of the needle . . . were truly discouraging. Many of the shirts were so poorly made that the slightest force would pull them to pieces; others had to be ripped and re-made.” In order not to humiliate his workers, Pease paid for the ruined shirts himself. Meanwhile, the mission board became increasingly resentful of all the time and effort involved, complaining, as he later recalled, that “it illy comported with the dignity of a minister, to be found in his shirt-sleeves, superintending a workshop—giving to such characters shirts and buttons.” But Pease pressed on, expanding his operation within just a few weeks to employ one hundred indigent women.23
Pease’s employees found it hard to abide by his rules when they returned home each evening to their saloon-infested tenements, so Pease next decided that the only way to isolate his charges from these degrading influences was to rent an entire building in which to lodge his workers and to exclude from it the bordellos and grog shops that flourished elsewhere. Finding no large tenements available, Pease secured the assistance of the district attorney and two police court justices, who agreed to arrest and evict the brothel keepers in two houses on Little Water Street adjoining the mission. In late August 1850, Pease chose thirty of his female employees—“mostly women of bad repute”—to live in the two houses, charging them $1.25 per week for room and board. The mission board refused to finance any of it. In the winter and spring of 1851, Pease’s personal financial burden increased still further when he rented additional houses (increasing his “family” of tenants to 120) rather than allow brothel keepers to occupy the three-story wooden tenements surrounding his own.24
He was a one-man employer and landlord—and school superintendent. Another dispute between the Missionary Society and Pease developed over the issue of a mission school. The mission operated a Sunday school, but Pease told the board in August 1850 that his efforts to uplift Five Pointers would fail unless the mission operated a non-denominational school on weekdays as well. Otherwise, argued the minister, destitute women with small children would not be able to work, while the older offspring of those who did work would succumb to the district’s immoral influences when left unattended. The mission’s board replied that it could not afford to operate a “day school,” which, in any case, lay outside its purview of promoting religion. Pease then sought outside funding, returning to the board a month later to ask if the city’s other denominations could have a voice in the operation of a mission day school if these outsiders financed it. Again, the board rejected his proposal, so the infuriated Pease started the school on his own. In late September, just as he was about to open a bare-bones classroom, Pease discovered an Episcopal woman who had raised $700 to start a school in Five Points but had never carried her plans to fruition. He used the money to buy slates, maps, a stove, furniture, and a much-needed new coat of paint. Sensing that Pease would succeed despite them, the Missionary Society members begrudgingly hired a “female assistant missionary” to work within the school, though after six months Pease financed her salary as well. He could soon boast an attendance of one hundred students each day.25
By this point, Pease and the mission had manifestly different agendas. In March 1851, when asked at the Missionary Society’s board meeting how many Five Pointers he had won over to Methodism, he could not cite a single conversion. But Pease did excitedly report that he planned to combine his various charitable projects into a single enterprise, to be called the “Industrial House for the Friendless, the Inebriate, and the Outcast.” When the National Temperance Society agreed in mid-1851 to finance it, Pease resigned his mission post to devote himself to his humanitarian endeavors, which his new backers renamed the Five Points Temperance House. The mission could save souls; he would provide schools, shelter, and employment opportunities. Only ten months later, however, a philanthropic takeover threw his work into jeopardy. The New-York City Temperance Alliance assumed control of the National Temperance Society and immediately withdrew its financial support for his operations. By then, he was so well known within reform circles that supporters were ready to step forward; the Rev. Gregory T. Bedell of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension (which had been financing Pease’s day school) mobilized New York’s philanthropic community to save his fledgling organization. Bedell found businessmen and ministers willing to fund Pease’s efforts and act as an informal board of trustees. In May 1852, they renamed his organization the Five Points House of Industry.26
Not wanting their former minister to upstage them, the mission’s leaders in early 1852 announced to the press their own bold plan—to buy the infamous Old Brewery tenement and make it the society’s headquarters. Sixteen thousand dollars seemed a small price to pay to eliminate from the neighborhood that “great landmark of vice and degradation, the haunt of crime and the home of misery.” After taking possession, however, mission officials found that the building could not be renovated economically, and instead decided to demolish it. Criminals from all over the city supposedly visited the deserted structure in the weeks before the wreckers arrived, hoping to find bulging sacks of stolen booty hidden by neighborhood thieves in the floors and walls. Thousands of law-abiding New Yorkers came to see the Old Brewery as well before its destruction, lighting their way with candles and torches provided by the mission. “Though the inmates had departed,” wrote one of the mission ladies, “the very ‘stones in the wall seemed to cry out’” with the “echoes of wailings and wild revelry” that had once occurred there. A number of artists recorded the scene for posterity.27
Though few city residents lamented the Old Brewery’s demise, controversy developed over the city’s financing of the project. In October 1852, the board of aldermen voted 13 to 1 to provide $1,000 of the $36,000 the mission would eventually spend to purchase the property, raze the Old Brewery, and construct a new building. A leading Catholic newspaper, the New York Freeman’s Journal, bitterly condemned the proposed
expenditure, complaining that the need to improve living conditions in the neighborhood did not justify “establishing Methodism as the religion of the Five Points, at the public expense.” The Times replied that Pease’s work with the poor justified the municipal appropriation. “They have converted what has always been the very den of thieves and murderers and prostitutes,—the very fountain of every imaginable abomination and every form of vice and crime,—into a house of industry and order,” noted the Times. “. . . Can a sincere and right-minded Catholic so grudge them the chance of making a possible convert to their faith, as to denounce and oppose the unquestioned good they have done?” Journal editor James A. McMaster retorted that Pease was no longer associated with the mission, leaving it with only a religious function. Calling the mission “a proselyting-trap,” McMaster predicted that its operatives “will try to convert the degraded classes of the Points by the animal excitements of Methodism;—that is, by the preachings, prayings, roarings, rantings, cantings, groanings, yellings, and other yet more obscene fooleries and indecencies of this ignorant, degraded, irrational and unpatriotic sect.” When the Times discovered that Pease had indeed severed all ties with the mission, it reluctantly admitted that a city contribution to the project would not be appropriate. City fathers agreed. By a vote of 9 to 8, the board of assistant aldermen tabled the motion to grant funds to the mission.28
On June 17, 1853, the Missionary Society celebrated with pomp and circumstance the opening of a grand new, privately funded Five Points Mission building. The four-story facility covered three large lots and included a chapel that could seat five hundred worshippers, a parsonage for the missionary and his family, two schoolrooms, and twenty three-room apartments. All this on the very spot, boasted the mission, where a year earlier hundreds of the most degraded denizens of Five Points had lived amid wretched squalor and sin. “What no legal enactment could accomplish—what no machinery of municipal government could effect,” bragged the mission “ladies” in the book they published to commemorate the event, “Christian women have brought about, quietly but thoroughly and triumphantly.” By the time the new mission headquarters opened, the House of Industry had secured control of all seven of the three-story buildings on Little Water Street facing Paradise Park. Several years later, it relocated to its own large new headquarters on Worth Street directly across the park from the mission. In just a few years, the mission and the House of Industry had become an imposing presence in Five Points.29
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