Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  In the end, he could not wait even that long. “What had happened was that just at the right moment the politicians had concluded . . . that they could not allow an independent newspaper in the ward, and had offered to buy it outright.” Riis sold them the South Brooklyn News for five times what he had paid just a year earlier. His pockets bulging with his newfound wealth, Riis boarded the very next steamer for Hamburg. He arrived in Ribe on New Year’s Eve 1875, proposing to a surprised and somewhat overwhelmed Elisabeth that same evening. They were married there in March and soon returned to America.3

  To say that Jacob Riis was a man of determination and energy is obviously an understatement. Soon he would use that energy as a reformer, determined to improve the decrepit living conditions of poor New Yorkers, especially those in Five Points. First through his innovations in the use of flash photography, then through his groundbreaking book How the Other Half Lives, Riis revived and intensified New Yorkers’ concern for Five Points and its infamous slum housing.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Remaking of a Slum

  IF AN IRISH Rip Van Winkle had left his home in Five Points at the beginning of 1850 and returned twenty years later, he would have been astounded by the changes that had taken place during his absence. Standing on the site of the notorious Old Brewery tenement was a Methodist church and mission. Cow Bay had vanished as well, covered over entirely by the huge Five Points House of Industry. The blocks radiating from the Five Points intersection, once inhabited almost exclusively by African Americans and Irish immigrants, were now overwhelmingly Italian. Tenement hallways in that part of the neighborhood, formerly suffused with the aroma of boiling potatoes and cabbage, were now dominated by the scent of garlic and onions.4

  Perhaps the most significant change in Five Points during the Civil War years was the plunge in its population. The Sixth Ward’s population dropped a remarkable 23 percent from 1860 to 1865, from more than 26,000 to just below 20,000. A number of factors contributed to this tremendous decline. The exodus of New Yorkers into the army and navy helped drive up wages for those manual laborers left in the workforce. With substantially rising incomes, many Five Pointers could afford the move to a better neighborhood. New tenement construction uptown and on the Lower East Side, as well as the development of other Irish enclaves, also enabled many to find alternate lodgings. As a result, Five Points by the postwar years was no longer the most densely populated portion of the city. That dubious distinction now fell to the Lower East Side (the area east of the Bowery between Canal and Fourteenth Streets), though its relatively new five- and six-story brick tenements were more spacious and comfortable than the older, more dilapidated buildings in Five Points. Even decades after the war, when tall brick buildings had replaced most of the old wooden tenements, the neighborhood’s population never again approached its antebellum levels.5

  “THE IRISH ELEMENT IS . . . YIELDING ONE

  STRONGHOLD AFTER ANOTHER TO THE ITALIAN FOE”

  Although Five Points was no longer renowned for its overcrowding, New Yorkers continued to think of it as the city’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood. The Tribune reported in 1885 that Cruz’s Boardinghouse on Baxter Street near Franklin “demands a polyglot to run it properly and a polyglot it has. Cruz speaks, or attempts speaking, in English, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Portugese, Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Manillan, Cochinese, Corean and Hindostan.” A rector of Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church likewise boasted of having officiated at a baptism at which “the grandfather was Irish, the grandmother Scotch, the father Chinese, the mother an American, the godfather an Italian, and the godmother a negress. Surely, Europe, Asia, and Africa have come very closely together in this little section of America.” The Herald in 1878 characterized the large brick tenement at 31 Baxter, once dominated by Lansdowne immigrants, as “a veritable tower of Babel,” with “a different language at every door.”6

  New Yorkers’ sense of Five Points as a tower of Babel was still somewhat exaggerated. In one generation, from 1855 to 1880, the Irish and German populations in Five Points were reduced by about half, the Italians increased dramatically, and Polish Jews became a more significant presence:

  Nativity of Five Points Adult Residents7

  Nevertheless, Five Points had not lost as much of its Irish flavor by 1880 as these figures imply. Fully 80 percent of the native-born Americans living in the district were the children of Irish-born parents.

  Ten years later, the Italians had completed their takeover of the neighborhood, as the city’s police census of 1890 indicates:

  Ethnicity of Five Points Residents, 18908

  “The Irish element is . . . yielding one stronghold after another to the Italian foe,” Riis could write by 1892. “It lost its grip on the Five Points and the Bend long ago.”9

  The physical changes that took place in Five Points after the war were just as striking. The most significant was probably the extension of Worth Street eastward from the Five Points intersection to Chatham Square in 1868. Before the lengthening of Worth Street, Paradise Park and the Five Points intersection had felt closed in and secluded. Connecting the intersection to the hustle and bustle of Chatham Square and the Bowery helped eliminate the sense of dread that visitors felt in that part of the neighborhood. “The extension of Worth Street through the Points . . . to Chatham Street, let the daylight into the slums so effectually, that as many as could of the criminal class therein resident ‘got up and dusted,’” noted Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Twenty years after its completion, New Yorkers still attributed much of the neighborhood’s improvement to the Worth Street project.10

  Whereas the extension of Worth Street improved Five Points, the opening of an elevated railway on the Bowery in 1878 had the opposite effect. The new rail line did speed the movement of passengers from uptown residential neighborhoods to downtown commercial districts. But the mammoth steel girders that supported the tracks plunged the once airy boulevard into darkness, while the noise from the trains (no longer absorbed by the ground) made the Bowery’s saloons and dance halls especially inhospitable. The “el” helped transform the Bowery, once the working-class Broadway, into the seedy gathering place for drunks and “bums” for which it is still (unjustly) renowned.11

  Five Points also changed in less concrete ways in the early postwar years. By 1869, for example, a journalist could declare the Bowery B’hoy “nearly extinct. . . . His crimson shirt, and his oiled locks, and his peculiar slang, and his freedom of pugnacity, and his devotion to the fire-engine are things gone by.” The subculture of the “sporting man” persisted to the turn of the century, but by 1880 its adherents no longer congregated in the Sixth Ward. “Twenty years ago it was one of the head-quarters of the gamblers,” reminisced one old sport in 1885, “but you find none of these gentry of any importance in the neighborhood now.” As African Americans moved out of Five Points in the 1860s, so too did the neighborhood’s famous dance halls. Prostitution diminished significantly as well, as brothels relocated to Greenwich Village to be closer to the city’s most prosperous commercial and residential districts, now located above Fourteenth Street. By about 1880, most working-class theaters had also moved uptown.12

  The vacuum created by these departures was filled in part by the influx of large-scale “manufactories.” By 1868, a huge paper box factory occupied all of Mission Place and half of the south side of Worth Street between Centre Street and the Five Points intersection. A playing card factory took over much of the north side of Worth on that block. Portions of the neighborhood south of Worth Street and west of Baxter Street became especially popular with manufacturers in this period.13

  “NO PENCIL CAN FULLY PICTURE ALL ITS HORRORS”

  Perhaps the most significant physical change in Five Points in the post–Civil War years was the ongoing transformation of its tenements. In the postwar decades, landlords continued to replace the neighborhood’s old wooden tenements with five- and six-story brick structures. The ratio o
f brick to frame domiciles, which had stood at three to two in 1855, reached about three to one by the mid-1880s.14

  Many of the changes in Five Points’ tenements resulted from postwar legislation. In the spring of 1867, New York State enacted the nation’s first building codes, which included a variety of tenement regulations. The statute required landlords to install fire escapes and connect their outhouses to sewer lines, and prohibited them from renting space in basements without a permit from the Board of Health. The law also mandated that every room have a window (though it could face a hallway or another room rather than the outside), that no animals other than dogs or cats live in tenement apartments, and that all inhabited rooms have a minimum ceiling height of eight feet. The Board supplemented these rules with others that placed limits on the number of people who could occupy an apartment, as well as requiring the periodic spraying of disinfectants in and around the outhouses.15

  A potentially more important change in the city’s tenements developed in 1879. State lawmakers were again debating the tenement issue and considering legislation that would limit new buildings to 65 percent of a lot and require that every inhabited room have a window to the outside. Anticipating that these proposals would become law, the trade journal Plumber and Sanitary Engineer announced a prize competition for the best tenement floor plan that would satisfy such restrictions. The society awarded first prize to architect James E. Ware, whose winning design became known as the “dumbbell” tenement because the floor plan vaguely resembled a weight lifter’s implement. Ware’s design replaced the perfectly rectangular buildings of the past with ones that narrowed on the sides so that rooms away from the front and back of the structure could have windows that faced the outside. Rather than open to the street or the yard, these side windows would face narrow airshafts. Ware’s floor plan became the standard design for the remainder of the nineteenth century.16

  Both the design changes and the new regulations significantly improved the lives of many Five Points tenement dwellers. The Board of Health forced landlords to cut 46,000 interior windows citywide, increasing the airflow in the neighborhood’s “sleeping closets.” The city also conducted tenement inspections, evicting illegal cellar dwellers and spraying disinfectants in the district’s yards, basements, and privy vaults. The new laws also resulted in the construction of larger apartments, as virtually all dumbbell flats consisted of three rooms rather than the two-room habitations that builders had typically constructed in the past. Richard W. Gilder, editor of Century Magazine and chairman of the city’s 1894 tenement commission, testified in 1901 that housing for the poor had improved dramatically during the previous half century as a result of these innovations. He recalled being taken as a boy “into the old Five Points and . . . shown things that no tenement-house commissioner, certainly none of 1900—or 1901—can now see in this city. Sub-cellars occupied by the refuse of humanity; Old Cow Bay; scenes such as exist in the pictures that Dante makes, but not now in reality, certainly, in this city.”17

  Nonetheless, many New Yorkers understood that these minor modifications had by no means solved the “tenement problem.” Referring to Ware’s award-winning design as well as those of the runners-up, the Times asserted that “if the prize plans are the best offered—which we can hardly believe—they simply demonstrate that the problem is insoluble. . . . If one of our crowded wards were built up after any one of these three prize designs, the evils of our present tenement-house system would be increased ten-fold.”18

  This was hyperbole, to be sure, yet subsequent experience proved that the Times was not entirely mistaken. The advent of the airshaft exacerbated two already chronic tenement problems: noise and stench. The airshafts became echo chambers that seemingly amplified the sounds of screaming babies, boisterous children, and quarreling adults. Whereas the inhabitants of older tenements could hear sounds from apartments above, below, and next to theirs, now the noise from half the building was transported loudly and clearly into every other flat. Dumbbell dwellers complained just as bitterly about the vile smells that now wafted into their apartments. One woman who lived on the ground floor at the bottom of the airshaft reported that her neighbors constantly threw “garbage and dirty papers and the insides of chickens” into it. Even the contents of chamber pots were occasionally deposited there. Because “the stench is so vile and the air is so foul,” and because of the unrelenting noise, dumbbell dwellers almost never opened their airshaft windows.19

  Safety innovations also failed to dramatically improve tenement life. In 1871, the Times observed of Five Points that “there is here and there a fire-escape, but even these in many cases would be entirely useless, being in the rear, where all the smoke and fire would concentrate, and no creature could live one minute.” By the 1880s, fire escapes were much more common, but tenants in terribly overcrowded apartments used them for storage, making them virtually useless for emergencies. One tenement dweller likened the fire escapes to “curiosity shops,” noting that one found on them “quilts and clothes . . . chairs, tin boxes, ice boxes, dogs, birds, cats, rabbits, jars and bottles of every description, big parrots screeching at each other, canaries singing, and children playing.” Bathtubs were also a common sight on fire escapes, as were washtubs and rudely constructed sleeping platforms.20

  Many tenement problems that had existed before the war persisted in the postbellum years. Although tenements were now more likely to be connected to sewers, their outdoor toilets were still repulsive. “I have the children go to the toilet at school, for I am afraid of sickness,” testified one tenement resident at the turn of the century. “It is so horrid for my daughter, that she waits to use the toilet where she works. She hasn’t been inside of one here for four or five months.” State investigators in 1884 found that many Five Points tenements still had backyard privy vaults “reeking with filth and decomposition,” rather than the required sewer connections. Older people still had to descend and climb four, five, or six flights of stairs merely to use the toilet, take out the garbage, or fetch some water. Some refused to risk the steep, pitch-black, often banister-less stairwells more than once or twice a week. Darkness in the hallways remained a problem as well. In 1892, a Herald reporter remarked that Bayard Street tenement stairwells were still enshrouded in total darkness even though legislation mandating their illumination had been on the books for more than a decade. “It was necessary,” she wrote, “to grope our way to the top by lighting matches on every landing.” Lack of tubs and running water above the first floor also meant that bathing was still a rarity. “Many tenants do not bathe more than six times a year, and often less,” noted one tenement dweller. The lack of bathing facilities was especially frustrating during the summer, when the tenements once again became virtual brick ovens.21

  Overcrowding also persisted in the postwar years. The Board of Health had far too few inspectors to enforce the new laws limiting the number of occupants per apartment. Still, Five Points tenements were not as notoriously overcrowded as they had been in the antebellum period. When, in the late 1860s, Charles Loring Brace described finding “a half a dozen families—as we frequently do—occupying one room,” he added that such conditions had abounded “formerly in the Five Points,” but were now more often found on the Lower East Side.22

  Nonetheless, appalling overcrowding did persist on some blocks in the postwar years. In the early 1870s, an investigator found in a Baxter Street cellar a fifteen-by-ten-foot room in which at least twenty people slept on the straw-covered floor. Through the straw one could plainly see the filthy floorboards whose “numberless holes . . . show it to be as much the residence of rats, as of men.” In another Baxter Street tenement, the same journalist discovered a room sixteen feet square where eighteen people slept. A reporter for Frank Leslie’s encountered seventeen people (as well as a goat and some chickens) sleeping in a room twelve feet square in a Mulberry Street basement. These were extreme cases, but finding as many as ten or twelve inhabitants in a two-room apartment, espe
cially one occupied by Italians, was not extraordinary.23

  Fifteen years later, such conditions persisted. One night Riis accompanied the police on their raids of illegally overcrowded dwellings. In a Bayard Street apartment, he found appalling overcrowding:

  In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor. A kerosene lamp burned dimly in the fearful atmosphere, probably to guide other and later arrivals to their “beds,” for it was only just past midnight. A baby’s fretful wail came from an adjoining hall-room, where, in the semi-darkness, three recumbent figures could be made out. The “apartment” was one of three in two adjoining buildings we had found, within half an hour, similarly crowded. Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for five cents a spot.

  Riis’s moving photograph of the scene makes almost palpable the discomfort and misery suffered by men and women crowded into these tiny spaces.24

  By the 1880s, as immigration increased and affordable housing for the poor became scarce, appalling basement lodging houses once again began to proliferate throughout New York. As in the antebellum period, many of these establishments located in Five Points. In 1882, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly described one such lodging house at 508 Pearl Street. For twelve cents a night, it reported, one could have a bed on the ground floor. Belowground a bed cost ten cents per night. Another subterranean chamber contained no beds at all—merely narrow canvas strips slung between wooden frames, hammocklike “beds” just wide enough to hold a man. There were two rows of these resting places, one on top of the other. No bedding was provided, and each lodger paid five cents per night. Although Leslie’s published a print of this room, it assured its readers that