Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Jacob Riis, “Lodgers in a Bayard Street Tenement,” c. 1888. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

  no pencil can fully picture all its horrors. . . . Imagine these scores of beds filled with dirty and degraded men, clothed only in their own nakedness; for while the custom of such lodging places is that the sleeper shall remove the garments he has worn during the day, he is furnished no other covering, and depends on the heat furnished by the stove and generated by his fellows to keep him warm. Imagine such a room, where not only is every canvas occupied, but late comers have stretched themselves at full length on the floor, cut off from the outside air as effectually as the closing of every window will permit, while a hot stove pours forth heat, and the odors of damp clothing and long unwashed bodies combine with the breathing of the crowd of occupants to make an atmosphere which almost sickens the visitor who steps inside but for a moment. Imagine all this, and the reader will have a faint idea of a scene, the full horror of which can only be appreciated by one who has actually gazed upon it—and smelled it!

  Despite the assertions of Brace and Gilder to the contrary, terrible tenement and lodging house conditions persisted in Five Points throughout the late nineteenth century, and became especially bad after 1880.25

  “LIKE A WART GROWING ON THE TOP OF A FESTERING SORE”

  Certain tenements in post–Civil War Five Points became especially notorious. In 1873, for example, the Board of Health announced that “the city’s worst tenement” was the building known as “Mulberry Hall” or the “old Baptist Church tenement,” a building that covered the rear portion of 5, 7, and 9 Mulberry Street. As the latter nickname implied, the building had originally served as a house of worship. When it was built in about 1809, the sixty-foot-wide and forty-two-foot-deep wooden church had sat well away from the street at the back of a pleasant green lawn and attracted Baptists from all over the city, including some of the city’s most prominent citizens.

  In about 1850, however, the congregation moved uptown and sold the property. The new owner built six-story brick tenements at the front of the lot, leaving only a fourteen-foot yard between them and the old sanctuary. He converted the church into a tenement, dividing the once airy interior into five floors of living space, though in order to squeeze in that many stories he constructed ceilings just six-and-a-half-feet high.26

  As soon as they opened, the new tenements at 5–9 Mulberry Street filled to overflowing with famine immigrants, especially those from County Cork. The new front buildings were not especially noisome. Young politicos Tom and William Walsh had moved into number 7 and opened a saloon there. But by the late 1860s, conditions in the old church building in the rear had become scandalously wretched. Harper’s Weekly found that “the doors are unhinged, the windows broken, the plastering hangs in shreds, [and] the dust and grime of years blackens the walls.” Just as bad as the physical dilapidation of Mulberry Hall was the “foul stench” that permeated the building. In 1873, a Board of Health sanitary inspector found that “the walls and floors are saturated with offensive effluvia, the accumulation of years, to such a degree that the air is poisoned by them, and the inmates who are continually exposed to their noxious influence are all pallid, thin, and delicate in appearance.” In addition, he noted, “the sewer connection of the privies is clogged, they are full of night-soil, and very offensive. The floor of this place is covered continually with excrement, urine, and rubbish, and is continually wet from the deluge of water used in attempts to keep it clean. . . . The odors from these areas are exceedingly offensive.” The malfunctioning toilets inside the building also contributed to the horrible stench.27

  Mulberry Hall was renowned for the dissipation of its inhabitants. “At night . . . nearly all the adult tenants are drunk,” reported the sanitary inspector. The Times concurred that “strong fumes of whisky came from many mouths.” Many of the alcoholics were not residents of the building, but homeless folk who sought refuge there to sleep off a bender. “Street tramps and drunkards slink in the hallways, especially at night, and sleep upon the floors,” noted the Times. “Two besotted cases were there when we entered; both were beastly drunk, and lay with their persons exposed, their rags and tatters being covered with vermin, and dabbed in their own vomit.”28

  These conditions contributed to Mulberry Hall’s phenomenally high mortality rate. Tenants died so frequently that the Board of Health ordered the building vacated in November 1871. Yet after the owner of the property, Peter Dolan, promised henceforth to lease only half of the building’s forty apartments, the board agreed to keep Mulberry Hall open. Even with fewer tenants, the death rate continued to increase, to 9.2 deaths per 100 inhabitants for the year ending in March 1873, nearly four times the citywide rate. Despite repeated efforts by health officials and reformers to close “this repulsive pile,” the Old Baptist Church Tenement still housed dozens of Five Pointers in the early 1890s.29

  Number 65 Mott Street, the oldest tenement in the city, also became notorious in the postwar years. This building, reported the Times in 1880, stood out “like a wart growing on the top of a festering sore. It is the crowning glory of tenement-houses.” The seven-story front structure was so tall that it “might lead you to take it for a mill or a factory or an overgrown car-stable, or anything but a human habitation.” As with Mulberry Hall, the building’s accumulation of dirt and grime was most notable. “The filth in it is so thick and deep that it is hanging out of the windows like icicles,” insisted the Times’s reporter. A year earlier, another repulsed journalist had found that the chicken-rendering plant on the ground floor suffused the apartments with a noxious odor that far surpassed the stench of the typical Five Points tenement. As the Times story aptly concluded, “the building is far beyond being a disgrace to the city—that would be mild—and its owner ought to be ashamed of himself; no doubt he is, but he collects the rent regularly.”30

  In 1880, Mulberry Hall and 65 Mott Street were relatively recent additions to the list of the city’s worst tenements. But another of Five Points’ most decrepit residential complexes—the low, wooden tenements on the east side of Baxter Street just north of the Five Points intersection—had held that status for half a century. “It is a miserable shell, of perhaps 100 feet front, thirty feet depth and two stories high,” noted a Times correspondent in 1871 of the front buildings stretching from 33 to 39 Baxter, the same tenements filled twenty years earlier with Lansdowne immigrants such as Ellen Holland and Sandy Sullivan. “The roof and floors have sagged down some five feet from the level; the shingles are split and rotten, and admit the rain like a basket; all the timbers are badly decayed, and tremble to the footsteps upon the floors.” Conditions in the rear buildings and yards were just as dreadful. “Six goats roam here at will, and four besotted women lay helpless in the dirt,” reported the Times. “Children of various ages and in all stages of nastiness were numerous, some crying, others shouting, fighting or cursing.”31

  The most infamous tenement on this block would help make Riis’s reputation. Just to the north at 47 Baxter, it was known as “Bottle Alley.” Though already decrepit before the Civil War, Bottle Alley only earned citywide renown in the postbellum years. In 1866, Frank Leslie’s featured the alley’s tenements in a story on New York’s “fever nests.” When Harper’s Weekly decided in 1879 to run a series on “the abodes of the poor,” its editors chose Bottle Alley to inaugurate the series.32

  Jacob Riis, “Bottle Alley: Mulberry Bend in Its Worst Days,” c. 1888. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

  Peering through the four-and-a-half-foot-wide passageway that ran thirty-five feet under the front building to a filthy, garbage-strewn courtyard, Bottle Alley appeared to lead to a stable. “No one would ever dream that the tumble-down building in the rear was the abode of human beings,” reported Harper’s. The passageway led to a courtyard that was paved with irregularly shaped flagstones. Huge sacks of rags, bones, and discarded paper, collected by the ragpickers living in Bottle A
lley, typically filled the small plaza, but over the years heaps of other refuse had accumulated as well and spilled into the surrounding apartments. “The vilest filth that ever offended a human nostril covered the paving stones and even the door sills,” wrote a reporter in the New York Tribune in the summer of 1879. “Besotted women lay as they had fallen.”33

  Inside the rear building, the Tribune found that “men and women were huddled together like cattle.” The ten-by-fourteen-foot cellar, “a queer hole” according to the Harper’s account, had housed as many as thirteen—and sometimes even seventeen—persons in recent years. One of the walls consisted of nothing but bare logs, another of “undressed stone. There are no chairs to sit on, only a few rough boxes.”

  “The two upper floors are not quite so bad,” continued the Harper’s story, “but there are sights to be seen in some of the rooms that baffle description.” A staircase and balcony on the front of the building led to the one-room apartments on the top floor. One of these, depicted by the Harper’s artist, housed five Italian men—one carpenter, one shoemaker, and three street sweepers:

  The floor is destitute of carpet, is sunken in one corner, and is covered with grease and dirt. The ceiling and walls are more like those of a smoke-house than of a dwelling. There are no closets or pantries. The cooking utensils hang about the fire-place, the dishes are piled on the table, and the personal effects are crammed into canvas bags that hang from pegs against the wall. None of the vessels used in cooking or serving a meal are ever washed. . . . The food is gathered principally from the garbage boxes on the streets or from the offal of the markets. . . . The sleeping appointments are equally bad. There are no bedsteads. Five filthy-looking mattresses spread on boards supported by carpenters’ “horses” serve as resting places.

  The men slept in the same clothes they wore during the day, “boots and all.” Theirs was not the only squalid apartment, either. A year later, Harper’s found a ground-floor apartment in which “the plastered walls, cracked, broken, and grimy, were damp, and sickening to look at. Millions of roaches crawled over the walls and ceiling, and gathered in black clusters over the solitary smoking candle that dimly lighted the room.” Ten years later, when Riis featured Bottle Alley in How the Other Half Lives, nothing had changed.34

  “THE WORST SLUM THAT EVER WAS”

  The block just north of the Five Points intersection had been notorious for more than half a century, but it lacked a catchy name like Cow Bay, the Arch Block, or Hell’s Kitchen by which New Yorkers could identify it. Riis changed all that in 1888 when he began referring to the area bounded by Baxter, Bayard, Mulberry, and Park Streets as “Mulberry Bend.” While he may not have coined the term, Riis certainly made it famous. Frank Leslie’s stated in August 1888 that “the ‘Bend’ was once the dead-line of the Five Points; now it takes its place as a seat of iniquity, poverty and dirt. It is one of the danger-spots of the town.” In November, another magazine maintained that “by all odds the most vicious, ignorant and degraded of all the immigrants who come to our shores are the Italian inhabitants of Mulberry Bend and the surrounding region of tenements.” In 1890, How the Other Half Lives devoted an entire chapter to “The Bend,” and the term became a household word.35

  Mulberry Street looking north from Bayard Street toward Canal, c. 1901. Dominated by street peddlers, banks, and padroni, this image captures the sense of bustle and activity that made Mulberry Street the focal point of Five Points’ Italian community. Detroit Photographic Company Collection, Library of Congress.

  “Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is ‘the Bend,’ foul core of New York’s slums,” begins Riis’s chapter on Mulberry Bend. It is “a vast human pig-sty. There is but one ‘Bend’ in the world, and it is enough.” Standing on Mulberry Street at the Bend, the tenements did not look particularly frightening. Italian vendors dominated the street scene. “Hucksters and pedlars’ carts make two rows of booths in the street itself, and along the house is still another—a perpetual market doing a very lively trade in its own queer staples, found nowhere on American ground save in ‘the Bend.’” Mixed in with the substantial traders with large hand trucks were a number of female peddlers. “Two old hags, camping on the pavement, are dispensing stale bread, baked not in loaves, but in the shape of big wreaths like exaggerated crullers, out of bags of dirty bedtick.” On another portion of the sidewalk, Riis found Italian women “haggling over baskets of frowsy weeds, some sort of salad probably, stale tomatoes, and oranges not above suspicion. Ash barrels serve them as counters.”36

  Little in these descriptions seemed to warrant the extravagant claims of wretchedness for which Mulberry Bend was renowned. The neighborhood was no longer dominated by saloons, junk shops, and second-hand stores. Merchants on or near the Bend sold everything from beds and mattresses to clocks and guns, as well as food and wine. Doctors, midwives, and pharmacists all operated out of storefronts there as well. Riis admitted that the Bend might be “ordinary enough to look at from the street,” but behind those brick walls, he insisted, lay three acres “built over with rotten structures that harbored the very dregs of humanity. . . . [It was] pierced by a maze of foul alleys, in the depths of which skulked the tramp and the outcast thief with loathsome wrecks that had once laid claim to the name of woman. Every foot of it reeked with incest and murder. Bandits’ Roost, Bottle Alley, were names synonymous with robbery and red-handed outrage.”37

  One of the most appalling features of Mulberry Bend was its death rate. Children living in its cramped, dirty quarters became especially susceptible to contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, measles, and diphtheria, and died from them at horrific rates. Eight children under the age of five living at 61 Mulberry Street died in 1882. Next door at 591/2 Mulberry, eleven small children perished that same year. Of the nine youngsters living at that same address in 1888, five died. These were extreme cases, to be sure. Yet the death rate for all ages on Mulberry Bend was about 50 percent above the citywide average, while children under age five died at about three times the citywide rate.38

  The Bend—and especially its Mulberry Street side—was infamous not merely for squalid tenements but for its “stale-beer dives” as well. “Stale beer” was the term used to describe the dregs left at the bottom of a standard barrel of lager. Enterprising young immigrants—usually Italians—“go out early in the morning and sweep out lager-beer saloons or help the drivers of beer wagons. . . . For this work they receive the dregs found remaining in the cags [kegs] the day before.” In order to make this recycled brew more appetizing, Riis noted, the beer was “touched up with drugs to put a froth on it.”39

  Stale-beer cellars abounded in Mulberry Bend. “Every other basement seemed to be a stale beer saloon,” noted a Tribune reporter who toured the Bend in 1879. By 1880, journalists found “tramps of every nationality,” “the lowest of the low,” imbibing “these stupefying dregs” in Bottle Alley haunts. But it was Riis, a decade later, who made the Bend’s stale-beer dives truly infamous. Accompanying a raiding party of Sixth Ward police officers, Riis found in one such establishment a room about twelve feet square with “hard-trodden mud” on the floor and “shuddering showers of crawling bugs” on the walls. “Grouped about a beer-keg that was propped on the wreck of a broken chair,” Riis discovered “a foul and ragged host of men and women, on boxes, benches, and stools. Tomato-cans filled at the keg were passed from hand to hand. In the centre of the group a sallow, wrinkled hag, evidently the ruler of the feast, dealt out the hideous stuff.”40

  The infamous stale-beer dives of one Mulberry Street alleyway, “Bandits’ Roost,” inspired the creation of Riis’s single most famous photo. In Riis’s image, the pavement is damp and dotted with puddles. Overflowing ash barrels are visible on the left, while clotheslines heavy with the day’s wash filter the afternoon sunlight ominously. Tall tenements, the rear buildings of 57 and 59 Mulberry Street, loom on either side. The people add to the sense of f
oreboding. In the right foreground stands a neatly dressed young man in bowler hat who would have been recognized by contemporaries as a menacing gang member. Just behind him is an older, bearded figure apparently holding a double-barreled shotgun. Above these two toughs, one of Riis’s omnipresent “old hags” leans out a window. Stairs leading to the alley’s numerous stale-beer dives are visible as well. Most of Riis’s photos inspire pity or disgust at tenement dwellers’ wretched conditions, but his image of Bandits’ Roost creates a sense of menace and dread that is nearly as palpable today as it was in 1888 when Riis first exhibited it.41

  Jacob Riis, “Bandits’ Roost,” c. 1888. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

  Most residents of the Bend shunned the stale-beer cellars in favor of street-level saloons. It was primarily the homeless—the “tramps,” as Riis called them—who patronized stale-beer dives because they could stay in their seats all night once they made a purchase. In many of these cellars, beer was the only item for sale. In others, Riis noted, “a cup of ‘coffee’ and a stale roll may be had for two cents.” These small, dirty subterranean dens were consequently known as “two-cent restaurants.” Yet some customers could avoid even this small surcharge. “The men pay the score,” explained an indignant Riis. “To the women—unutterable horror of the suggestion—the place is free.”42