Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  We tend today to suspect Riis of sensationalizing and exaggerating the Bend’s conditions, and in fact, not all observers depicted Mulberry Bend in such pejorative terms. Frank Leslie’s emphasized the positive. “The ‘bend’ is woefully overcrowded with people and smell,” it admitted. Yet the inhabitants “are joyous in squalor and merry in poverty, these lazzaroni. Babies roll on the sidewalk and snooze in the gutter, while the adults enjoy the dreamy dolce far niente [pleasant idling] across some ash-barrel or on some sunny wagon-seat.” Journalists rarely bothered to describe the many tenement apartments that had been made cheerful and pleasant by their inhabitants. “Some of their homes were low, dark rooms, neglected and squalid,” noted one reporter, but others were “clean and picturesque, with bright patchwork counterpanes on the beds, rows of gay plates on shelves against the walls, mantels and shelves fringed with colored paper, red and blue prints of the saints against the white plaster, and a big nosegay of lilacs on the dresser among the earthen pots.”43

  Most accounts of the Bend, however, depicted it in terms that made Riis’s assessment seem mild. “Mulberry Bend . . . is an eddy in the life of the city where the scum collects, where the very offscourings of all humanity seem to find a lodgment,” wrote one journalist in 1888. “In the great ‘dumb-bell’ tenements, in the rickety old frame buildings, in the damp, unwholesome cellars, on the sidewalks and in the gutters reeking with filth and garbage, is a seething mass of humanity, so ignorant, so vicious, so depraved that they hardly seem to belong to our species.”

  After a brief hiatus, Americans once again considered Five Points “the worst slum that ever was.”44

  12

  PROLOGUE

  “THESE ‘SLAVES OF THE HARP’”

  IN JUNE 1873, a groundskeeper in Central Park made a startling discovery. Huddled in a secluded corner of the park he found a famished twelve-year-old boy, “with scarcely a rag on him.” The boy could speak no English, but his hunger was evident, so the park worker shared his lunch with the unfortunate lad, who ravenously devoured the food. Before the park worker could decide what to do with the poor child, he ran off. The groundskeeper found the boy again the next day, however, and after feeding him again, took him to one of the park’s shanty-like huts, where many impoverished New Yorkers lived. There, a Mrs. McMonegal cleaned the boy up, fed him, and found him some decent clothes. During the two weeks that the boy remained with Mrs. McMonegal, he was able, bit by bit, to explain how he had ended up in Central Park alone and famished.

  His name was Joseph, and he had been born in Calvello, a desolate, windswept village about ninety miles southeast of Naples in the mountainous Italian region of Basilicata. Joseph had lived with his parents, who were peasant farmers, until age nine, when they handed him over to a stranger who took him aboard a ship with eight other boys from the same region. The man was a “padrone,” a labor contractor who had bought the right to the children’s labor from their parents. After weeks at sea, they arrived in New York, where the padrone sent Joseph onto the streets to play a triangle and beg for money. He slept on a pile of straw on a cellar floor and was fed only small rations of black bread twice a day. Soon he was taught the violin and told not to return each night to his basement home on Crosby Street until he had collected one dollar from passing pedestrians. The padrone beat him when he failed to bring home the requisite sum and bound him by his wrists at night so he could not run away. But after living in such conditions for more than two years, Joseph did escape. A few days later, he was found in Central Park and his story, as told to the Times, became the talk of the town.1

  New Yorkers were appalled by Joseph’s saga. Explaining the outpouring of sympathy, an editorial noted that “it seemed impossible that the world had given up stealing men from the African coast, only to kidnap children from Italy, and that the auction-block for negroes had been overturned in the Southern States, only to be set up again for white infants in New-York.” No slave, the Times asserted, “ever narrated cruelties more brutal than has this wretched boy.”2

  Aside from his escape, Joseph’s story was not unique. Tiny Italian minstrels, generally ranging in age from six to twelve, had first become fixtures on the thoroughfares of Paris and London. Brought to those capitals in the late 1850s and early 1860s, the children played small harps, violins, and triangles while soliciting donations from passersby. When officials in France and England announced that they would no longer allow padroni to victimize the helpless waifs in this manner, many of them brought their tiny charges to New York. In some cases, an entrepreneur purchased the right to a youngster’s labor in Italy and accompanied him all the way to the United States. In other instances, a child might be traded two or three times in different countries—once in Italy, another time in France (usually Marseilles), and a third time in the United States—before he began performing on the sidewalks of New York. By the early 1870s there were about a thousand child street musicians, almost all boys, living in the city.3

  Like Joseph, these children were mostly natives of Basilicata. Residents of this isolated and impoverished southern province had for centuries learned mestiere per partire, jobs specifically designed to help them escape Basilicata and earn a living in more prosperous areas—either within Italy or abroad. Learning to play a musical instrument was a mestiere per partire especially popular in Basilicata. Yet it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that children began leaving Basilicata to work as musicians. Parents who sold their offspring might appear cruel or heartless, but they often had the youngsters’ best interests at heart. By turning their children over to padroni, these parents felt they were giving them a chance of escape the crushing poverty of life in Basilicata. Besides, each padrone promised to train his charges to become skilled musicians, a trade that in theory would guarantee them a far better income than had ever been within the reach of their parents.4

  Whatever the parents’ motivations, New York’s child street musicians lived and worked in appalling circumstances. “Without father or mother, or any relative who might be in the least interested in their welfare,” complained the Times, “these ‘slaves of the harp’ have been torn from their homes in Italy, and compelled to support, by the hardest of hard work, a lazy lot of ‘padrones’ whose only care is to make as much out of the poor children as possible. Half-starved and ragged they are sent into the streets, and should they return at night without a certain sum of money which they have been ordered to make, the poor children are severely punished, and sent to their filthy couches without their supper.” Charles Loring Brace, who was intimately familiar with the musicians’ circumstances through his work with the Children’s Aid Society, noted that the colder the weather, the more likely the padrone would force his charges out onto the streets, playing the harp “to excite the compassion of our citizens. . . . I used to meet these boys sometimes on winter-nights half-frozen and stiff with cold.” One Times reporter encountered a boy just five years old, who “trudged along, bearing his cross, in the form of a harp, twice the size of himself” and was crying “dove mia Mama,” where’s my mother?5

  An Italian street musician and his padrone. Harper’s Weekly (September 13, 1873): 801. Collection of the author.

  After publishing Joseph’s tale, the Times sent a reporter to uncover the stories of other Italian street musicians. He soon found a small band of the waifs rummaging through some garbage barrels looking for food. The youngest “was regaling himself upon a semi-petrified beef bone. In the other hand he held a piece of bread begrimed with filth. His triangle lay on the ground forgotten.” At first, the children refused to talk with the journalist, but they grew more forthcoming after he fed them a meal of meat, bread, and strawberries at his home. The youngest, a six-year-old called Frances-chito (“little Francis”), was the triangle player. His padrone required him to bring home at least eighty cents each day. A second boy, Rocco, a twelve-year-old from Laurenzano (a small village about five miles west of Calvello), had been in New York for six months. A third you
ngster, Pietrocito (“little Peter”), also a Laurenzano native, had arrived in New York just six days earlier via Naples and Marseilles. “Their clothing is such as a beggar would scorn,” commented the outraged Times correspondent. “. . . They are only washed once a month, and in the meantime they never have their clothes off. At the end of the month they receive a clean shirt.”

  The padrone kept his charges in tatters not merely to save money but to elicit the most sympathy from passersby and thus increase the youngsters’ income. Aside from an hour of music practice each morning at dawn, the children spent all day and much of the evening on the streets, rain or shine, performing and begging. “Hundreds of . . . young Italian children,” the Times lamented, “are now suffering the greatest cruelties at the hands of task-masters, or owners, who have purchased them in New-York City, and who cruelly and maliciously beat and ill-treat them daily should they not bring home enough money every night to satisfy their greed.”6

  The extent to which these child street musicians lived in Five Points is unclear. Most of the children described by the Times resided on Crosby Street a mile or so north of the notorious neighborhood. Yet little Joseph told the Times reporter that many of his fellow musicians lived on Mulberry Street. In 1881, Harper’s Weekly published an image of a Baxter Street padrone whipping a child musician, further evidence that some of these children lived in Five Points. Other accounts of the neighborhood’s tenements noted the presence of small violins and harps, indicating that the children inhabiting them probably performed on the streets.7

  After the Times published Joseph’s story in mid-1873, an outraged public demanded an end to the virtual enslavement of these poor children. Initial efforts to arrest the padroni proved fruitless because prosecutors discovered that the Italians were not violating any laws. That changed in 1874, as the New York legislature enacted a statute making it a crime to receive children under the age of sixteen for the purpose of performing on the street. By the end of the year, the Children’s Aid Society could proudly report that the new law had virtually eliminated the sight “of boys of tender age staggering under the weight of the harp, or begging for the harpist.” Thus came to an end one of the most cruel forms of child labor New York has ever known.8

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Italians

  THE STREETS NEW YORKERS now associate with Little Italy—Baxter, Mulberry, and Elizabeth—did not become thoroughly Italian until the 1880s. Before then, Italian immigrants were just a modest presence in Five Points. Both Cow Bay and the block of Baxter Street just north of the Five Points intersection had become home in the 1850s to many natives of Italy. In the prewar decade, the majority of the city’s Italian immigrants were either professionals or skilled artisans. But those who lived in Five Points worked primarily as unskilled day laborers and fruit peddlers, while the women toiled as ragpickers and the boys as bootblacks. Like their countrymen in other parts of the city, most of the first Italians in Five Points were natives of northern Italy, particularly the province of Liguria and its bustling port capital of Genoa. By 1855, the Italian presence in Five Points was significant enough to prompt the Children’s Aid Society to establish a special night school there especially for Italian immigrants.9

  During the 1860s, the neighborhood’s Italian population continued to increase steadily. In 1865, it was sufficient to support three Italian groceries. These establishments, two of which featured billiard tables and crowded barrooms, served as social hubs for the Italian residents. Growth in the early 1870s was even more rapid, and soon the Italian “colony” began spreading south from the Five Points intersection down Baxter Street. This concentration was the largest in Manhattan, prompting the editor of the city’s Italian-language newspaper to dub Five Points the city’s “Boulevard des Italiens.”10

  Many of the newly arriving immigrants still hailed from Liguria and other northern provinces, but by the early 1870s, large numbers also began arriving in New York from the southern half of the Italian peninsula, especially Campania (the region surrounding Naples) and Basilicata (the region south of Campania). By this point, significant Italian enclaves developed a few miles to the north of Five Points on Thompson, Sullivan, Jersey, Crosby, and Washington Streets. Yet most of the impoverished southern Italians arriving in these years chose to make Five Points their home.11

  Overpopulation, crop failures, high taxes, desperate poverty, and in the case of Basilicata in particular, fear of malaria, all drove southern Italians from their homeland in the 1870s. Until about 1875, most of these sojourners settled in South America, especially Argentina. But as the American economy revived later in the decade, New York became their preferred destination. Soon, hare l’America, to go to America, became a goal of all young Italians, “almost a sign of manhood,” notes one historian. Men did, in fact, outnumber women in this early Italian emigration, by a margin of nearly ten to one in the mid-1880s. They came without women in part because they did not intend to relocate permanently. Most hoped merely to save money and return to Italy to pay off family debts, buy a farm, or in some other way improve upon their previously miserable standard of living.12

  “GROANING OUT THEIR HORRID MUSIC UNDER OUR WINDOWS”

  Unlike Irish Five Pointers, who had quickly embraced American foods upon their arrival in America, Italians chose to bring their culinary staples with them. They could find virtually all of their favorite foods in the neighborhood’s many Italian groceries. Luigi Peirano’s emporium at 98 Park Street carried “a complete assortment of every type of food, specializing in the foods of Genoa and Naples, imported directly. . . . We have olive oil from Lucca and the Ligurian Riviera, parmesan, romano, pecorino, and Swiss and Dutch cheese, dried mushrooms, preserves, salami, rice, flour etc.” The store also stocked wines from Italy and California. Italian groceries also sold pasta, of course, though most Italian housewives settling in Five Points continued to make their own by hand. As in Italy, many Italian food shops in Five Points were highly specialized. Pasquale Cuneo’s Mulberry Street “salumeria,” for example, sold only pork products, including salami, Bolognese mortadella, lard, and numerous varieties of sausage and prosciutto. The Italian press waxed eloquent on the wonderful aromas emanating from Five Points’ kitchens, a sentiment never expressed when the Irish dominated the neighborhood. Yet other New Yorkers did not salivate over the thought of Italian cuisine. Still wedded to a meat and potatoes diet, they looked disdainfully upon the Italians’ “dirty macaroni.”13

  Some specialties, such as Italian ice cream, were sold on the street. For just one cent, a vendor dished out, “on a bit of brown paper, a small dab of ice-cream, or its mysterious and sticky relative called ‘hokey-pokey’; and he finds plenty of cash customers. While ice-cream is sold at such popular prices, even the poorest family need not be without cramps and dyspepsia.”14

  The first Italians in New York became synonymous not merely with certain types of food but with specific occupations as well. Initially, organ-grinding was the vocation most associated with Italian immigrants. Journalist Solon Robinson had complained in the 1850s that New Yorkers were “tormented” by Italians “groaning out their horrid music under our windows, while the grinder and his monkey look anxiously for falling pennies or pea-nuts.” As Robinson noted, monkeys were an integral part of the organ-grinder’s trade, climbing up building facades to solicit donations from those in upper-story windows. Their antics delighted children, who in turn beseeched their parents for coins. Grinders usually dressed their simian assistants in ornate costumes to attract attention, though they did so with a sense of humor. After the Austro-Italian War of 1866, for example, it became especially popular to dress the monkeys in Austrian officers’ uniforms.15

  New Yorkers associated organ-grinding with Five Points. Nearly one in twenty Italian men living there was an organ-grinder in 1880. Even if he did not live in Five Points, the organ-grinder probably bought or rented his instrument there. An aspiring grinder could rent a hand organ for four dollars per month on Baxte
r Street, or buy one direct from the manufacturer a block away in Chatham Square. The Chatham Square dealer claimed to have supplied five thousand Italians with the instruments from 1870 to 1890.16

  Five Pointers also supplied organ-grinders with their monkeys. A Harper’s Weekly story on “Italian Life in New York” featured a full-page print of a Baxter Street “monkey training school.” The “half-grown” monkeys enrolled at the simian academy were taught to doff their hats and shake hands in response to commands in either Italian or English. A properly trained monkey could significantly increase a grinder’s income by thoroughly working the crowd for tips and amusing onlookers so that they dug deeper into their pockets for donations. Trained animals were worth twenty to thirty dollars, the equivalent of several months’ salary to impoverished Five Pointers.17

  Consequently, a Five Pointer would go to virtually any length to keep a monkey healthy. An Italian author visiting the neighborhood related with astonishment that “one day, seated on a step of one of the darkest tenements, one could see an Italian lady who, with uncovered breasts, nursed a monkey as if it were a baby. The monkey was sick; and this woman, the wife of an organ-grinder, hoped to restore it with her own milk.”18

  As had been the case with child street musicians, legislation hastened the decline of organ-grinding. “The law forbidding organ-grinders to have monkeys, and the demand for Italian laborers, have made organ-grinding almost a thing of the past,” reported Harper’s Weekly in 1890. This was something of an exaggeration, as the trade persisted well into the twentieth century. But the number of organ-grinders in New York probably declined by two-thirds from the 1870s to 1890. Once Italian boys began to displace Irish youngsters as bootblacks and newsboys, and Italian men gained acceptance as day laborers, few lamented the demise of these musical street trades.19