Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  The Appos’ story also reflects the uneasy ties between Five Points’ various ethnic groups. Quimbo Appo, like many of the first Chinese Five Pointers, married an Irishwoman. Yet every one of his murder victims was an Irish American as well. Even his delusions revealed both resentment and affection toward the Irish. On the one hand, he blamed his long incarceration at Matteawan on the “Fenian Party,” insisting that Irish-American Democrats were conspiring with the governor to keep him behind bars. But at the same time, he believed that his own persecution was tied to the oppression of the Irish, telling a doctor in 1885 that “he has been, and is now, suffering for the cause of Ireland and that he must suffer until she is free.” The once exemplary Chinaman continued to suffer his personal torment at Matteawan for another twenty-seven years until he died, at age eighty-seven, in 1912.15

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Chinatown

  “HE HEAR HE CAN MAKE MONEY IN NEW-LORK,

  AND BOYS NO POUND HIM WITH STONES”

  TODAY, FIVE POINTS is long gone. The name dropped out of use in the 1890s. The five-way intersection has become three-pointed. Virtually all the Irish, Italians, and Jews have moved away. Only one group from the nineteenth century has stayed—the Chinese. Five Points has become Chinatown.

  Before the Civil War, most Chinese New Yorkers had lived in the impoverished, Irish-dominated Fourth Ward to the east of Five Points. Chinese immigrants probably settled in the Fourth Ward because it was located on the waterfront. Many of the first Chinese New Yorkers were sailors—it was not uncommon to find a Chinese cook or steward working on a ship with an otherwise all-Caucasian crew. Eventually, a number of boardinghouses opened to accommodate them.

  Not all of the early Chinese New Yorkers were sailors. Others worked as street peddlers, in particular selling cheap cigars and rock candy. A few, like Quimbo Appo, found higher-status employment in the tea trade. Some had come to New York after failing to strike it rich in the California gold mines. Others had escaped to New York by way of the Peruvian Chincha Islands, where they had worked as “coolie laborers” in near-slavelike conditions shoveling guano for use as fertilizer. Still others had been tobacco workers in Cuba.16

  In the years after the Civil War, however, Five Points became a magnet for the New York Chinese. By 1869, the New York Tribune could authoritatively call “Baxter st., and its immediate neighborhood, the particular locality of New-York in which all the Chinese live.” It is possible that the Irish somehow pushed the Chinese out of the Fourth Ward, for the block on lower Baxter Street on which the Chinese concentrated was remarkable in Five Points for its lack of Irish residents, and was instead dominated by Italian and Polish Jewish immigrants. The Chinese may have felt more welcome—or at least less threatened—among the city’s other outcast groups on lower Baxter Street than they did in the overwhelmingly Irish Fourth Ward.

  Apart from the relocation, New York’s Chinese community remained unchanged in 1870. Sailors and cigar sellers still predominated. Most residents continued to live in Chinese-run boardinghouses, where, for three dollars a week, they received a bed, breakfast, and “a good meat supper.” And it was still a very small community. “There are not more than 60 or 70 Chinamen regularly living in New-York,” asserted the Tribune in 1869. A year later, the census recorded only thirty-eight Chinese natives living in Five Points, though the enumerator seems to have skipped some of the seediest Baxter Street tenements where additional Chinese immigrants lived.17

  From the very beginning, the Chinese in Five Points organized “clubhouses” to foster sociability within their community. A Daily Graphic reporter found one such clubroom in early 1873 on an upper floor of a Donovan’s Lane tenement. Its members “are very respectable men, chiefly cooks and stewards of ships.” Dominoes seemed to be the diversion of choice, although one section of the clubhouse contained writing materials so that members could correspond with loved ones back in China. “The gamesters were sprawled about in all sorts of attitudes, and no professional gambler could have a more inscrutable physiognomy than these phlegmatic, unimpressionable beings. They played and smoked in profound silence.” By the end of the year, the Times had identified two additional Chinese “mutual benefit” clubs operating in Five Points, one on Baxter Street and another on Mott.18

  During the 1870s, the Five Points Chinese began to shift from Baxter to Mott Street. Again, it is difficult to determine why. A Chinese boardinghouse already existed on Mott (probably at No. 13) by 1870. A prominent Chinese merchant, Wo Kee, moved his popular general store and boardinghouse from the Fourth Ward to 34 Mott in 1873. Wo Kee may have opted for Mott Street because he found it impossible to secure commercial space near the Chinese residences on lower Baxter, where Jewish clothing merchants virtually monopolized storefront property. But prosperous Chinese merchants instead may have sought to distance themselves from the especially decrepit Baxter Street tenements. In any case, by the mid-1870s, newspaper accounts of the Chinese in New York began referring more and more to Mott Street. In 1880, the Times called Mott Street New York’s “China Town.”19

  By that point, the city’s Chinese population had increased dramatically. Some Chinese had begun filtering into New York after completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 facilitated the journey from California. But most of the increase stemmed from the anti-Chinese movement fomented in San Francisco by Denis Kearney. An Irish immigrant, Kearney rose to prominence by founding the California Workingmen’s Party, which blamed the Chinese for the massive unemployment that gripped California during the severe depression of the late 1870s. Crying “the Chinese must go,” Kearney and his supporters used intimidation and violence to drive the Chinese out of their California workplaces and prevent new employers from hiring Asians. In a typical incident, Kearney led a mob to the mansions of railroad tycoons Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker, threatening to destroy their homes if they continued to employ the Chinese in railroad construction. San Francisco vigilantes led or inspired by Kearney also wrecked numerous Chinese-owned businesses in 1877. Kearney’s tactics drove thousands of Chinese Americans from California in that year, and many headed for New York. More left the West Coast in late 1879, after Kearney’s party gained control of the San Francisco municipal government and began enacting discriminatory legislation against the Chinese.20

  By March 1880, newspaper reports expressed alarm at the increasing size of the Mott Street Chinese enclave. The Tribune announced that one hundred Chinese had arrived in New York from California in a single day, and that fifty had completed the journey from San Francisco a few days earlier. “They are the vanguard of the immense army of almond-eyed exiles who are about to pour into this city if the situation in the West continues to be serious,” intoned the Herald ominously. Samuel Weeks, a prominent lower Mott Street landlord, told the Tribune that the Chinese “had been leasing all the desirable property in that part of Mott-st., in several cases they had paid large prices for the tenants to leave.” Weeks noted that Chinese entrepreneurs preferred to lease entire buildings rather than individual apartments, opening shops on the ground floor while providing dormitories and rooms for socializing above.21

  With the press having played a prominent role in fomenting the anti-Chinese violence in San Francisco, few of the newcomers were willing to talk to the many journalists who converged on Mott Street to document their influx. But the Times managed to locate one new Chinatown resident, laundry operator Wah Ling, who agreed to discuss the surge in Chinatown’s population. Using another immigrant who had already lived in New York for several years as an interpreter, Wah told the Times that San Francisco was “no good place for Chinaman any more. White man flaid to bling his shirts to iron any more. Chinaman get pounded with stones by boys on stleet. He hear he can make money in New-Lork, and boys no pound him with stones.” Wah also cited a price war between rail and steamship companies, which had cut the cost of a transcontinental journey in half, as a factor in his decision to come to New York. Nearly all of the New York
Chinese were natives of Guangdong, the South China region best known for the cities of Hong Kong and Canton. The 1880 census recorded 748 Chinese natives living in New York (200 of whom lived in Five Points), but the press insisted that the true figure was closer to 2,000.22

  Although the Chinese constituted only a tiny proportion of the Five Points population, it seemed to many observers that the Asians had overrun the neighborhood. “Mott Street might be in Pekin instead of Gotham, so Chinese has it become,” commented Frank Leslie’s in a typical 1880 story. “. . . Almond eyes and pig-tails . . . are the order of the day.” Like the Irish Lansdowne immigrants before them, the Chinese chose to concentrate on just two of the neighborhood’s approximately twenty blocks: Mott Street below Pell and Pell Street between Mott and the Bowery. In 1890, when the New York City Police conducted a census of the neighborhood, 95 percent of the eight hundred or so Chinese they found in Five Points lived on these two blocks. So even though the number of Chinese in the city was still relatively small, noted Frank Leslie’s, they are “so distinct and so concentrated that [they] form a much more considerable community than double the number of Italians, Hungarians or Polish Jews.”23

  By this point, Mott Street had become as well known in Guangdong as Mulberry Street was in Basilicata and Campania. One Chinese American vividly recalled when the idea of emigrating first dawned upon him. He remembered that when he was a child in China,

  a man of our tribe came back from America and took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it. . . . The man had gone away from our village a poor boy. Now he returned with unlimited wealth, which he had obtained in the country of the American wizards. After many amazing adventures he had become a merchant in a city called Mott Street, so it was said. When his palace and grounds were completed he gave a dinner to all the people who assembled to be his guests. One hundred pigs roasted whole were served on the tables, with chickens, ducks, geese and such an abundance of dainties that our villagers even now lick their fingers when they think of it. He had the best actors from Hong Kong performing, and every musician for miles around was playing and singing. . . . Having made his wealth among the barbarians this man had faithfully returned to pour it out among his tribesmen, and he is living in our village now very happy, and a pillar of strength to the poor. The wealth of this man filled my mind with the idea that I, too, would like to go to the country of the wizards and gain some of their wealth.24

  Just as newly arrived Italians always made Mulberry Street their first stop in New York, Chinese immigrants invariably went to Mott Street to find lodging and work in the great metropolis.

  Work opportunities abounded. Some Chinese continued to labor as sailors and peddlers. By the 1870s, many Chinese peddlers sold “that peculiar preparation known as Chinese candy,” probably a rock candy made from brown sugar. Only a tiny amount of start-up capital was required, as the vendors usually produced the confection themselves.25

  Most Chinese street peddlers hawked cigars. Ballou’s Pictorial portrayed a Chinese cigar peddler in its 1855 collage of “New-York Street Figures,” and they became especially ubiquitous by the end of the 1860s.

  Most had come to the United States via Cuba, where they had worked as indentured servants on sugar plantations before escaping into the tobacco industry. In Manhattan, they bought tobacco remnants from upscale cigar manufacturers, which they rolled into one hundred fifty or more cigars each evening and sold on the street the next day for three cents apiece.26

  Eventually, many Chinese began working as cigarmakers for the city’s Anglo tobacco merchants. “Because of their natural deftness and quickness of finger,” Chinese cigarmakers were said to earn even more than the city’s well-paid German cigarmakers—as much as twenty-five dollars per week. But their impressive earnings also resulted from their skill at organizing. By 1885, several hundred Chinese tobacco workers had formed a trade union. Several were able to open their own cigar factories. One, operated by Mig Atak on Chatham Street just south of Five Points, employed as many as one hundred workers. New Yorkers continued to associate the Chinese with cigars until almost the end of the century.27

  By the 1880s, however, New Yorkers began to associate Chinese immigrants more with the laundry trade than with cigarmaking. The Chinese shifted their focus from cigars to shirts in part because laundrywork did not threaten the occupations of white men and therefore would not lead to the labor unrest that had driven them from California. Chinese immigrants also gravitated to laundrywork because the Irish immigrant women who had once taken in laundry were leaving the business as their economic status improved. With demand for laundry services high and competition minimal, laundrywork seemed perfectly suited to the needs of the Chinese.

  Operating a laundry required the leasing of retail space, which meant that start-up costs were significantly higher than those for cigar and candy peddlers. One might acquire this capital working in someone else’s laundry. It generally took two people to run a “hand laundry”—a washer and a presser. The washer would come in early in the morning and launder the clothes. The presser would report to work at midday and work late into the evening ironing by hand. Often there was so much work that both partners worked sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days.28

  Another way to obtain funds was to take part in a whey, a cooperative loan system Chinese immigrants used to raise seed money for business ventures. Signs posted on Mott Street advertised the organization of these syndicates, which typically involved a ten-dollar contribution from each of twenty participants. Once twenty subscribers had been found, each would write on a slip of paper the interest rate he was willing to pay for one month’s use of the two hundred dollars they had collectively pledged. The highest bidder went home that day with the two hundred dollars, minus the agreed-upon interest, which was divided among the remaining participants. At the end of the month, the borrower turned two hundred dollars over to the next-highest bidder, and so on until every man in the whey had borrowed the money. Some desperate immigrants paid as much as 40 percent interest to get first crack at the whey’s funds.29

  As the Chinatown community matured, immigrants seeking credit relied less on wheys, and more on the enclave’s Chinese groceries. By 1888, there were nearly thirty Chinese groceries on Mott Street, enjoying the same status in the Chinese community as the Italian banks just a block away on Mulberry Street. Like the Mulberry Street banks, most Chinese groceries played on the newcomers’ regional loyalty to attract business. There were several dozen counties within the Guangdong region represented in New York, and arriving immigrants would go straight to the general store run by a native of his county to look for work and lodging.

  According to the Chinese-American journalist Wong Ching Foo, if the newcomer “was in any way known in China by any of the . . . men at this headquarters, he is given capital by the storekeeper for whatever business he wished to start, to the limit of two hundred dollars. . . . Most of these storekeepers are old laundrymen who accumulated enough money from the washing business to start these more profitable groceries.” Wong reported that these merchants charged no interest on the thousands of dollars they loaned. Instead, the borrower had to promise to buy his supplies from the lender and to pay down his debt in regular installments.30

  The Chinese groceries on Mott Street served the community not only as a source of credit and supplies, but also, as Wong observed, as “clubs, and general newspaper stations, [and] post-offices.” Chinese immigrants typically received mail at a Mott Street grocery rather than at their homes. This custom developed in part because the laundrymen moved frequently, especially before they purchased their own establishment. Certain groceries served as postal drops for particular clans or Chinese counties or towns. Kaimon Chin, a longtime Chinatown resident, recalled in about 1990 that his father’s store at 59 Mott became a mail distribution center for the Chins from his village. Sundays were especially busy at the groceries, because that was the only day of the week that Chinese laundries were closed. At th
e grocery, laundrymen would buy food and laundry supplies for the week, collect their mail, trade gossip and news from back home, and relax over a cup of tea and a game of dominoes. Most Chinese laundrymen in New York eagerly anticipated Sundays, when they could escape their exhausting, isolated workplaces and enjoy the comforting sociability of their favorite Mott Street general store.31

  Describing Wo Kee’s general store, probably when it was still at 34 Mott, a correspondent from the Sun reported that “it contains apparently somewhere near a million different things of the most incongruous character.” They included

  gigantic pills, roots, herbs, barks, seeds, and such like. There are incense sticks, jade bracelets; strange evolutions of Celestial fancy in the way of ornamentation, like glorified valentines; quaint and pretty tea services; dried shark fins, looking like tangled strips of amber-tinted glue; ducks split, baked in peanut oil, and flattened out dry, so as to look like strange caricatures of dragons; sweetmeats in infinite variety, nuts that nobody but a Chinaman knows the names of, dried mushrooms, opium and pipes for smoking it, tobacco, teas of many kinds, some of them exquisite and much more expensive than any American store sells; silks, fungus-looking black lumps, of which it is guaranteed that a small bit will make the drunkest man immediately sober; sandals and Chinese clothing.32

  The Sun’s reporter described Wo Kee tallying customers’ purchases with an abacus and making entries into his account books with a camel’s-hair brush, leaving readers with the impression that these stores were quaint and old-fashioned. But they were also extremely profitable. By 1885, Wo Kee owned businesses and property in Chinatown worth $150,000. Most of this fortune derived from the export to China of American cutlery, firearms, and fine prints. With headquarters first at 32 Pell Street and then at 9 Doyers, Wong He Cong also exported goods to China, Southeast Asia, and Cuba, while simultaneously becoming, according to the Herald, “the foremost wholesale dealer in tea and rice in New York.” Journalists estimated his net worth at a million dollars. Such phenomenal success was rare, of course. But through their control of the enclave’s venture capital, Chinatown’s merchants became the community’s most powerful and influential members.33