Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Lee soon began demanding payoffs from Chinatown’s gambling dens. He would flash his deputy sheriff’s badge and insist that without a payment of five dollars per week, the police would close down the establishment. Lee probably also threatened to use his tong’s toughs to punish any holdouts. By 1883, virtually every one of Chinatown’s two dozen or so gambling resorts made weekly payments to Lee and his Loon Ye Tong minions, netting them thousands of dollars each year.53

  The victims of Lee’s extortion eventually began to balk at making the protection payments. They hired an attorney who filed affidavits with the District Attorney’s Office documenting Lee’s demands. As a result, Lee’s commission as deputy sheriff was revoked, and a grand jury directed the district attorney to file charges. After deliberating for some time about exactly what Lee could be charged with, he was indicted on May 1 for “keeping a gambling establishment” at 17 Mott and “compounding a crime” by taking money from other illegal gambling houses.54

  Lee responded aggressively. To the press, he argued that the accusations were motivated by Chinese regional jealousies. Nearly all the New York Chinese hailed from the region around Canton, explained the Times, but while Lee was from the subdistrict of Sin Ching, those charging him with extortion were natives of Ha Sin Ning. Wong Ching Foo, a Lee ally, told the Times that Lee’s enemies were “armed to the teeth” and had threatened Lee with “extermination.” Yet Lee’s men apparently did most of the threatening. They promised death to anyone who testified against Lee, leaving those who had made statements against him, their attorney complained, “in a state of almost abject terror.”55

  In the days before Lee’s gambling trial was scheduled to take place, the other pillar of Chinatown’s vice industry—its opium dens—also came under attack. But whereas the fight over fan tan was an intra-Chinese battle, the assault on the opium trade was mounted by Five Points’ non-Asian residents. Many Irish-American parents had become convinced that Chinese opium joints were corrupting their daughters. The president of Transfiguration’s Catholic Young Men’s Association, John A. O’Brien, condemned the opium dens as “girl traps.” Five Pointers commonly believed that Chinese peddlers, as one eighteen-year-old woman put it, “give girls opium in candy and all sorts of things, until we can’t do without it.” Another neighborhood resident claimed that “little girls” in their early teens secretly whiled away their days in the dens.56

  Spearheading this attack was the organizer of the Young Men’s Association, Transfiguration assistant pastor James Barry. In early May 1883, Barry stationed surveillance teams on the neighborhood’s rooftops. Whenever these units observed a white woman entering one of the suspected opium joints, they notified the police, who would immediately raid the premises and arrest the occupants under the state law, passed just a year earlier, that for the first time made it a misdemeanor both to smoke opium and operate a joint. But the raids did not uncover the expected hordes of opium-crazed girls. The only “girl” found in the joints, identified by Barry as a fourteen-year-old, turned out to be nineteen and was never charged. The association nonetheless claimed that many girls aged ten to fifteen had escaped over backyard fences.57

  Despite the hysteria whipped up by Barry and fanned by the newspapers, many non-Asian New Yorkers stepped forward to defend the Chinese. An official of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children called the whole affair “newspaper buncombe. . . . Nothing more is going on in Mott street than has been going on for the past two or three years.” Irish women, he asserted, “tempt the Chinamen to immorality as often as they are tempted.” A Protestant missionary agreed that “Mott street wickedness is not general.”58

  The stories of the arrested Caucasian women substantiated these claims. Katie Crowley had come to Mott Street to visit her sister—known as “Chinee Annie” because she had married a Chinese American and lived in Chinatown. Two other white women picked up in the raids were also Irish Americans who had married Chinese men. They admitted smoking opium, but probably had picked up the habit from their husbands. Only the last of the four, apprehended at her brother’s behest for “vagrancy,” had no apparent kinship ties to the Chinese community. She admitted frequenting opium dens, but insisted she did so only to eat Chinese candy!59

  “Crazed by Opium” reflects the increasingly prevalent fear that white women were becoming addicted to opium in Five Points’ opium dens. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (May 19, 1883): 204. Collection of the Library of Congress.

  Father Barry’s campaign against the opium dens was not endorsed even by the head of his own parish, Father Thomas F. Lynch. Barry’s crusade “finds no favor with Father Lynch,” reported the Tribune. “He says that the charges that the Chinese have been debauching large numbers of young girls are grossly exaggerated.” In his eighteen months at Transfiguration, Lynch told the Tribune, “not a single instance of the ruin of a young girl by a Chinaman had come under his notice.” He condemned Barry’s attempts to, in the reporter’s words, “stir up race hatred against the Chinese.” The Chinese, of course, worried about being stigmatized as well. “The trouble,” observed Wong Ching Foo after the raids and arrests, “is that the Irish are trying to direct this clamor against the whole [Chinese] race.”60

  The opium raids could not have pleased Tom Lee. The one indicted opium den operator, Ah Chung, admitted selling the drug but said he thought the ten dollars per month he paid Lee was a license fee that made his operation legal. To this point, Lee had been implicated only for taking money from fan tan operators. These narcotics-related revelations, coming just days before the start of his trial on the gambling charges, did not bode well. But prosecutors did not file any additional charges against Lee. Furthermore, as his court date approached, his terror campaign seemed to pay dividends, as one after another of the men who had implicated Lee began to recant. At a preliminary hearing held on May 16, the prosecution could muster but a single witness, and with Lee’s men ominously filling the courtroom, even he changed his testimony. The charges were eventually dropped and Lee was reinstated as deputy sheriff.61

  In the future, opium dealers would have to operate more furtively. The opium den proprietors also learned to forestall prosecution by keeping their female clientele to a minimum. And they learned, along with the fan tan operators, that the authorities would do nothing to prevent Lee from extorting protection money from them. Until these men could establish some organization of their own to match Lee’s Loon Ye Tong, he would remain the “the great Mongolian magnate of Mott Street,” the most powerful man in Chinatown and the best known Chinese New Yorker.62

  “YOUR RELIGION IS GOOD ENOUGH AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT OURS IS BETTER AND GOES FURTHER”

  New Yorkers would continue to associate Mott Street with vice. But fraternal, occupational, and religious organizations became a much more integral part of the Five Points Chinese community. The Chinese made such organizations the focal point of both their business and social lives.

  Most of Chinatown’s fraternal societies had economic or social agendas. As New York’s Chinese population expanded in the 1880s, for example, Chinatown’s residents replaced the all-encompassing mutual aid societies of the 1870s with more selective groups organized around family and geographic origins. Village associations, known as fongs, rented apartments in Chinatown for use as both social headquarters and lodging houses for homeless or unemployed members. Members traded intelligence on job openings and laundry opportunities, and pooled money to start businesses. They also sent money back to China to finance flood or famine relief, build a new school, or help the village defend itself against bandits.

  More consequential than these geographically based groups, however, were the family or surname organizations known as kung saw, which limited membership to those with a certain surname, no matter what part of China they had emigrated from. These groups were far more important than the regional bodies, especially for newcomers seeking loans and lodging. The Wong family association, for example, located at 5
Mott Street in a building controlled by a wealthy Wong merchant, played a major role in Chinatown life. Smaller clans often joined forces in order to attain a membership base that could sustain an organization. When one Chinese, Hor Pao, arrived in New York in the late 1870s, he could not find enough clansmen to create a kung saw. He and his kin eventually teamed with Lais and Gongs to form the Sam Yip, or Three Family Society.63

  The press constantly marveled at the number and variety of Chinese mutual aid societies. Among the most important were the laundrymen’s organizations. Some catered to laundry owners, regulating the prices that were charged for a given service. Others functioned more like trade unions for their employees—it was even said that the washers and the pressers maintained separate labor organizations. Chinese cigarmakers established unions as well, while Chinatown merchants created a chamber of commerce. Even leisure activities were organized; a fan tan society, for example, regulated that game. The Chinese could depend upon one another even in death. A burial society provided for interment in the traditional manner, arranging for the return of its members’ remains to China.64

  Given their penchant for organization, it should come as no surprise that Chinatown’s residents created an umbrella group to regulate their myriad societies. This was the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, established around 1883 and modeled after a body of the same name in San Francisco. The association coordinated celebrations for Chinese New Year and adjudicated disputes that could not be settled by the smaller bodies. Each year the heads of the various organizations that constituted this society elected a leader, christened by the press as the “mayor of Chinatown.” Its headquarters—a lavish brick building at 16 Mott—was known as the “Chinese City Hall.”65

  Number 16 Mott also eventually housed Chinatown’s most important religious institution, its “joss house.” Chinese Americans’ religious practices are difficult to characterize, for their Taoist roots had been melded over the centuries with elements of Confucianism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship. Their temples consequently contained images of various popular gods drawn from these traditions. Whether Chinese Americans devoted much attention to religion is also difficult to determine. One immigrant, asked by the Tribune about his spiritual views, “laughingly replied that he had left all that at Canton,” and American journalists rarely found crowds in Chinatown’s places of worship. Nonetheless, these temples were one of the most talked about features of Chinese life in Five Points.66

  At first, Chinese New Yorkers built makeshift shrines in their clubhouses, initially on Baxter Street and later on Mott. By the early 1880s, they had constructed a more formal and elaborate temple in a third-floor apartment at 10 Chatham Square. Americans always referred to the carved deity at the center of these shrines as “joss” (the origin of the term, first coined in California, is not known) and the buildings in which they sat as joss houses. “The joss himself sits in a gorgeous shrine of carved wood, mounted with gold,” noted one Caucasian visitor to the Chatham Square sanctuary:

  The setting is most fantastic and bewildering. Birds, dragons, antediluvian animals, serpents, crabs and fishes burst out all over the front of the shrine. Almost veiled from view, the joss peers out on the worshipper. He is painted on carved wood, and is as hideous a deity as was ever seen in the most frenzied of opium dreams. In front of the shrine stands a table—a handsome one, with all the appliances of worship upon it. Worship takes the form of burning scented sticks and paper. . . . Before the god an oil lamp burns day and night. . . . On the walls are painted mythological scenes. . . . Handsomely illuminated texts from Confucius in rich frames are everywhere. . . . The costly furnishing of the room, however, is found in the magnificent two-armed ebony chairs, elaborately carved. . . . There are a dozen or more of these chairs in a row. The great merchants and teachers of the Chinese colony sit in them on feast days and occasions of solemn conclave.

  By the end of the 1880s, the Chinese had completed an even more ostentatious temple in the Consolidated Benevolent Association Building at 16 Mott.67

  New Yorkers were both fascinated by and suspicious of Chinese religious practices. “The Chinese have peculiar ways of showing reverence for their sanctuaries,” intoned Transfiguration’s Father Thomas McLoughlin. “Namely they sit around and smoke and chat and have a quiet little game; nay right back of the shrine is a room with two bamboo couches where the priests of the temple and their friends ‘hit the pipe’ to pass away the time.” Observing that most who entered the joss house across the street from his church merely lit incense and chanted a few quick prayers before departing, McLoughlin ridiculed the Chinese “go as you please [form of] worship, having no fixed hours, nor fixed days, nor fixed ritual, nor fixed liturgy.” The only reason most Chinatown residents attended at all, McLoughlin sneered, was to receive a piece of paper that contained “his fortune for the week, i.e., what were to be his lucky and unlucky days[,] what his lucky numbers [were] in gambling, on what days to buy and sell, etc.”

  Most Protestants, of course, continued to disparage both religions practiced on Mott Street. “I visited the Joss house in Mott Street last week and saw the pagans bowed down before their idols and offering their incense,” commented one minister. “Right opposite, I entered a so-called Christian Temple and there found a lot of Papist idolators bowed down in like manner before their idols of wood and stone.”68

  Catholics were initially unwilling to make efforts to convert the Chinese, but the Methodists of the Five Points Mission actively proselytized in the Chinese-American community. In 1879, they rented prime retail space at 14 Mott Street to house their Chinese mission and placed at its head Moy Jin Kee, a young immigrant whose father was a Methodist minister in Canton. At one of the mission’s first Sunday services, an uptown minister told the Chinese in attendance that “your religion is good enough as far as it goes, but ours is better and goes further.” Such an approach did not bode well for the mission’s success. The next day, Chinatown residents mobbed Moy for disparaging remarks he had apparently made about them to the press. To make matters worse, police arrested him hours later for stealing silks from his former employer. Although the Mott Street mission soon closed, the Methodists did eventually achieve a modicum of success converting Chinese immigrants. Another Protestant organization aimed at the Chinese was started in the 1890s by Baptists on Doyer Street. Known in the neighborhood as “Tom Noonan’s Rescue Mission,” it became a Chinatown institution, though it focused its proselytizing efforts primarily on Bowery drunks rather than the Chinese.69

  Unwilling to lose the Chinese to the Protestants by default, Five Points Catholic leaders eventually felt compelled to proselytize in Chinatown as well. When McLoughlin replaced Lynch in the early 1890s, he announced to the press that he would work to convert the neighborhood’s Chinese immigrants. But he gave up a few years later, insisting that such efforts were pointless. The Chinese immigrant “comes here for the sole object of making money,” explained McLoughlin, “and he has the poorest idea of the spiritual world that it is possible for a human being to have.” This last point echoed almost verbatim Lynch’s assessment of the Italians a few years earlier. McLoughlin claimed that apparent Protestant success with the Chinese was a sham. “Most of their converts still carry the queue,” he noted, “which is a sign that they still hold to their own superstitions.”70

  “A PECULIAR FANCY FOR WIVES OF CELTIC ORIGIN”

  New Yorkers considered the Chinese—with their “heathenish” religion, strange foods, opium and gambling dens, and utterly incomprehensible language—more “foreign” than any other immigrants who had ever settled in New York. One potentially threatening aspect of this utterly foreign enclave was its overwhelming domination by men. Just as antebellum Americans had viewed the celibacy of Catholic priests as “unnatural” and speculated endlessly about the “crimes” and “perversions” to which such a life might drive them, postbellum New Yorkers worried about Chinatown’s lack of women. This was one of the unspoken subt
exts of the panic over the “ruin” of white women in the neighborhood’s opium joints. Yet Americans must have realized that they themselves were partly to blame for the scarcity of women in Chinatown. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had prohibited even most Chinese already in the United States from bringing wives from Asia to New York. The law’s sponsors apparently hoped that Chinese men would return to Asia rather than face the possibility of a lifetime without a spouse.

  Chinese New Yorkers began instead to marry other immigrants. Even before the Civil War, Americans noticed the propensity of Chinese men to court Irish women, who for more than a generation had suffered from a shortage of potential Irish spouses. By the late 1860s, Chinese-Irish unions were quite common. “These Chinamen have a peculiar fancy for wives of Celtic origin,” asserted the Tribune in early 1869. A reporter from the World who in 1877 toured a Baxter Street tenement housing fifteen Chinese immigrants found that all had Irish wives. With shortages of both Chinese women and Irish men, laws of supply and demand drew these Five Pointers together.71

  Some Chinese Five Pointers did manage to find Chinese wives. Two spirited their brides across the Canadian border dressed as men. Most of the Chinese women who came to New York unattached were young indentured servants who, when they became old enough, could be “bought” from their “owners” and wed. In 1896, even though he already had two wives in China, forty-six-year-old Hor Poa paid $1,200 to marry sixteen-year-old Gon She, described by one reporter as “the Belle of Chinatown.” Another immigrant paid $900 for his bride.72