Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Nonetheless, the majority of Chinese men still married non-Chinese women. Courtship could not have been easy for these couples. Most Chinese New Yorkers spoke very little English, while their mates told the Times that “they knew little of the language of their spouses, it was very hard to learn.” Many New Yorkers could not fathom why a non-Asian would marry a “Chinaman.” When a journalist from the World asked two Five Points Irishwomen why they had wed Chinese immigrants, one just laughed, but the other replied indignantly, “Because we liked ’em, of course; why shouldn’t we?” The reporter “suggested that it was more in accordance with the nature of things that they should marry white men, whereupon Mrs. Ching Si said that [their husbands] were as white as anybody and a good deal whiter than many of their neighbors, and Mrs. Ah Muk showed her little baby as proof that she was more than content with her lot. . . . ‘Joe is his name,’ said the proud mother. ‘He don’t look like a Chinaboy, does he, when he’s asleep’?”73

  Intermarriage is sometimes hailed as a benchmark of assimilation, but anti-Chinese prejudice remained strong, both in Five Points and beyond. This became especially manifest when Congress in 1892 passed the Geary Act. In addition to renewing the ban on Chinese immigration imposed a decade earlier, the Geary Act required Chinese Americans (other than merchants and professionals) to register with the Treasury Department, which would issue them a certificate of residency, including a photograph. Any Chinese caught without this photo identification were to be punished with up to one year’s hard labor followed by deportation, unless they could produce a “white witness” to prove that they had been prevented from obtaining the certificate by accident or illness.

  The Geary Act inspired unprecedented indignation in Chinatown. Wong Ching Foo condemned it in testimony before Congress, noting that convicts were the only other group forcibly photographed by the American government. A Mott Street laundryman, Fong Yue Ting, organized the Equal Rights League to coordinate the Chinese community’s legal challenge to the statute. Many non-Asians also condemned the legislation. Harper’s Weekly called it “an act of bad faith” and “unintelligent zeal,” while the Times denounced it as “one of the most humiliating acts of which any civilized nation has been guilty in modern times.”74

  The San Francisco–based Chinese Six Companies coordinated resistance to the Geary Act. It called on Chinese Americans nationwide not to register, asked for one dollar from each immigrant to finance a legal challenge, and hired a prominent expert on constitutional law—attorney Joseph H. Choate—to head their legal team. Choate arranged with federal prosecutors to have Fong Yue Ting and two other laundrymen arrested on May 6, 1893, the first day upon which the Chinese would be liable to deportation. Choate immediately appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had already agreed to consider the matter on an expedited basis.

  New York’s Chinese Americans were stunned when the Court ruled by a five to three vote that the Geary Act was, in fact, constitutional. In their unusually vigorous dissenting opinions, the minority insisted that the law violated the Burlingame Treaty’s pledge to grant Chinese immigrants all “the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions” as other immigrants; that its presumption of guilt in the deportation proceedings violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process to all “persons”; and that deportation itself was cruel and unusual punishment. The Court majority, however, insisted that Congress had just as much right to regulate the residence of aliens who had taken no steps to become naturalized as it did to regulate immigration itself. How the Chinese could be expected to apply for naturalization when they were now banned from doing so was not addressed. As to the act’s supposed violation of due process, the Court ruled that due process was a right for citizens, but only a privilege for aliens, one that Congress could choose to withhold from them.75

  The Supreme Court’s ruling in Fong Yue Ting v. the United States highlighted the importance of naturalization to the legal rights of immigrants in the United States. The handful of Chinese New Yorkers such as Tom Lee who had become citizens before 1882 must have felt both lucky and relieved. But most white Americans found the sight of any Chinese immigrant exercising the rights of citizenship appalling. In August 1904, after casting ballots for more than a quarter century in state and national political contests, Tom Lee was arrested for voting illegally. His naturalization papers were invalid, prosecutors declared, because Congress had subsequently stipulated that the Chinese were not eligible for naturalization. Police also arrested Civil War veteran William A. Hang, a Pearl Street cigar manufacturer who had lived in New York for more than forty years, on identical charges. Hang was serving aboard one of David G. Farragut’s fourteen gunboats in Mobile Bay when the admiral shouted, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.” No amount of service to one’s country could earn a Chinese immigrant the privileges of citizenship.76

  Americans rationalized their refusal to naturalize Chinese immigrants on the grounds that the Chinese could never become “true” Americans. Even Harper’s Weekly, which defended them throughout the Gilded Age, insisted that “the Chinese are the most undesirable of immigrants because, with all their useful qualities, they cannot assimilate socially or politically or morally with Americans.” In truth, no Five Points immigrants had ever assimilated to an extent that would have satisfied native-born Americans. The Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, and Chinese all tended to re-create their Old World culture in New York rather than adopt American habits and values. They socialized mostly with other immigrants from the land of their birth, sang the same songs and played the same games as they had back home, ate much the same food, and complained that American values would ruin their children. While they may not have regretted coming to America, they often pined for their native soil. Italians and Chinese dreamed of returning to their homelands with great riches. The Irish yearned to return to Ireland and liberate it from the British. Only the neighborhood’s Jews gave little thought to returning to the “old country.”

  It was, as ever, their children who assimilated. They were embarrassed by their parents’ “foreign” habits and wanted to be like other American kids, speak English without an accent, play baseball, and so on. And to a great extent they achieved these goals. One of Tom Lee’s sons became a Methodist minister. The other sold cars in affluent Westchester County. Although Hor Poa’s son remained in Chinatown for many years, both as a bookie and a waiter, he eventually started a bowling club, a softball team, and even organized a Chinese-American squad for the Police Athletic League basketball tournament. Sailor William Assing’s son, William Junior, became New York’s first Chinese-American policeman.77

  In little more than a decade, Five Points and its reputation had once again changed dramatically. In 1875, it was an Irish-American enclave that had improved markedly since the days of the Old Brewery and Cow Bay. But by 1890, it was an overwhelmingly Italian and Chinese quarter, once again perceived as the most repulsive in the city, an incubator of vice and crime. Protestantism had not saved it after all. But Jacob Riis believed that he could.

  14

  The End of Five Points

  “HIS BOOK IS LITERALLY A PHOTOGRAPH”

  HAVING WON the hand of his beloved Elisabeth in Denmark, Jacob Riis returned with her to the United States in 1876 and settled once again in Brooklyn. For a while, he continued to run the South Brooklyn News, which he had sold to some local politicos before his betrothal. But without the editorial freedom that came with owning the newspaper, Riis became frustrated and bored, and soon quit the News for good. How he achieved fame is quite a story, one that altered the course of Five Points history.

  While working at the News, Riis had purchased a “stereopticon outfit,” the nineteenth-century equivalent of a slide projector. He was fascinated by the “magic lantern,” as it was popularly known, and after he left the News, he decided to earn a living with it. Riis and a partner would string a canvas screen between two trees in city parks and project onto it images of famous world l
andmarks, which they interspersed with advertisements for local businesses. During the winter, the slide shows moved indoors to a storefront in downtown Brooklyn. In the spring of 1877, profits began to dwindle, and Riis and his partner hit upon the sideline of publishing the first city directory of Elmira, New York, which they would advertise through the slide shows. But believing that the two strangers had come to town to foment violence during the ongoing nationwide rail strike, the authorities ran them out of town. With a new baby to support, Riis returned to Brooklyn and began to look for work as a reporter.1

  At first, New York’s major dailies scoffed at his résumé, and after weeks of rejection it appeared that he would have to change careers yet again. But suddenly his luck changed. One of the newsmen who had refused to hire Riis was William F. G. Shanks, city editor of the prestigious New York Tribune and Riis’s neighbor in Brooklyn. Toward the end of 1877, Shanks found himself desperately in need of an extra newsman. He found Riis and hired him as a general assignment reporter on a trial basis.

  The work was not what Riis had imagined. His editors stuck him with assignments no other reporters wanted, usually in the farthest-flung corners of the city. Once, he trudged miles through knee-deep snow to cover a disaster on Coney Island, only to be upbraided by Shanks for sloppy reporting. And because he was not part of the permanent staff, the pay was terrible, too little to live on even for the now thrifty Riis. So “after six months of hard grubbing I decided that I had better seek my fortune elsewhere,” Riis later wrote. He composed a letter of resignation and left it on Shanks’s desk one morning.

  When Riis returned that afternoon, he realized that Shanks had been out all day and had not seen his letter. Riis retrieved it, tore it up, and went out to cover his assignment. That evening, rushing downtown to file his story, he came running around a corner in Printing-House Square at full speed and crashed into Shanks, knocking the editor into a snowdrift. The incensed editor asked him why he was careening around corners so recklessly, to which Riis replied that he was hurrying to file his story before deadline. When a somber-faced Shanks summoned Riis into his office the next morning, Riis expected to be fired. Instead, Shanks promoted him to a full-time post as the Tribune’s reporter at police headquarters. “It is a place that needs a man who will run to get his copy in,” said Shanks. Riis, of course, was thrilled. “Got staff appointment,” he telegraphed his wife in Brooklyn. “Police Headquarters. $25 a week. Hurrah!”2

  Riis flourished on his new beat, which included the fire and health departments in addition to police work. Whereas most reporters covering the police relied on paid informants in both headquarters and the precincts to leak them news, Riis hustled to come up with his own leads, which often led to scoops. For one story, he tracked down all the guests at a party to prove that a series of apparently unrelated illnesses was in fact an outbreak of trichinosis. In another, he was the only reporter to accurately report the conclusion to a celebrated case of grave-robbing, in which thieves stole the body of department store magnate A. T. Stewart and held it for ransom. After a few years, Shanks could boast that Riis had made the Tribune police reports “the best in the city.”3

  Police headquarters in those days was located at 300 Mulberry Street, about a mile north of Five Points. When Riis got off work, usually at about dawn, he would walk down Mulberry Street past Mulberry Bend and Five Points to the Fulton Street Ferry. He could have taken a train down the Bowery to the docks, but he preferred to walk and see “the slum when off its guard.” Riis knew the Bend well from his days and nights as a homeless immigrant. Soon he made it his special cause, accompanying the police there to capture murderers and tagging along with health inspectors as they hunted for the source of epidemics. He became intimately familiar with Bottle Alley, Bandits’ Roost, and the reputation of every tenement in the neighborhood.

  Riis began to make shocking slum conditions a leitmotif of his reporting. Most journalists attributed the persistence of slums to the “ignorant” and “backward” immigrants who inhabited them, but Riis assigned some of the blame to the tenement buildings themselves and the greedy landlords who refused to provide adequate light, ventilation, or maintenance. Riis was not above prejudice; greedy Jews, lazy Italians, and sly Chinese filled his writings. He was convinced, however, that tenements actually bred many of the social ills that Americans blamed on immigrants. Exorbitant rents drove tenement dwellers to take in too many boarders, and the resulting overcrowding led to epidemics. Poor ventilation exacerbated the rate of illness. Constant sickness made it impossible for the tenement dwellers to keep steady jobs. Unlike most Americans, Riis knew from his own experience that most impoverished immigrants were not simply too lazy to work.4

  Riis recalled in his memoirs that on his “midnight trips with the sanitary police . . . the wish kept cropping up in me that there were some way of putting before the people what I saw there. . . . We used to go in the small hours of the morning into the worst tenements to count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated, and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something.” He considered publishing drawings, but Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s had used these for years to little effect. Riis continued to write about the tenements, “but it seemed to make no impression.”5

  His crusade did have some impact. In early 1887, Mayor Abram S. Hewitt pressed state lawmakers to finance the construction of small parks in tenement districts. The lack of parks and playgrounds in neighborhoods such as Five Points had been a theme of Riis’s slum reporting. “The project is to open up parks in the tenement districts as breathing places,” explained the Times’s Albany correspondent, “and it is one of Mayor Hewitt’s pet schemes.” The Small Parks Act was passed and signed into law in May.6

  That same year, Riis read about the invention of flash photography. Riis excitedly contacted his friend Dr. John T. Nagle, head of the Health Department’s Bureau of Vital Statistics and an avid amateur photographer. A few weeks later, Riis, Nagle, and a couple of other photography buffs began to document the filth and overcrowding of New York’s most notorious tenements. “I had at last,” Riis wrote, “an ally in the fight with the Bend.”7

  A police escort initially accompanied Riis’s photographic “raiding party” into the tenements, but as he later recalled, “they were hardly needed. It is not too much to say that our party carried terror wherever it went. The flashlight of those days was contained in cartridges fired from a revolver. The spectacle of half a dozen strange men invading a house in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they shot off recklessly was hardly reassuring.” Soon the amateur photographers who took the photos tired of the late-night work. Riis hired professionals, but they were not fond of the hours Riis kept either. He eventually bought his own camera and—using a frying pan instead of a revolver for the flash powder—began taking the photos himself.8

  Riis put some of his pictures to practical use immediately. He used his photo of men crammed into bunks in a Bayard Street apartment, for example, to help secure a judgment against the lessee before the city’s Board of Health. But his sights were set much higher. “For more than a year,” he later wrote, “I knocked at the doors of the various magazine editors with my pictures, proposing to tell them how the other half lived, but no one wanted to know.” When Harper’s offered to take the photos but insisted on hiring “a man who could write” to tell their story, Riis stormed out of the magazine’s office. He tried to arrange speaking engagements before city religious groups, but they declined as well. When even his own Brooklyn church, where he was a deacon, refused to hear his “truth-telling,” he resigned in disgust.9

  The only organization that would give Riis a speaking engagement was the New York Society of Amateur Photographers. Remembering the success of his magic lantern shows, he had slides made from his negatives and used them to illustrate the lecture he delivered on January 25, 1888. He turned out to be a gifted public spea
ker. “Mr. Riis was so ingenious in describing the scenes and brought to his task such a vein of humor,” that he often had the audience in stitches, the Tribune reported the next day. He brought tears to his listeners’ eyes as well, especially with the heartrending stories of the Bend’s defenseless waifs and scrub girls.10

  About a month later, the minister of the Broadway Tabernacle, a prestigious Congregational church on Broadway just four blocks west of the Bend, consented to let Riis lecture to his parishioners. He again wowed his audience. Invitations quickly followed from some of the most prominent churches in New York and Brooklyn. Soon, he began lecturing to church groups up and down the East Coast. In Buffalo, according to a local journalist, Riis mixed “racy description[s] of the infected district” with “a vein of earnestness that lifted the lecture quite above the level of a mere passing away of the time.” Another theme of Riis’s lecture, noted the Washington Post, was “what [are] we going to do to protect ourselves?” Far-flung audiences were just as troubled by Riis’s images as were New Yorkers in part because every American city had its share of impoverished immigrants, and in part because they believed it was their responsibility as good Christians to ameliorate the suffering of the poor. Combining humor with horror, and evoking both pity and outrage, Riis transformed Mulberry Bend and its wretched tenements into a national issue.11

  Riis also turned to the local press. On February 12, 1888, the New York Sun published “Flashes From the Slums,” which told the story of Riis’s photo expeditions and described the results. As was typical in that era, the story had no byline; though it described Riis in the third person, he was probably its author. But unlike magazines, a newspaper could not usually reproduce actual photographs, so “Flashes From the Slums” featured eleven drawings of Riis photos, which significantly lessened their impact.12