New York’s gangsters soon began to covet a share of Chinatown’s nightclub profits. The gang that controlled the downtown area west of the Bowery was the predominantly Italian “Five Pointers.” They were Five Pointers in name only, however, drawing members from all over the city, including Brooklynite Al Capone before he relocated to Chicago.
A Jewish mobster, Monk Eastman, headed the gang that controlled the area east of the Bowery. Like the Five Pointers, Eastman’s syndicate demanded protection money from many dance halls. Hoping to add a bit of the lucrative Chinatown district to his sphere of influence, Eastman and his gang declared sovereignty over the territory from Nigger Mike’s to the Bowery. The Five Pointers resisted, of course, and the shootings and stabbings that resulted took many lives. The district’s political leader, Tom Foley, eventually organized a truce over dinner uptown at the Palm Restaurant.35
While the Italians and Jews fought over nightclubs, Chinese gangs went to war as well. A new tong, the Hip Sing, had grown in the late 1890s to challenge the dominance of Tom Lee’s Loon Ye organization, which had demanded protection money from Chinese-operated businesses for decades. The ensuing “tong wars” first drew public attention in 1897, but escalated in the first years of the new century with shoot-outs and stabbings in restaurants, on street corners, even in the Chinese Opera House on Doyers Street. Tom Lee’s alarm clock was shot off his night table in 1901, but he escaped unscathed. Dozens were killed and hundreds wounded until a truce was negotiated in 1911, though sporadic violence would continue between the two groups into the 1920s and beyond.36
All this fighting was over business, not politics. The neighborhood became a political backwater primarily because its new Italian residents were relatively apathetic, while the Chinese were completely disenfranchised. “Years of oppression and gross neglect had left the peasantry with an almost pathological distrust of government, or more accurately, of all power above them,” observed one historian of the Italians’ experience before coming to America. As a result, a reporter noted in 1888, Italian New Yorkers had “a certain temperamental indifference to the diversions of politics. They do not naturally care for the petty power and personal aggrandizement that in times of peace make the chief charm of political life under a popular government.”37
When they did become politically active, the Italians tended, unlike most other Catholic immigrants, to vote Republican. This stemmed primarily from the continuing Irish-Italian religious struggles—Italians no more wanted to be dominated by the Irish in the Tammany hierarchy than in the Catholic hierarchy. The city’s first two prominent Italian-American politicians, Congressmen Fiorello La Guardia and Vito Marcantonio, were both Republicans, though they sounded and voted like Democrats. And reflecting the relative political impotence of downtown Italians, both men represented the uptown Little Italy around 116th Street. Irish Americans continued to dominate elective office in Five Points well past World War I.38
The immigration restrictions imposed by Congress in the 1920s changed the character of Five Points further still. Chinese immigration, previously limited to merchants, was now cut off altogether, while Italian immigration fell by more than 98 percent from its peak in the decade before the war. Crowding in the neighborhood’s tenements soon disappeared. The Mulberry Street labor brokers became superfluous. In the late 1930s and 1940s, New Deal housing programs drew many Italian Americans to the suburbs, especially New Jersey. The Feast of San Rocco moved with them, to Fort Lee and other towns. Five Points was now a quiet district of Italian and Chinese restaurants inhabited primarily by the children of immigrants rather than the immigrants themselves.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, when Congress repealed the discriminatory immigration quotas of the 1920s, a flood of newcomers revitalized the neighborhood. Chinese immigrants, mostly from Taiwan rather than Guangdong, began filling its tenements. A new wave of Italian immigrants arrived as well, but they tended to settle above Canal Street or in Queens and Brooklyn. By the late 1960s, New Yorkers generally referred to the entire Five Points neighborhood as Chinatown, and the area north of Canal as Little Italy. Chinese immigration grew steadily through the 1970s and 1980s. When the People’s Republic of China relaxed emigration restrictions, thousands of mainland Chinese began coming to New York as well, especially from the eastern Fujian province. Many came legally, either as part of the yearly quotas or through quota exemptions available to relatives of those already in the United States. But by the late 1980s and early 1990s, many immigrants were paying tens of thousands of dollars to be smuggled into the United States illegally, only to toil in slave-like conditions in brothels, restaurants, or sweatshops to pay off their debts to the smugglers.39
TODAY, THE NEIGHBORHOOD once known as Five Points is again a thriving, bustling, crowded immigrant enclave. On the surface, it shares little with the notorious neighborhood of one hundred fifty years ago. The Irish have moved to Queens and the suburbs, though many of their descendants work as police officers and district attorneys in the courthouses along Centre and Pearl Streets. The neighborhood’s streets are relatively free of garbage, odor, and crime. The tenements have modern plumbing and decently lit hallways. There are few signs of destitution. New Yorkers do not fear walking its streets, even at night. It is no longer a “slum.”
Yet in some ways, life is the same. Immigrant street vendors are everywhere, though today they hawk music CDs and bootleg videos rather than suspenders and razor strops. Food is still the most popular item for sale on the streets, though spring rolls and other Asian delicacies have replaced hot corn and pears in syrup. A Chinese-American woman who has sold Hong Kong egg cakes at the corner of Mott and Mosco (formerly Park) Streets for almost twenty years helps her family make ends meet much as did female Irish apple sellers in the mid-nineteenth century, though in a modern twist she has used her earnings to put two sons through college. Ragpickers no longer scour the district, but some Asians do rummage through garbage bins collecting discarded aluminum cans.40
The neighborhood is no longer renowned for its variety of immigrant groups, yet the ethnic mixing that once gave birth to tap dancing is still evident. The Asia-Roma Restaurant on Mulberry Street offers Asian and Italian cooking, as well as a karaoke bar. Immigrants from Thailand and Vietnam began working in the kitchens of the neighborhood’s Chinese restaurants in the 1980s, slowly sneaking their native dishes onto the predominantly Cantonese menus. In many cases, these immigrants have now taken over the eateries and converted them into Thai, Vietnamese, and Malaysian restaurants. Likewise, few of the cooks in lower Mulberry Street’s Italian restaurants are still Italians.
A variety of ethnic and regional tensions are still apparent. Some animosity between the Italians and Chinese remains. Italians have charged that when the Chinese buy neighborhood real estate, they evict long-standing Italian tenants. Italian restaurateurs complain that sidewalk sales by Chinese fish and vegetable dealers create a stench that drives away customers. But most of this conflict now takes place north of Canal Street, as the Chinese have spread well above Canal and east of the Bowery. A kind of de facto segregation still persists at Transfiguration Church. Each Sunday, separate masses are held in Cantonese for those from Guangdong, in Mandarin for more recent immigrants from other parts of China, and in English for non-Asians.41
Yet intraethnic conflict now overshadows interethnic animosity. Guangdong natives who have lived in Chinatown for decades resent the increasing power of the Fujianese. Their organization, the United Chinese Associations of New York, has in many ways superseded the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association, the Guangdong-dominated society that controlled Chinatown’s political and cultural landscape from Tom Lee’s day until the mid-1990s.42
Many of these tensions still manifest themselves through gang warfare. Just as the Roche Guard and the Bowery Boys fought for neighborhood supremacy one hundred fifty years ago, today Chinese gangs such as the Ghost Shadows and the Flying Dragons vie for control, though now they sometimes cross swords
with gangs of Vietnamese immigrants as well. In one shoot-out between Chinese gang members in 1991, a stray bullet killed a tourist at the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets, the very spot where some of the slain fell during the 1857 Bowery Boy Riot.43
These gangs control the district’s sex trade, which has revived as the population of single men has again mushroomed. Rather than walk the streets or openly solicit customers in brothel doorways, prostitutes now operate out of the neighborhood’s beauty salons, drawing customers through advertisements touting full body massages. Sweatshops have returned to the district as well. Jewish immigrants had sewn clothing in Five Points throughout the nineteenth century, but such operations moved uptown after World War I. Yet with the influx of Chinese immigrants into the neighborhood after 1965, the sweatshops returned, as Chinese immigrants turned out clothing for fashionable retailers and discount chains alike. Illegal immigrants still work in appalling conditions in these garment factories, toiling for more than a dozen hours a day and receiving just a fraction of the wages paid to legal employees.44
Finally, the huge influx of immigrants and skyrocketing rents have combined to revive tenement crowding not seen in New York since the heyday of Mulberry Bend. An exposé in the Times in 1996 revealed overcrowding just as astounding as that found in the Old Brewery in the 1840s or photographed by Riis in the 1880s. Triple-decker bunk rooms have reappeared. Multiple families again share tiny two-room apartments. The number of laws enacted to prevent and punish such overcrowding has multiplied since Riis published How the Other Half Lives, but each successive wave of immigrants nonetheless follows the path of its predecessors.45
From 1607 to 2001 and beyond, would-be Americans have arrived from abroad, adjusted to the often harsh realities of their new lives, and set to work. The Five Points story, at a certain level, is common to us all. Koreans arriving in Los Angeles, Mexicans in Houston, West Indians in Miami, Salvadorans in Washington, Arabs in Detroit, and Hmong in Minneapolis all replay its acts and scenes today. There may never again be another slum quite like Five Points, but as long as the United States remains a nation of immigrants, the outline of the Five Points story will never die.
NOTES
To avoid needless repetition, and because almost every newspaper cited in these notes was published in New York, I have left off the place of publication from all New York newspapers. Most of the following references to newspapers date from the Civil War period, so I have followed the customary mode of citation for those papers by listing the date only. In about 1880, however, the size of American newspapers expanded significantly, making reference to page numbers more important. So for most newspaper citations after 1880, I have included the page numbers as well. Finally, all emphasis found in quotations in Five Points is contained in the original source.
INTRODUCTION
1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 16, 1873): 363; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 41; Church Monthly (March 1858), quoted in Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (June 1858): 34-35.
2. Junius H. Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York (Hartford, 1869), 272.
3. [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1852), 93.
4. Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of The Underworld (New York, 1928), Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931).
5. Carol Groneman, “The ‘Bloody Ould Sixth’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1973); George E. Pozzetta, “The Mulberry District of New York City: The Years Before World War One,” Robert F. Harney and J. Vincenza Scarpaci, eds., Little Italies in North America (Toronto, 1981); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1982); Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990); Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, 1992); Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996); Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York, 1991); Caleb Carr, The Alienist (New York, 1994); Times, June 15, 1991, p. 11; May 7, 1995, sect. 13, p. 2; J. A. Lobbia, “Slum Lore,” Village Voice, January 2, 1996, pp. 34–36; Rebecca Yamin, “New York’s Mythic Slum,” Archaeology 50 (March/April 1997): 44–53; Yamin, “Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points,” Historical Archaeology 32 (1998): 74–85; Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven, 1995), 414–415; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 392.
6. See especially Groneman, “‘Bloody Ould Sixth’”; Lobbia, “Slum Lore”; and Yamin, “Lurid Tales.”
CHAPTER ONE
1. Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (New York, 1871), 194–95; Paul O. Weinbaum, Mobs and Demagogues: The New York Response to Collective Violence in the Early Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1979), 21–24; John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York, 1999), 5: 527–28 (Cornish), 21: 311–12 (Tappans).
2. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 9; Garth M. Rosell and Richard A. G. Dupuis, eds., The Memoirs of Charles G. Finney: The Complete Restored Text (Grand Rapids, 1989), 354.
3. Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970), 115–16; Sun, July 7, 1834. For Cox’s opposition to colonization, see American National Biography, 5: 630.
4. Evening Post, July 8, 1834.
5. Evening Post, July 10, 12, 1834; Tappan, Life of Arthur Tappan, 209–15, 420; “Old Sports of New York,” Leader, June 16, 1860 (quotation).
6. Transcript and Sun, July 14, 1834.
7. Evening Post, July 12, 1834; Transcript and Sun, July 14, 1834.
8. Evening Post, July 12, 1834; Transcript and Sun, July 14, 1834.
9. Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, 1988), 167; Tappan, Life of Arthur Tappan, 214–15; Richards, “Gentlemen of Property,” 141–45, 150–54.
10. William Duer, New-York as it Was During the Latter Part of the Last Century (New York, 1849), 13–14; The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 16; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 86, 106–10, 120–21, 142; Rebecca Yamin, ed., “Tales of Five Points: Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York” (draft report of the Five Points archeological project), 14–23. The Collect covered the area bounded by modern-day Worth, Lafayette, Franklin, and Baxter Streets.
11. Isaac N. P. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island: 1498–1909, 6 vols. (1915–28; New York, 1967), 1: 396–97; Duer, New-York as it Was, 13–17; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 125–26.
12. Yamin, “Tales of Five Points,” 23–31; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 106–10, 114.
13. Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 1816–1860 (New York, 1897), 84. Yamin, “Tales of Five Points,” 27, dates the extension of Anthony Street to 1809, based on an undated map in the New-York Historical Society labeled “Opening of Anthony Street.”
14. Carol Groneman, “The ‘Bloody Ould Sixth’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1973), 23–29, 35. These figures are based on those for the entire Sixth Ward, of which the Collect neighborhood composed approximately one-third. I have approximated the figures for the Five Points locale by comparing the wardwide figures with those for native, black, and immigrant residents provided by Groneman. Consequently, these figures should be taken as estimates only. Per capita income is that for 1810, the latest figures available; it too should be considered approximate
. For Five Points workers living with their employers, see Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, 1990), 169, 177–79.
15. I have grossly simplified a very complicated process. For the nuances of this transformation, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984).
16. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 103–4, 243.
17. Ibid., 173, 193–94, 199, 234.
18. Ibid., 135; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 208–9.
19. Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), quoted in Edward Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem in New York City and the Movement for Its Reform, 1856–1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1970), 95–96.
20. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, 1992), 31; indictments of October 7 and 10, December 25, 1820, February 13, March 14, May 16, July 16, 31, August 28, December 5, 1821, May 8, June 21, 1822, June 30, 1823, in boxes 7436 and 7437 of the Police Court Papers and in the District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, both at the New York Municipal Archives. Gilfoyle kindly brought these indictments to my attention.
21. “CORNELIUS” to the Editor, Evening Post, September 21, 1826.
22. Evening Post, March 19, 1829.
23. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784–1831, 19 vols. (New York, 1917), 17: 587, 652, 760; 18: 19 (quotation).
24. Evening Post, May 13, 1830; Minutes of the Common Council, 17: 760; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 172–76.
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