Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  44. Leader, November 22, 1862; Herald, January 20, 1879; John Ridge, “The Hidden Gaeltacht in Old New York,” New York Irish History 6 (1991–92): 17. Brennan can be found in the 1860 federal census in the Sixth Ward, fourth district, dwelling 265, where he is listed as a thirty-nine-year-old police justice with $14,000 in real property, $1,000 in personal property, along with his thirty-three-year-old wife Margaret (also a New York native, who owned $2,000 in real estate), five children aged nine, seven, five, three, and one, and two servants. State Democrats realized that victory in 1856 was virtually impossible, and it is likely that Brennan would not have received the nomination for prison inspector had the party had a realistic chance to carry the contest.

  45. Herald and Times, May 14, 1876; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1849, 87.

  46. Leader, July 2, 1864.

  47. Ibid. (first two quotations); Times, July 2, 1864 (“graceful and polished writer”); Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1850–51 (New York, 1850), 101.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; London, 1985), 80–83.

  2. Marian Hannah Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” Paul Magriel, ed., in Chronicles of the American Dance (New York, 1948), 42–43 (including Herald quotation); Edward LeRoy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy (New York, 1911), 48; Michael B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management (New York, 1912), 33–34; Marshall and Jane Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, 1968), 44–45; Illustrated London News, August 5, 1848.

  3. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, ed. Joseph J. Rubin and Charles H. Brown (State College, PA, 1950), 21; Mathews quoted in Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 251; Diarmund O’Muirithe, A Seat Behind the Coachman: Travellers in Ireland, 1800–1900 (Dublin, 1972), 64.

  4. Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, 40 (“greatest jig dancers”); Winter, “Juba,” 39, 47, 52 (other quotations).

  5. Winter, “Juba,” 39.

  6. Cornelius Mathews, A Pen-and-Ink-Panorama of New-York City (New York, 1853), 124; Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 18; Junius H. Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York (Hartford, 1869), 129–30; [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1852), 162.

  7. Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 1816–1860 (New York, 1897), 360; Browne, Great Metropolis, 165–66; Clipper, October 21, 1860 (Worden House); Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 381, 415–16, 535.

  8. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 175; Morning Express, July 6, 1857 (“coffee and cake saloon”).

  9. George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (1850; Berkeley, 1990), 192–93; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 43–44 (all quotations).

  10. Davis S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York, 1995), 103–4; Richard H. Thornton, An American Glossary, 2 vols. (London, 1912), 1: 58–60; [Bobo], Glimpses of New-York, 164 (long quotation); [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 43–47; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 196; Haswell, Reminiscences, 270–71 (final quotation).

  11. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 170, 171, 173; [Foster], New York in Slices, 45 (final quotation only); Tribune, October 4, 1848 (not quoted).

  12. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 175–76. Abram C. Dayton, The Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York (1880; New York, 1897), 219.

  13. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 169, 175; Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 137–38; Haswell, Reminiscences, 270–71.

  14. John Ripley, “Account of the Astor Place Riot” (1897), quoted in Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), 300; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 189, 296–97.

  15. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 206; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 225.

  16. Times, January 14, 1885 (which defines the sporting man as “a combination of gambler, horseman and politician”); Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose (New York, 1903) and My Old Bailiwick (New York, 1906).

  17. Clipper, October 21, 1860 (quotations), January 24, 1885 (Arena); Kernan, Reminiscences, 42–43.

  18. Clipper, October 21, 1860; Kernan, Reminiscences, 42–43.

  19. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 36; Matthew P. Breen, Thirty Years of New York Politics Up-to-Date (New York, 1899), 71; Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 95–96.

  20. Firemen may have exaggerated their occupational status when they were surveyed. “Return of the Engine, Hose, Hook and Ladder, and Hydrant Companies” (a broadside) and Annual Report of the Chief Engineer of the Fire Department (New York, 1858), both in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 12 (1845), doc. 16, p. 361; 25 (1858), doc. 6, pp. 53–54, 161, 171; Kernan, Reminiscences, 862–81.

  21. “Return of the Engine, Hose, Hook and Ladder, and Hydrant Companies,” in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 25 (1858), doc. 6, pp. 53–54, 161, 171.

  22. Account 2378, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books and Account Ledgers, New York Public Library; family 680, second division, third electoral district, and family 375, fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census, Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office; Trow’s New York City Directory for 1858–59 (New York, 1858), 364, 806; marriage of James Tucker to Maria Quinn, August 7, 1860, marriage register, Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York.

  23. Charles Townsend Harris, Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies (New York, 1928), 36; [James D. Burn], Three Years Among the Working-Classes in the United States During the War (London, 1865), 108–9; William H. Bell Diary, July 24, 1851, New-York Historical Society; report of Chief Alfred Carson in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 17 (1850), part II, doc. 57, pp. 930–32, 945–48.

  24. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 193.

  25. Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 99–100; John T. Ridge, Sligo in New York: The Irish from County Sligo, 1849–1991 (New York, 1991), 16, 20; Irish-American, March 20, 1852 (Brennan Guard), August 15, 1857. That the Sarsfield Guard captain, John R. Boland, operated a saloon at that address is documented in Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851 (New York, [1851]), 290.

  26. Edward K. Spann, “Union Green: The Irish Community and the Civil War,” in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 194; Ridge, Sligo in New York, 14, 15, 18 (quotation).

  27. Carol Groneman, “Working-Class Immigrant Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York: The Irish Woman’s Experience,” Journal of Urban History 4 (1978): 267; OUA, April 7, 28, 1849; Tyler Anbinder, “‘Boss’ Tweed: Nativist,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Spring 1995): 109–16; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York, 1991), 253.

  28. The group sold the tenement at some point between 1892 and 1905. Craig S. Wilder, “The Rise and Influence of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, 1808–1865,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 22 (July 1998): 7–9; Kernan, Reminiscences, 41; John J. Zuille, Historical Sketch of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief (New York, [1892?]), 16; Samuel R. Scottron, “New York African Society for Mutual Relief—Ninety-Seventh Anniversary,” Colored American Magazine 9 (December 1905): 685–90.

  29. Ridge, Sligo in New York, 13; John T. Ridge, “Irish County Societies in New York, 1880–1914,” in Bayor and Meagher, eds., New York Irish, 275–79; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (1949; Port Washington, NY, 1965), 122.

  30. Ridge, Sligo in New York, 14 (including Irish-American quotation), 18; Irish-American, February 17, 1850.

  31. Ridge, Sligo in New York, 17–20; Irish-American, August 3, 31, December 28, 1850, February 22, 1851; Ridge, “Irish County Societies,” 278.

  32. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 234–56; Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 104; Herald, August 29, 1836, in Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros:
New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, 1992), 110; Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 187; Browne, Great Metropolis, 430; Foster, New York Naked, quoted in Peter G. Buckley, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), 161.

  33. Haswell quoted in Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 382–85.

  34. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 260, 265–67, 385; The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, Allan Nevins, ed. (New York, 1936), 273.

  35. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 206; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 223–25; Herald, April 26, 1848 (on the popularity of the Mose series).

  36. Richard Moody, Ned Harrigan: From Corlear’s Hook to Herald Square (Chicago, 1980), 72, 241; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (January 17, 1874): 316; Herald, February 20, 1874; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York, 1928), 244; Sante, Low Life, 91. The Herald and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper placed the theater at 17 and 19 Baxter Street respectively.

  37. Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851. Sometimes the distinction between a saloon and a grocery was imperceptible. Some of the “grocers” listed in the directory were labeled saloonkeepers in the census, and vice versa.

  38. “Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Examine into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Eightieth Session—1857, doc. 205 (Albany, 1857), 25–26; Clipper, October 3, 1868, p. 204 (all but final quotation); Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), 207; [Foster], New York in Slices, 79, 82, 84; Tribune, August 10, 1846.

  39. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (January 1858): 224–25; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 128–29.

  40. Family 128, fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York state census; Times, January 22, 1853; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (January 1858): 224–25; 3 (March 1860): 249; Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1849–50 (New York, 1849), 112; Longworth’s New York City Directory for 1840–41 (New York, 1840), 185 (which describes the establishment as a “tavern” rather than a grocery). That 1,000 people per day patronized Crown’s is based on Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 3 (March 1860): 249, which reported that on Sunday, January 22, 1860, 1,054 people entered Crown’s Grocery and the saloon “directly opposite” in a five-hour stretch from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Of these, 1,054, 547 went into the “saloon” and 507 went into “Crown’s.” I suspect that the “saloon” was merely the entrance to the barroom of Crown’s itself. But even if this was not the case, if 507 went into Crown’s in five hours, it seems safe to assume that more than 1,000 would enter the grocery during the course of an entire business day.

  41. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 218–19; Breen, Thirty Years, 251–52, 255. Ethnicity of saloon and grocery operators is based on an examination of surnames in Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851, supplemented by information from the 1855 New York manuscript census. I found twenty-four grocers who were obviously Irish Americans, forty-four with German-American surnames, and twenty-nine whose last names did not clearly indicate a certain ethnicity. Among saloonkeepers, eighty-seven were Irish, twenty were German, and forty could not be securely identified.

  42. Sun, May 29, 1834; Sante, Low Life, 105; Walsh in Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York, 1981), 348. Brace, Dangerous Classes, 64–65; William Hancock, An Emigrant’s Five Years in the Free States of America (London, 1860), 76, in Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 220; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 379; Clipper, October 3, 1868, p. 204; J. H. Green, Report on Gambling in New York (New York, 1851), 85–89.

  43. John F. Maguire, The Irish in America (London, 1868), 287.

  44. Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American (New York, 1926), 47–48; Carl Wittke, We Who Built America, in Edward M. Levine, The Irish and Irish Politicians (Notre Dame, 1966), 117; Breen, Thirty Years, 231.

  45. Leon Beauvallet, Rachel and the New World: A Trip to the United States and Cuba (New York, 1856), 274; Tribune, October 12, 1863; Green, Report on Gambling, 93. “Rachel” was Elisa Rachel Félix, the most famous French actress of the 1840s and ’50s. Beauvallet was an actor and aspiring playwright in the troupe that toured the United States with her.

  46. Dickens, American Notes, 79; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 87; Green, Report on Gambling, 73–74 (“wait upon the players”); account 5735, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

  47. National Police Gazette, October 11, 1845, May 30, 1846 (Moses); Tribune, February 27, 1855; Green, Report on Gambling, 45–46; Clipper, October 3, 1868; Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 1990), 136–50; F. Norton Goddard, “Policy: A Tenement House Evil,” in Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (1903; New York, 1970): 2: 27–31.

  48. Kernan, Reminiscences, 41–42; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 146–47.

  49. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 143; Kernan, Reminiscences, 42, 44; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 146–47; Tribune, October 12, 1863.

  50. Clipper, October 21, 1860 (“Uncle Pete’s”), October 3, 1868 (“great mogul”); John Doggett, Jr., ed., The New-York City and Co-Partnership Directory (New York, 1843), 367; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 145. It is possible that Williams’s place later relocated to 51 Orange, for in 1852 “Pete Williams 51 Orange” is listed among a number of saloonkeepers operating without a license. Unlike the others on the list, however, Williams was never charged—New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, April 22, 23, 24, 1852, New York Municipal Archives. He may have moved after a fire destroyed his previous establishment. See Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 140–41.

  51. The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845; new ed. in one vol., Philadelphia, 1849), 582–83; Dickens, American Notes, 80–83; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 141; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 148; Clipper, October 21, 1860.

  52. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 142–43; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 149. For other descriptions of Williams’s place, see Harper’s Weekly, February 21, 1857; [Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, 96; Samuel Prime, Life in New York (New York, 1847), 175.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1. Tribune, October 20, 1856; Clipper, July 9, 1864.

  2. Ed James, The Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan (New York, n.d.), 3–5.

  3. Ibid., 3–12, 21; Times, June 30, 1854; George Foster quoted in Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 234.

  4. James, Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, 11; Times, May 14, 1876 (obituary of another Five Pointer mentioning sparring match at Monroe Hall); Tribune, April 12, 1842; Herald, September 26, 27, October 21, November 1849. For the 1842 riot, see Chapter Five.

  5. James, Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, 13–19 (“must fight”); Clipper, November 17, 1860 (“pride of Chatham Square”), July 9, 1864.

  6. Ed James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer (New York, n.d.), 7–12; Herald, February 8 (“urchins”) and 9 (other quotations), 1849; Wallace Shugg, “‘This Great Test of Man’s Brutality’: The Sullivan-Hyer Prizefight at Still Pond Heights, Maryland, in 1849,” Maryland Historical Magazine 95 (2000): 47–63.

  7. James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer, 12–14; Clipper, July 9, 1864 (“native boys”).

  8. James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer, 14–18 (quotations); James, Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, 18–20.

  9. Clipper, July 9, 1864; William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Boston, 1994), 95.

  10. James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer,
20–24; Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1848–49 (New York, 1848), 393; Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1849–50 (New York, 1849), 220; Times, June 30, 1856 (Sullivan), June 27, 1864 (Hyer); Tribune, March 10, 1855. James places the Branch Hotel at 40 Bowery, but the city directories show that it was located at no. 36.

  11. William F. Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry (New York, 1893), 2; Herald, February 17, 1858; “The Five Points,” National Magazine 2 (1853): 169.

  12. John Francis Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 1609–1872 (New York, 1872), 477–78; [Foster], New York in Slices, 23; letter of L. M. Pease in Times, November 19, 1852; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 122; Evening Post, January 30, 1846.

  13. Locations of brothels based on a list compiled by Professor Timothy Gilfoyle, Loyola University of Chicago, in the possession of the author. Gilfoyle’s inventory is based primarily on criminal indictments. See, for example, indictments of September 21, 1841 (charging inhabitants of 139 Anthony Street), April 15, 1850 (142 Anthony and 34 Orange), February 21, 1851 (50, 62, 67, and 71 Cross), May 23, 1851 (151 Anthony and 6 Little Water), January 23, 1852 (145 Anthony and 89 Cross), April 22, 1852 (163 Anthony and 33, 35, 361/2, 40, and 41 Orange), April 23, 1852 (143, 149, and 157 Anthony, and 92 Cross)—New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, New York Municipal Archives.

  These records must be used with some caution. Not every person indicted was necessarily guilty, though notations on the indictment papers indicate that most were convicted, pled guilty, or promised to abandon the premises (thus implying guilt). In addition, it was possible to be charged with conducting a “disorderly house” that was merely a raucous saloon rather than a brothel. I accept Gilfoyle’s contention, however, that the vast majority of those charged with this offense promoted prostitution. That most of those indicted for “keeping a disorderly house” responded by vacating the premises also implies that these were brothels. If those under indictment were only operating loud saloons, they could have merely asked their customers to be quieter. One might also argue that prosecution for prostitution over the course of two decades does not prove that these buildings housed brothels simultaneously. But brothel keepers were generally only prosecuted for keeping a “disorderly” house of prostitution. As a result, indictments were relatively rare, and were only handed up when neighbors repeatedly complained about persistent disturbances in the bordellos. So indictments probably underestimate the pervasiveness of prostitution in Five Points.