Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  3. Riis, Making of an American, 80–112.

  4. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 13 (April–May 1870): 300–301 (expansion that eliminated Cow Bay).

  5. John I. Davenport, Election and Naturalization Frauds in New York City, 1860–1870, 2nd ed. (New York, 1894), 15, 17 (population and density statistics); Herald, September 18, 1892, p. 11 (Lower East Side tenements).

  6. Tribune, June 21, 1885, p. 9; Rev. Thomas P. McLoughlin, “In Darkest Chinatown,” Donahue’s Magazine (November 1897), in Peter P. McLoughlin, Father Tom: Life and Lectures of Rev. Thomas P. McLoughlin (New York, 1919), 102; Herald, November 30, 1878.

  7. The 1880 Five Points adult population figures are based on a random sampling of Five Points residents age seventeen and older from the 1880 United States manuscript census, National Archives. Five Points is defined (as it has been throughout this book) as the area bounded by Canal Street to the north, the Bowery and Chatham Square to the east, Pearl Street to the south, and Centre Street to the west. Children have been excluded from this calculation because they inflate the figures for U.S. natives. For the method used to compile the 1855 figures, see Chapter Two, note 10.

  8. Election districts 18–27, Sixth Ward, 1890 Police Census, New York Municipal Archives. The federal manuscript census of 1890 was destroyed by fire. Ethnicity was determined by examining first and last names. The police figures probably exaggerate the decline of Five Points’ Irish population to some extent because many of the residents whose surnames did not definitively reveal their ethnicity were probably Irish Americans.

  9. Jacob A. Riis, The Children of the Poor (New York, 1892), 67–68.

  10. Isaac N. P. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island: 1498–1909, 6 vols. (1915–28; New York, 1967), 3: 1012; John J. Post, Old Streets, Roads, Lanes, Piers, and Wharves of New York (New York, 1882), 76; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 16, 1873): 363; Viola Roseboro, “The Italians of New York,” Cosmopolitan 4 (January 1888): 404. The Worth Street project had been contemplated for years—see Tribune, January 21, 1854.

  11. Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 387–88.

  12. Junius H. Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York (Hartford, 1869), 137; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 64.

  13. The rise of large-scale manufacturing in Five Points can be seen in the Perris insurance maps of 1857, 1875, and 1884.

  14. Building material comparison based on Perris insurance maps of 1855 and 1884.

  15. Lawrence Veiller, “Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1834–1900,” in Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (1903; New York, 1970), 1: 94–96; Edward Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem in New York City and the Movement for Its Reform, 1856–1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1970), 514–18, 521, 529.

  16. DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 99–100; Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York, 1990), 24–27.

  17. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890; New York, 1971), 13; Harper’s Weekly (July 12, 1873): 603, 606; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (September 20, 1884): 65, 70; Tribune, July 15, September 10 (p. 8), 1884; Proceedings of the New York State Conference of Charities and Correction (1901), in Roy Lubove, The Progressive and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh, 1962), 89 (Gilder quotation).

  18. Times, March 16, 1879.

  19. “Tenement Evils as Seen by the Tenants,” in DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 386, 388 (quotation), 397, 407–8, 413 (quotation).

  20. Times, July 2, 1871; DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 394.

  21. DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 385, 414–15; “Report of Tenement-House Commission,” February 17, 1885, Documents of the Senate of the State of New-York, 108th Session, 1885 (Albany, 1885), vol. 5, doc. 36, p. 100; Herald, September 18, 1892, p. 11.

  22. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), 223.

  23. Gustav Lening, The Dark Side of New York Life and Its Criminal Classes: From Fifth Avenue Down to the Five Points (New York, 1873), 17–19; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (July 5, 1873): 271; Times, July 2, 1871. Because overcrowding was now a crime, tenement dwellers had an incentive to underreport the number of boarders they took in. As a result the census, which so vividly documented the overcrowding of the 1850s, is an unreliable guide to postwar conditions.

  24. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 58–59.

  25. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (March 18, 1882): 55–57.

  26. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 11; Denis T. Lynch, The Wild Seventies, 2 vols. (1941; Port Washington, NY, 1971), 2: 293–95; Times, August 27, 1873. Why the owner was allowed to build such low ceilings, despite the 1867 law, is unclear. Perhaps the old building, as an existing structure, did not have to meet the new requirements.

  27. Harper’s Weekly 17 (September 13, 1873): 796; Times, July 2, 1871 (“foul stench”), August 27, 1873 (remaining quotations).

  28. Times, July 2, 1871, August 27, 1873.

  29. Times, January 20, November 23, 1871, August 27, 1873; Jacob A. Riis, The Battle with the Slum (New York, 1902), 16 (“repulsive pile”).

  30. Times, March 22, 1880; Plumber and Sanitary Engineer (December 15, 1879): 26; folder 200/27, “Block and Lot Folders,” New York Municipal Archives. According to the Plumber and Sanitary Engineer, the buildings at 65 Mott were the first erected in New York specifically for use as tenements.

  31. Times, July 2, 1871 (quotation); Herald, December 26, 1869; Tribune, July 8, 1879.

  32. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (September 15, 1866): 405; Harper’s Weekly 23 (March 22, 1879): 226–27.

  33. Harper’s Weekly 23 (March 22, 1879): 226–27; 24 (February 28, 1880): 142; Tribune, July 8, 1879.

  34. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (September 15, 1866): 405; Harper’s Weekly 23 (March 22, 1879): 226–27; 24 (February 28, 1880): 142; Tribune, July 8, 1879; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 54.

  35. “Flashes from the Slums,” Sun, February 12, 1888, p. 10; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 11, 1888): 415; Allan Forman, “Some Adopted Americans,” American Magazine 9 (November 1888): 46–47; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 49–60. The first published use of the term “Mulberry Bend” that I have found is in a January 1888 article by Viola Roseboro, in which she describes her “unusually careful examination [of] Mulberry Street, particularly the part known as the ‘Bend.’” See “The Italians of New York,” Cosmopolitan 4 (January 1888): 397.

  36. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 50.

  37. Riis, Battle with the Slum, 39–40; advertisements in Il Progresso, September 4, 1889, August 1, 1891 (for Mulberry Bend businesses).

  38. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 52–54; Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America (New York, 1984), 367; “Report of Tenement-House Commission,” February 17, 1885, in Documents of the Senate, 108th Session, vol. 5, doc. 36, pp. 233–35.

  39. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 47, 62; Tribune, July 8, 1879.

  40. Tribune, July 8, 1879; Harper’s Weekly 24 (February 28, 1880): 142; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 61.

  41. Sun, February 12, 1888, p. 10.

  42. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 62.

  43. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 11, 1888): 415; Charlotte Adams, “Italian Life in New York,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 62 (April 1881): 681.

  44. Forman, “Some Adopted Americans,” 46–47 (first quotation); Riis, The Making of an American, 181 (“worst slum”); I[gnatz] L. Nascher, The Wretches of Povertyville: A Sociological Study of the Bowery (Chicago, 1909), 67.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1. Times, J
une 17, 1873.

  2. Times, June 18, 1873.

  3. Times, February 1, 1869; John E. Zucchi, The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York (Montreal, 1992), 39.

  4. Times, June 17, 19, 1873; Zucchi, Little Slaves of the Harp, 114–15. Basilicata specialized in the production of these small harps. Photos of child street musicians playing harps, violins, and triangles in Basilicata, London, and America can be found in Giulia Rosa Celeste, L’Arpa Popolare Viggianese nelle Fonti Documentarie (Viggiano, Italy, 1989), 108–14.

  5. Times, June 20, 1873 (“where’s my mother”), June 4, 1874 (“slaves of the harp”); Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), 195. This child’s comment may have indicated that his parents, rather than a padrone, forced him to work on the streets.

  6. Times, June 17 (final quotation), 19 (all other quotations), 1873; Eco d’Italia, July 23, 1869; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (March 22, 1873): 28.

  7. Zucchi, Little Slaves of the Harp, 191. Horatio Alger wrote one of his early dime novels about an Italian child street musician, based largely on accounts of their lives provided by the head of the Children’s Aid Society’s Five Points Italian School. See Phil the Fiddler, or the Story of a Young Street-Musician ([New York], 1872).

  8. Times, August 1, 20, 27, December 16, 1873; Zucchi, Little Slaves of the Harp, 125; Twenty-second Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1874): 33; Jacob A. Riis, The Children of the Poor (New York, 1892), 148–50. The “Padrone Act” did not prevent parents from sending their own children into the streets to play music, and consequently some Italian youngsters continued to perform for money on New York’s sidewalks. But those who examined Italian life in New York in the 1880s and ’90s agreed that “since the abolishment of the padrone system one sees few child-musicians.” Charlotte Adams, “Italian Life in New York,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 62 (April 1881): 684.

  9. Second division, third election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York State manuscript census, Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office; George E. Pozzetta, “The Mulberry District of New York City: The Years Before World War One,” in Robert F. Harney and J. Vincenza Scarpaci, eds., Little Italies in North America (Toronto, 1981), 9, 11, 29; Brace, Dangerous Classes, 196–98; Third Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York: 1856): 17–18; Fourth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York: 1857): 15–17; Seventh Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1860): 15–16.

  10. Tenth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1863): 28 (“colony”); Twelfth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1865): 29; John I. Davenport, comp., The Registered Voters of the City of New York (New York: 1877), 43, 706 (showing a marked increase in the number of Italian voters since 1874); Eco d’Italia, October 29, 1869.

  11. Robert F. Foerster, Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge, MA, 1919), 38; Twenty-ninth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1881): 32–33; G. Florenzano, Della Emigrazione Italiana in America (Naples, 1874), 140; Times, December 13, 14, 1872, June 17, 18, 19, 1873, April 4, 1885, p. 8 (Jersey Street).

  12. George E. Pozzetta, “The Italians of New York City, 1890–1914” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1971), 40–54; Tribune, April 13, 1890, p. 17 (Argentina); Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870–1929 (New York, 1991), 123 (quotations); Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 11, 1888): 415; George J. Manson, “The ‘Foreign Element’ in New York City. V—The Italians,” Harper’s Weekly 34 (October 18, 1890): 817.

  13. Eco d’Italia, October 22, 1869 (waxed eloquent), April 15, 1881, and April 26, 1883 (advertisements for neighborhood businesses); Brace, Dangerous Classes, 194 (“dirty macaroni”).

  14. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 29, 1885): 27.

  15. Solon Robinson, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York, 1854), 213; Tribune, May 12, 1883; Denis T. Lynch, The Wild Seventies, 2 vols. (1941; Port Washington, NY, 1971), 2: 287–88.

  16. Brace, Dangerous Classes, 194; Adams, “Italian Life in New York,” 682; Manson, “‘Foreign Element,’” 818; Edwin Winslow Martin [pseud. James D. McCabe], The Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia, 1868), 124–25; Sixth Ward, 1880 United States manuscript census, National Archives.

  17. Adams, “Italian Life in New York,” 681–82.

  18. My translation of Adolfo Rossi, Un Italiano in America (Milan, 1892), 64.

  19. Manson, “‘Foreign Element,’” 818.

  20. Ibid., 817; Viola Roseboro, “The Italians of New York,” Cosmopolitan 4 (January 1888): 400–402; Herald, September 18, 1892, p. 11; Rossi, Un Italiano in America, 67–68; Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, A Case Study: Italians and American Labor, 1870–1920 (New York, 1975), 95–135; Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrone and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York, 2000); Humbert Nelli, “The Italian Padrone System in the United States,” Labor History 5 (1964): 153–67.

  21. Herald, September 18, 1892, p. 11; E. Idell Zeisloft, ed., The New Metropolis (New York, 1899), 523; Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890; New York, 1971), 52.

  22. John Koren, “The Padrone System and the Padrone Banks,” United States Bureau of Labor, Special Bulletin No. 9 (March 1897): 126. For the watchmaker and the wine shop, see advertisements in Il Progresso, September 4, 1889, August 1, 1891.

  23. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 329–36; Pozzetta, “Mulberry District of New York City,” 16–17.

  24. Giovanni Lordi, et al., to the Editor, Herald, September 25, 1892, p. 13.

  25. Il Progresso, September 4, 1889, April 2, 1893; Pozzetta, “Mulberry District of New York City,” 10; Trow’s New York City Directory for the Year Ending May 1, 1893 (New York, 1892), 301.

  26. Manson, “‘Foreign Element,’” 817; Pozzetta, “Mulberry District of New York City,” 15; Fifty-fifth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1907): 94–95.

  27. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (October 14, 1882): 123–24; Tribune, January 23, 1887, p. 9.

  28. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana, 1972), 103–06; Pozzetta, “Mulberry District of New York City,” 14–15, 31; Times, October 10, 1895, p. 25 (Ellis Island alternatives to padrone).

  29. Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860–1885 (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 111; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 11, 1888): 412–13.

  30. John Swinton’s Paper, January 20, 1884, p. 1; my translation of Rossi, Un Italiano in America, 64.

  31. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 243–48; Pozzetta, “Mulberry District of New York City,” 19–20.

  32. Giovanni Lordi, et al., to the Editor, Herald, September 25, 1892, p. 13; Tribune, April 13, 1890, p. 17; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (May 1, 1880): 139; Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 172–75; Cinel, National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 128–34, 141–49, 186.

  33. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (1901; New York, 1936), 178 (“grouped by villages”); Alberto Pecorini, “The Italians in the United States,” Forum 45 (January 1911), quoted in Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 96; Pozzetta, “Mulberry District of New York City,” 18. This clustering was even well known in Italy. See Umberto Bosco, et al., Basilicata (Milan, 1965), 43. For Italian housing patterns north of Five Points in the early twentieth century, see Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany, 1984).

  34. Tribune, June 2, 1895, p. 26 (quotation); Roseboro, “Italians of New York,” 399.

  35. Tribune, June 2, 1895, p. 26.

  36. Adams, “Italian Life in New York,” 677; Times, October 6, 1895, p. 25; Il Progresso, August 17, 1890; Manson, “‘Foreign
Element,’” 818.

  37. Adams, “Italian Life in New York,” 678 (artificial flowers); Times, October 6, 1895, p. 25 (garment work). Women’s occupations in 1880 broke down as follows:

  38. Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman’s Work (Boston, 1863), 467; Times, January 22, 1853; Lynch, Wild Seventies, 1: 60–62; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (January 1858): 227; Robinson, Hot Corn, 194–98, 202–4, 213–19, 223–24; Herald, November 5, 1853.

  39. J. Gilmer Speed, “The Mulberry Bend,” Harper’s Weekly 36 (April 30, 1892): 430.

  40. George Ellington, The Women of New York (New York, 1869), 605; Howard R. Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American Educational Views and Activities, 1870–1900: A Comparison (New York, 1976), 407; Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 310–11; Foerster, Italian Emigration, 335; Times, November 15, 1896, p. 15.

  41. Times, June 10, 1874, October 6, 1895, p. 25.

  42. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 119–20; World, July 12, 1882, p. 1; Times, October 6, 1895, p. 25. For the view that the Italians’ aversion to organized labor in this period has been overstated, see Donna Gabaccia, “Neither Padrone Slaves nor Primitive Rebels: Sicilians on Two Continents,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants (DeKalb, 1986), 95–117.

  43. Rev. Thomas P. McLoughlin, “In Darkest Chinatown,” Donahue’s Magazine (November 1897), in Peter P. McLoughlin, Father Tom: Life and Lectures of Rev. Thomas P. McLoughlin (New York, 1919), 95.

  44. Bishop Thomas A. Becker to Archbishop James Gibbons, December 17, 1884 (photocopy), Box 1, Records of the St. Raphael Society, Center for Migration Studies, Staten Island, NY; Becker and Archbishop James Gibbons to Rev. Simeoni, in Stephen M. DiGiovanni, Archbishop Corrigan and the Italian Immigrants (Huntington, IN, 1994), 29.

  45. Bernard J. Lynch, “The Italians in New York,” Catholic World 47 (April 1888): 68–70; Thomas F. Lynch to Archbishop Corrigan, March 26, 1888, file C-19, microfilm roll 12, Papers of the Archdiocese of New York, Archives of the Archdiocese of New York. Bernard Lynch’s comments, while distasteful, were nonetheless typical of this period. Just a few months after his article was published, an editorial in Frank Leslie’s asserted that “of the 40,000 Italian immigrants who have landed at Castle Garden since the 1st of January last, probably not one out of ten was a desirable addition to the population of the country.” They lack “that feeling of self-respect and personal independence which is desirable in a free, governing people. We cannot become enthusiastic in contemplating a manhood that would prefer driving a shoebrush to a plane, or turning the crank of a hand-organ to digging a ditch or paving a street.”—Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (July 14, 1888): 343.