63. Peter Kwong, Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950 (New York, 1979), 39–41; Hall, Tea That Burns, 58–59; Times, August 1, 1883, p. 8 (Wong society).
64. Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?, 39–40.
65. Times, December 8, 1884, p. 3; Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?, 82.
66. Tribune, January 4, 1869.
67. Times, December 26, 1873; Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police, 429–30; Wong, “Chinese in New York,” 308.
68. McLoughlin, “In Darkest Chinatown,” 91–93.
69. Sun, May 12 (quotation), 13, 1879; Times, April 25 (p. 3), May 5 (p. 8), 28 (p. 8), 1879; Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?, 110.
70. Herald, December 2, 1894; McLoughlin, “In Darkest Chinatown,” 96.
71. Times, December 26, 1856; Yankee Notions (March 1858): 65; Tribune, January 4, 1869; Herald, December 26, 1869; World, January 30, 1877; Wong, “Chinese in New York,” 308. It is possible that the press exaggerated the extent of these Chinese-Irish marriages. The census documents eighty-two Chinese-white couples living in Five Points in 1900, and of these, only one in seven involved an Irish immigrant. But Chinese-Irish unions may have been more common in the immediate postwar years. Record of Marriages, p. 362, Five Points Mission Records, United Methodist Church Archives, Drew University; Mary Ting Li Lui, “Contested Relations: Interracial Marriages and Families in New York City’s Chinatown, 1880–1910,” paper presented at the Fourteenth National Conference of the Association for Asian American Studies, April 1997, pp. 3–9.
72. Times, December 9, 1890, p. 3; Tribune, February 15, 1885, p. 12; Herald, March 3, 1885, p. 10; Hall, Tea That Burns, 105–11; Lui, “Contested Relations,” 14.
73. Times, June 20, 1859; World, January 30, 1877.
74. Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, 1995), 47–55 (including Times quotation); Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, 1994), 201–13; Harper’s Weekly (April 16, 1892): 362.
75. Times, March 18 (p. 1), May 11 (p. 11), 16 (p. 9), 22 (p. 11, for the dissenting opinions as unusually “vigorous”), 1893; Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 47–58; McClain, In Search of Equality, 201–13; Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893). Without the budget to deport the tens of thousands who failed to register, Secretary of the Treasury John G. Carlisle ordered Customs and Internal Revenue agents not to enforce this provision of the act. I have not been able to determine whether Fong Yue Ting and his codefendants were actually deported after the Supreme Court’s ruling. The Times reported that “the three Chinamen . . . will probably be sent out of the country at an early date unless some expedient be devised to circumvent the law,” but apparently never followed up on the story—Times, May 16, 1893, p. 9.
76. Times, August 17, 1904, p. 7; Tribune, September 28, 1904, p. 3.
77. Harper’s Weekly (April 16, 1892): 362; Herald, January 11, 1918, p. 10 (Lee); Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?, 48; Tribune, September 10, 1884, p. 8 (Assing); Hall, Tea That Burns, 209 (Hor Poa). On second-generation Italian-American teenagers’ desire to assimilate, see Viola Roseboro, “The Italians of New York,” Cosmopolitan 4 (January 1888): 404, who notes that an immigrant’s daughter was anxious “to sink her foreign extraction and be considered an American.” On the same phenomenon among second-generation Irish Americans, see Irish-American, April 30, 1858, and Thomas D’A. McGee, A History of the Irish Settlers in North America, 6th ed. (Boston, 1855), 236. I had hoped to be able to say more about assimilation in Five Points, but there is very little evidence concerning this issue in the neighborhood’s documentary record.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (New York, 1901), 113–24.
2. Ibid., 124–29.
3. Ibid., 130–43.
4. Ibid., 152–53; James B. Lane, Jacob A. Riis and the American City (Port Washington, NY, 1974), 29–44. Those who blamed the immigrants for tenement conditions reasoned that their American homes were an improvement over their European abodes, and that the newcomers therefore felt no compulsion either to maintain them properly or to complain about landlord abuses. As one observer put it in the 1880s, the tenements were “an upward step in evolution so far as many foreigners are concerned. . . . Indeed, in the last analysis, many of the worst social conditions we see are really stages of an upward advance”—Henry D. Chapin, “Preventable Causes of Poverty,” Forum 7 (1889): 415–23, in David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (New York, 1989), 63.
5. Riis, Making of an American, 173. Riis wrote (p. 178) that “my scrap-book from the year 1883 to 1896 is one running comment on the Bend.” This scrapbook is in the Riis Collection, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
6. Times, April 21 (p. 8), 30 (p. 5, quotation), May 14 (p. 5), 1887; World, April 21, 1887, p. 10; Allan Nevins, Abram S. Hewitt: With Some Account of Peter Cooper (1935; New York, 1967), 504–5.
7. Riis, Making of an American, 174–77. For the dating of Riis’s first tenement photographs to 1887, I have relied on Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York, 1989), chap. 1.
8. Riis, Making of an American, 173–75.
9. Ibid., 192–93.
10. Tribune, January 26, 1888, p. 10; Riis, Making of an American, 193.
11. Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, 5–6; Evening Post, February 28, 1888; Riis, Making of an American, 193.
12. Sun, February 12, 1888, p. 10. One newspaper, the Daily Graphic, had begun printing photos using the halftone process in March 1880, but New Yorkers considered that journal a scandal sheet rather than a serious newspaper.
13. Riis, Making of an American, 193–94; Jacob A. Riis, “How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements,” Scribner’s Magazine 6 (December 1889): 643–62.
14. Riis, Making of an American, 177. Five Pointers were discussing the plans to tear down Mulberry Bend by the spring of 1888. See Thomas F. Lynch to Michael Corrigan, March 26, 1888, C-19, roll 12, Archives of the Archdiocese of New York. In his Iconography of Manhattan Island, Isaac Stokes states that plans for the park were submitted in 1889, but I could not find the Tribune article he cites. See Isaac N. P. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island: 1498–1909, 6 vols. (1915–1928; New York, 1967), 5: 2000. For an earlier proposal to tear down part of the Bend, see “Report of Tenement-House Commission,” February 17, 1885, in Documents of the Senate of the State of New-York, 108th Session, 1885 (Albany, 1885), vol. 5, doc. 36, pp. 3–5, 7–15.
15. Riis, Making of an American, 196–97, 199 (quotation).
16. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890; New York, 1971), 214.
17. Ibid., 211–12.
18. Ibid., 212.
19. Lowell to Riis, November 21, 1890, in Riis, Making of an American, 199; Press, November 23, 1890; The True Nationalist, November 29, 1890; Chicago Times, December 20, 1890; Boston Times, November 30, 1890; The Critic, December 27, 1890; The Independent, January 1, 1891, all in Riis Scrapbook, Riis Collection.
20. Brooklyn Times, November 29, 1890; Chicago Tribune, December 13, 1890, both in Riis Scrapbook, Riis Collection; Riis, Making of an American, 212; Luc Sante, Introduction to Penguin Books edn. of How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1997), xi.
21. Times, July 17, 1891, p. 8, October 7, 1892, p. 10, January 21 (p. 9), 28 (p. 10), May 20 (p. 9), 1893.
22. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 5: 2018; Times, December 7, 1894, p. 2, January 22 (p. 9), June 7 (p. 7), 20 (p. 3), 1895.
23. Times, December 21, 1895, p. 14, June 23, 1896, p. 9, June 16, 1897, p. 7; Jacob A. Riis, The Battle with the Slum (New York, 1902), 269–70.
24. Times, June 16, 1897, p. 7; Riis, Battle with the Slum, 264 (quotation), 268; Riis, Making o
f an American, 183; Riis, “The Clearing of Mulberry Bend: The Story of the Rise and Fall of a Typical New York Slum,” Review of Reviews 12 (August 1895): 172.
25. Riis, Battle with the Slum, 286–87, 289 (quotation), 307–9, 355 (quotation); James Ford, Slums and Housing, with Special Reference to New York City: History, Conditions, Policy, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1936), 1: 201.
26. Times, November 15, 1896, magazine p. 15; E. Idell Zeisloft, ed., The New Metropolis (New York, 1899), 522–23; Charles Hemstreet, When Old New York Was Young (New York, 1902), 194; Fifty-fifth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1907): 107.
27. Gwendolyn Berry, Idleness and the Health of a Neighborhood: A Social Study of the Mulberry District (New York, 1933), 4–7; Walter Laidlaw, ed., Population of the City of New York, 1890–1930 (New York, 1932); Pozzetta, “Mulberry District of New York City,” 28.
28. Times, September 19, 1891, p. 1 (municipal building), June 26 (p. 3, Elm Street), November 7 (magazine, p. 6), 1897; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 508.
29. Walter M. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 174–75; Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus, OH, 1993).
30. See Ford, Slums and Housing; Roy Lubove, The Progressive and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh, 1962); and Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, passim.
31. Evening Post, August 20, 1850; Times, July 1, 1859; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 32.
32. Times, March 28, 1856; Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (1903; New York, 1970), 1: 87; Robert H. Bremmer, “The Big Flat: A History of a New York Tenement,” American Historical Review 64 (1958): 54–62. The only “model tenement” built in Five Points was the one constructed in the 1850s at 34 Baxter Street. “Filthy,” “wretched,” and “impregnated with the effluvia” from the commodes, this tenement suffered the same fate as the Big Flat and Gotham Court. Architect John Sexton owned the property and probably designed it as well. See Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 3 (March 1860): 249–50; “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 (Albany, 1857), doc. 205, p. 28; Manhattan Records of Real Estate Assessment, Sixth Ward, 1860, New York Municipal Archives (for Sexton as owner); Times, February 20, 1904, p. 9 (Sexton’s obituary).
33. Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany, 1984).
34. Bruce Edward Hall, Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown (New York, 1998), 119–21; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 483–84; Philip Furia, Irving Berlin: A Life in Song (New York, 1998), 18; Gene Fowler, Schnozzola: The Story of Jimmy Durante (New York, 1951), 19–21.
35. Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York, 1928), 272–95; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 501–3; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York, 1991), 234.
36. Asbury, Gangs of New York, 299–324; Herald, January 11, 1918, p. 10; Hall, Tea That Burns, 132–61.
37. Pozzetta, “The Italians of New York City,” 27 (quotation), 373–75; Viola Roseboro, “The Italians of New York,” Cosmopolitan 4 (January 1888): 400, 402–3.
38. Riis, Battle with the Slum, 186–87; Tribune, September 21, 1894, p. 4; Times, October 6, 1895, p. 25.
39. See Hsiang-Shui Chen, Chinatown No More: Taiwan Immigrants in Contemporary New York (Ithaca, 1992); Ko-Lin Chin, Smuggled Chinese (Philadelphia, 1999); Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown (New York, 1987); and Gwen Kinkead, Chinatown: Portrait of a Closed Society (New York, 1992).
40. “The Egg-Cake Lady of Mosco Street,” Times, December 11, 1994, sect. 13, p. 4.
41. Times, April 26, 1974, p. 39, July 13, 1980, sect. 4, p. 6, May 7, 1995, sect. 13, p. 6.
42. Times, June 22 (sect. 13, p. 1), November 20 (p. B3), 1997.
43. Times, December 28, 1981, p. A1, February 14, 1998, p. B6; Daily News, July 5 (p. 22), 6 (p. 16), 1998.
44. Times, February 6 (p. A1), March 12 (sect. 1, p. 1), 1995, July 8 (p. A15), November 12 (sect. 14, p. 9), 2000; Daily News, November 8, 1999, p. 14.
45. Daily News, November 10, 1995, p. 7; Times, October 6, 1996, sect. 1, p. 1.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Five Points is based overwhelmingly on the writings of those who saw the neighborhood firsthand. Because so much misinformation about the district and its inhabitants has spread over the years, I always attempted to verify stories found in historical works by consulting the contemporary record. Consequently, my notes do not reflect how much valuable material I found in the writings of other historians. What follows is a list of the works, other than newspapers, that I relied upon most heavily for recreating the Five Points story:
ARCHIVAL SOURCES
Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, Yonkers, NY
Most Precious Blood and Transfiguration Parish History Files
Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York
Marriage Registry
Columbia University
“Autobiography of George Appo.” Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers
Five Points Archaeology Project
Artifacts currently housed in the basement of the World Trade Center. A permanent location for storage and display has not yet been determined. See http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm
Library of Congress,
Jacob A. Riis Collection
National Archives
Manuscript Returns of the 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 federal censuses.
Register of Drafted Men, Fourth Congressional District, Entry 1589, Record Group 110
New York County Clerk’s Office, Old Records Division
Manuscript Returns of the 1855 New York State Census
New-York Historical Society
William H. Bell Diary
New York Municipal Archives
1890 New York Police Census
Housing Department “Block and Lot” Folders
Manhattan Records of Real Estate Assessment
New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers
New York Public Library
Charles F. and George L. Osborn Account Books
Emigrant Savings Bank Collection
United Methodist Church Archives, Drew University, Madison, NJ
Five Points Mission Records
PUBLISHED SOURCES AND DISSERTATIONS
Alland, Alexander. Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. New York, 1974.
Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York, 1928.
Barnard, William F. Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry. New York, 1893.
Barnes, David M. The Draft Riots in New York. New York, 1863.
Bayor, Ronald, and Timothy Meagher, eds. The New York Irish. Baltimore, 1996.
Bethel, Denise. “Mr. Halliday’s Picture Album.” Seaport (Fall 1994): 17–21.
Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850. Ithaca, 1990.
[Bobo, William M.] Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian. Charleston, 1852.
Bonner, Arthur. Alas! What Brought Thee Hither? The Chinese in New York, 1800–1950. Cranbury, NJ, 1997.
Boris, Eileen. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. New York, 1994.
Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge, 1978.
Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them. 3rd ed. New York, 1872.
Breen, Matthew P. Thirty Years of New York Politics Up-to-Date. New York, 1899.
Bremmer, Robert H. “The Big Flat: A History of a New York Tenement.” A
merican Historical Review 64 (1958): 54–62.
Brown, Mary Elizabeth. Churches, Communities, and Children: Italian Immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York, 1880–1945. New York, 1995.
Browne, Henry J. “The ‘Italian Problem’ in the Catholic Church of the United States, 1880–1900.” United States Catholic Historical Society, Historical Records and Studies 35 (1946): 46–72.
Browne, Junius H. The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York. Hartford, 1869.
Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York, 1999.
Czitrom, Daniel. “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913.” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 536–58.
Davenport, John I. Election and Naturalization Frauds in New York City, 1860–1870. 2nd ed. New York, 1894.
DeForest, Robert W., and Lawrence Veiller, eds. The Tenement House Problem. 2 vols. New York, 1903.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes. London, 1842.
DiGiovanni, Stephen M. Archbishop Corrigan and the Italian Immigrants. Huntington, IN, 1994.
Dolan, Jay P. The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865. Baltimore, 1975.
Ernst, Robert J. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1860. New York, 1948.
Five Points House of Industry. Annual Reports.
——. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry.
Foster, George G. New York by Gas-Light. New York, 1850.
——. New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver, Being the Original Slices Published in the N.Y. Tribune. New York, 1849.
Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920. New York, 1992.
——. “A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Autobiography of George Appo.” Missouri Review 16 (1993): 34–77.
Gilje, Paul A. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834. Chapel Hill, 1988.
Five Points Page 63