THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD.

Five Points
The Nineteenth-Century New York City
Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance,
Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most
Notorious Slum
Tyler Anbinder
The Free Press, $30, 512 pp.

In the 1840s and for decades after, the Lower Manhattan neighborhood surrounding the five-cornered intersection of Anthony, Orange, and Cross Streets (later Baxter, Worth, and Park) was North America's most notorious slum community. The neighborhood's "infamy was so well known," writes Tyler Anbinder in Five Points, "that out-of-town visitors went there to see its depravities." "Slumming parties" afforded notables from Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens the opportunity to witness first-hand a precinct renowned, in the words of a Methodist missionary, "for degradation so deep that human nature cannot sink below it."

Yet as Anbinder shows in vivid detail, the famine immigrants who poured into the neighborhood and helped shape its character had known far worse in Ireland, especially those thousands who fled to Five Points from the Landsdowne estate in Kenmare, County Kerry. These tenant farmers and their families (described in 1844 by an Irish clergyman as "the most wretched people on the face of the globe") joined native-born and German Americans to create an urban neighborhood whose lurid reputation--according to Anbinder--obscures more than it reveals. Amid the inhumane living conditions and resulting stench, adult Five Pointers toiled as shoemakers, tailors, seamstresses, and domestic servants. Male children worked as bootblacks and newsboys while girls peddled "nice Hot Corn, smoking hot, smoking hot, just from the pot!" at all hours. Many families established accounts at the Emigrant Savings Bank and some working people even managed to accumulate impressive sums. Neighborhood residents decorated their rude tenement dwellings, as a reporter for the New York Times discovered in 1859, with "lithographs, in high colors, of the crucifixion, Christ in the manger, Mary at the Annunciation, the Parting Lovers, and James Buchanan."

Anbinder covers but downplays the more colorful legends of Five Points in order to highlight the political ascendancy of the local Irish that was pursued in sometimes deadly earnest. He painstakingly corrects the historical record, for example, in his account of the notorious 1857 riot pitting the "Bowery Boys" against the "Dead Rabbits." It turns out there never was a gang called the "Dead Rabbits"; they were actually known as the Roche Guards and have only come down through time as the Dead Rabbits because they were so described by their enemies to newspaper reporters. And by 1857 the Bowery Boys were no longer a strictly antiforeign cadre (unlike their predecessors, the Bowery B'hoys) but a heavily Irish crew defending their turf on the eastern edge of Five Points from the growing political influence of one Matthew J. Brennan, hero of the Roche Guards. Like many another aspiring Irish politico, Brennan began his ascent with his role as foreman of a local volunteer fire company, the most admired organization in Five Points. Brennan was also a justice of the police court, but in the spring of 1857 New York City's Republicans conspired to replace the municipal police with a state-backed Metropolitan police force. When the Metropolitans entered the Sixth Ward on the Fourth of July they were attacked by Brennan's stalwarts who were in turn assaulted by Bowery Boys, allies of Brennan's political rival, James E. Kerrigan. What began as "an ordinary, or rather extraordinary Sixth Ward muss," in the words of the New York Herald, ended with twelve dead and more than one hundred wounded. Though the Roche Guards suffered the brunt of the casualties and legal fallout, the disaster only strengthened the hand of Brennan and his allies because the still-Anglo leaders of Tammany Hall--the city's Democratic apparatus--knew these Irishmen meant business and would soon need to be included on citywide tickets. Brennan went on to become county sheriff and was entrusted with the delicate responsibility of personally arresting Tammany chieftain William Marcy Tweed on civil fraud charges in 1871.

In addition to serving as the hothouse for Irish political aspiration, Five Points was also the site of the nation's first settlement house. The Five Points House of Industry was established in 1852 by Lewis M. Pease, an innovative Methodist minister who, unlike most of his colleagues, favored job training programs over mandatory conversions to Protestantism. An adoption program involving local Catholic children rankled the neighborhood, however, and helped inspire, in Anbinder's view, the establishment of the enormously popular Transfiguration parish in Five Points by Archbishop John Hughes in 1853. The vitality of religious activity and some progressive legislation involving housing regulations brought Five Points to the brink of respectability. Soon, however, the renewal of mass immigration in the postwar decades--this time from southern Europe--recast the neighborhood yet again as the nation's most notorious slum. This time around, Jacob Riis was on hand with his camera to document the appalling conditions greeting newcomers. Italian Americans performed jobs that the Irish now considered too dirty; these newcomers were banished to the basement of Transfiguration Church where two thousand worshiped weekly, until the church was finally placed in the hands of an Italian religious order in 1901. Eventually, the Italians, like the Irish before them, made their way uptown and to the outer boroughs, leaving the Chinese--whose Five Points roots extend back to the 1860s--as the inheritors of the old neighborhood.

Five Points offers a fascinating if complex narrative of a legendary neighborhood as well as a "revisionist" study that challenges various urban legends and historical truisms. Since Five Points lost its identity as a distinctive neighborhood a century ago, and most New Yorkers probably don't know precisely where it was once located (the five points are now three and face the federal court house in Chinatown), few readers will come to the book with a preconception in need of revision. The book works better as a companion to such popular works as Luc Sante's Low Life and Herbert Asbury's venerable The Gangs of New York (soon to be a Martin Scorsese film) than as a corrective. After all, what would urban life be without urban legends?

James T. Fisher, a frequent Commonweal contributor, teaches history at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City.