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As you know, I've been putting the finishing touches on my first book, Big Pond, which is why I've been so inattentive to the blog. I'm just getting to the end of a long series of revisions, after which I'll get some more feedback, and then make another round of changes, if need be. Then, it'll be pretty much done, and pretty much published, and pretty much available from the major online merchants (Amazon, bn.com). You'll also be able to request it in bookstores, and they can order it. As the publication draws nearer, I'll be terribly irritating about letting you know how to get a copy and where to make noise. In the meantime, here's an excerpt. This section is from Chapter Four, "Double Decker Dream," and it picks up just as we're flying past the intersection of Broadway and Canal Street.

WE REALLY ARE in old New York now. Lower Manhattan has an older, darker history than the rest of the island. Every so often, you notice a haunted little townhouse from the early nineteenth century. A measure of refined gentility, by that time, had begun to appear in the aristocratic enclaves developing uptown, but downtown was as rough and roguish a frontier as the Old West.

Have you ever heard of the Five Points? There are vanished neighborhoods which are remembered fondly, but it’s not one of them. Mostly, it’s remembered for the fact that it was once controlled by gangs. No account of the city’s history is complete without the usual list of fanciful gang names: the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies. In their attempts to romanticize the Five Points, Herbert Asbury (Gangs of New York, 1927) and Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York, 2002) showed us one big puddle of blood.

Before that, in the late eighteenth century, the part of Manhattan which became the Five Points was one big puddle of water. It was 48 acres in area, and was known as the Collect Pond. (That’s “COLL-ect,” not “coll-ECT” – another bastardization of a Dutch word – kalch, which means “body of water.”) This pond was unusually deep – sixty feet, according to most accounts – and fed by springs; it was therefore a good source of usable water. Because of this tremendous commodity, tanneries and slaughterhouses began appearing in the area, which contributed to the transformation of the crystal blue Collect into a festering pit of excrement and rotting flesh.

Plenty of people were still interested in drinking from it, apparently – a bad idea, because it was already being blamed for the local spread of cholera and typhus. The city condemned the Collect Pond, which was an appropriate formal gesture, but alas, it was still there. Eventually, at the pond’s northern end, they dug a canal, connecting the Hudson River and the East River. Through this canal, the Collect drained into the rivers. The canal was then filled in and became Canal Street.

The Collect Pond was filled in, too, but not very well. The thing had been condemned because it was a pit of garbage, and now it was finally being filled in – with garbage. As a notion of landfill, it’s not as quaint as it should be. On top of the garbage, there was dirt, and that was it. What resulted was a new kind of foul urban swampland. Wooden shacks and early tenements were built on this swampland, and over the years these sagging buildings slowly sank into the filthy former Collect. It was what some people might call “bad real estate.” So it became the worst slum in the New World. This was the Five Points.

Paradise Square in the 1840s. At the far right is the Old Brewery.

It was named because its heart was where Orange Street, Anthony Street, and Cross Street met, going off in five directions. To the west, between Anthony and Cross, was Paradise Square, where everyone cut each other up. At the corner of Cross and Pearl was the Old Brewery, the landmark most associated with the Five Points. It was a big brick triangle, originally a brewery, and eventually a flophouse for hundreds of indigent street people. They fed themselves by picking pockets, and called their home the Den of Thieves. By 1853, the Old Brewery had been razed and replaced by the Five Points Mission.

In the period surrounding the Civil War, the Five Points was inhabited by thousands of Irish immigrants, a few hundred blacks from Africa and the South, and a bizarre new breed, the native New Yorker. Usually, accounts of life in the area dwell on the tendency of these groups to hate and kill each other. They certainly did a lot of that. But this particular melting pot led to something even more sinister. I’m talking, of course, about tap dancing.

On the corner of Orange and Bayard, at a dance hall called Almack’s, tap dancing happened for the first time, around 1840. A synthesis of the Irish jig and the African shuffle, it went on to make people look ridiculous for generations. Even today, this infamous practice goes on, with little sign of stopping.

There’s something chilling about the idea of a neighborhood which has ceased to exist, and the Five Points is as gone as any neighborhood in the city’s history. There is no trace of it today. Even the street names have mostly changed. Orange Street became Baxter Street. Anthony Street became Worth Street. Their original names were thought to connote violence and disease. Cross Street just vanished. By the time the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor, it was all over.

Which was a good thing. The slum which developed subsequently, further east, was pretty bad, but the Lower East Side of 1900 was almost luxurious compared to the Five Points of 1850.

And if you’re looking for the Five Points now, you’ll have to visit the top of the municipal district, at the bottom of Chinatown. Across from Columbus Park. Between the New York County Courthouse and the United States District Court. Amazing. This used to be one gang-fighting, cholera-catching, tap-dancing part of town.

Then

Now

AS WE CONTINUE down Broadway, we approach the former offices of the now-defunct New York Sun, on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. The old clock is still mounted on the corner, with the Sun’s logo, as well as its slogan – “It shines for all.” As we cross Chambers, look on the left for a quick head-on view of the Municipal Building.

On the next block is the Tweed Courthouse. This is the infamous building which Tammany Hall kingpin William M. Tweed used as an excuse to funnel $13,000,000 in public funds into the pockets of his cronies. Interestingly, the Giuliani administration spent a fortune renovating it.

Boss Tweed, a big, beefy ex-fireman, is remembered as the most corrupt politician in American history. Tammany Hall itself was a political organization formed around the time of the Revolutionary War, but it became powerful decades later, with the rise in immigration. The city’s existing political machinery made little effort to communicate with the thousands of new immigrant New Yorkers, leaving the door open for Tammany to lure legions of untapped voters. As soon as new immigrants stepped off the boat, Tammany men would be there, often literally buying their votes. They’d press dollar coins into the hands of frightened newcomers, and then they’d tell them who to vote for.

The Civil War Draft Riots of 1863 were a triumph for Tammany Hall, which was the only organization in town capable of taming the violent immigrant mob. The Irish were outraged at being drafted to fight in a war that had nothing to do with them. They were repressed and abused everywhere they went, and now they were being asked to fight for someone else’s freedom. They took it out on every black person they saw. Irish immigrants just off the boat, as well as “nativist” descendents of New York Brits and New Amsterdam Dutchmen, terrorized the city for a full week, burning a hundred blocks to the ground and sadistically torturing anyone with dark skin they could get their hands, knives, torches, or ropes on. Uptown, the homes of the wealthy were smashed and looted, out of anger that the rich could buy their way out of the draft for $500. The year of the riots, Boss Tweed, now weighing in at over three hundred pounds, was made Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall. It was now impossible for the city’s larger political establishment to ignore Tammany, because now Tammany was the city’s larger political establishment. It had a credential now, having stopped the riots, with a little help from the Union Army.

New York Film Academy on 16th Street. The building was formerly a Tammany Hall meetinghouse, and the Tammany insignia is still apparent at the top of the façade.

Ultimately, Tammany did some good. Because its power depended on the city’s working class, it accomplished much in the way of public works projects. As discomforting as it is to learn that the voice of the immigrant masses was siphoning huge sums of money for its own pleasure, the fact remains that the working poor had no other champion at the time.

Tammany Hall finally started to crumble through the combined efforts of the New York Times, which exposed the treachery behind the courthouse funds, and Harper’s Weekly, which published Thomas Nast’s devastating political cartoons. Nast relentlessly depicted Tweed as a ridiculous, bloated scumbag. Although most Tammany voters couldn’t read the Times, they could see Nast’s drawings, which ran on the cover of Harper’s. Every time you walked by a newsstand, there was Boss Tweed, stuffing his face and his pockets.

Tweed was finally imprisoned in 1871. Four years into his twelve-year sentence, he managed to escape. He fled to Spain, where he was instantly recognized on the basis of Thomas Nast’s cartoons. He was deported, back to New York, and died in 1878 in a prison which he himself had built.

That's all for now, friends. Soon, you'll be able to read the whole book, which deftly alternates historical drama like this with the personal recollections of New York City's greatest tour guide*.

*What I mean to say here is that I'm pretty good.

9:16 AM

2 comments

Comments

Thanks so much for your posting. I grew up in Chinatown, formerly Five Points. Although I love mostly in Hollywood and only get back to NY several times a year, it continues to haunt me and my writing as well. I'm writing a musical in which a character is from Five Points, but I've enjoyed distracting myself with research about Five Points.
Thanks

# posted by misty : 6/02/2005 2:36 AM

this was really interesting to read. I want to know more!

# posted by Anonymous : 10/25/2008 2:25 PM

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Monday, August 23, 2004

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