Five Points
Subtitle: the 19th-century New York City neighborhood that invented tap dance, stole elections, and became the world's most notorious slum
By: Tyler Anbinder.
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 532
Subjects: Slums -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 19th century; Ethnic neighborhoods -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 19th century; City and town life -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 19th century; Five Points (New York, N.Y.) -- History; Five Points (New York, N.Y.) -- Social conditions; New York (N.Y.) -- History; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions
Description: ""The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented. All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over.

Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. Yet it was also a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters and dance halls, prizefighters and machine politicians, and meeting halls for the political clubs that would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five-Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it.

The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 511-515) and index.