America’s First Worst Neighborhood

We start the seminar with a look at America’s first “slum” – a neighborhood then known as “The Five Points”, which occupied a low-lying area that now sits between the financial district and Canal Street on the eastern side of downtown Manhattan. The Five Points is historically interesting because it was instrumental in shaping the politics and the social life of New York City in the mid 19th Century, at a time when the city was expanding rapidly and developing an identity. Sociologically, The Five Points is fascinating because it illustrated the best and the worst of what would become defined over the next century as the urban experience. It was dense, diverse, and polluted – a hotbed of cultural mixing and innovation, but also a breeding ground for infectious disease and racial hatred.

Because of all this, The Five Points became notorious. The neighborhood has been heavily mythologized, first in the journalism of the time, which relied heavily on drawings due to widespread illiteracy among the city’s inhabitants, and later in Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, and most recently in the spectacularly violent and very entertaining film of the same name, directed by Martin Scorcese. To this day, the line between historical fact and fiction is hard to identify when it comes to The Five Points.

Let’s begin with the fiction. Read and watch the following, paying attention to how the diversity, dirt and disorder, and violence of the neighborhood are portrayed: