Customer Reviews

Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First off, I must point out that I work about eight blocks away from the infamous Five Points intersection in New York City. Also, I am very familiar with American history. With these two points mentioned, I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed and learned alot from this book. If you are considering reading "Five Points", it is very important that you assess beforehand what you hope to get out of this book. It has the potential to be either VERY rewarding and informative to you OR, to bore the life out of you and make you want to fling it in the trash! This book is certainly NOT for the casual reader. It is remarkably detailed and meticulous in research chock full of 66 pages of footnotes and a small font, select bibliography of five pages. I had the great advantage of being able to walk over on my lunch hour and follow the included maps around the neighborhood to see where these locations were and, in some cases, see the still standing buildings mentioned in the text. If you are not from New York City or familiar with it's history, this book can be painfully tedious. If this book was a college course, I would estimate it to be either of the 300 or 400 level.

Some may take issue with the way the material is arranged. Trying to write about a whole neighborhood with so many layers of diverse history is no easy task. I personally enjoyed the format once I got used to it. Anbinder starts each chapter with a prologue vignette of a few pages describing an event or person who well exemplifies the topic following in the main chapter. I found myself going back at the end of each chapter and re-reading the prologue with the new information just gleaned in mind. The chapters cover the historical making of the Five Points neighborhood, why the neighborhood inhabitants originally (mostly the Irish before the Civil War) came there, how and where the residents lived there, how they worked and what they did, the politics the neighborhood was involved in over the years, the diversions and entertainment found in the neighborhood, types of vice and crime seen there, religion and reform issues (including extensive accounts of the activities of the Five Points Mission and the House of Industry), the infamous riots the neighborhood was a part or cause of (mostly in the 1850s), the neighborhood changes underway during the Civil War and the rise of Tammany Hall, the remaking of Five Points after the Civil War as Italians became more prevalent, the life and activities of the Italian majority in the 1870s and 1880s, the influx of Chinese to the neighborhood and the making of Chinatown, and the activities of Jacob Riis and other reformers towards the eventual demolition of much of Five Points in the 1890s. The author fills in some background information on discussed topics, but it helps greatly to be already familiar with the era's history. Examples would be needing to know the basics of Andrew Jackson and his "Democrats" before fully understanding the causes and issues relating to the rioting so common in Five Points before the Civil War or, familiarity with what Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall was. Some may also quarrel with the need for extensive statistics about the nationality makeup of individual Five Points tenements or the amount of money in residents bank accounts over the years, but extreme details such as those give insights to how New York City has become what it is today. Causes of the rise of the modern fire and police departments, some unions, gangs, and building code details are just some of the contemporary NYC realities that can trace a significant portion of their origins to Five Points.

With the previously mentioned warnings in mind, I highly recommend "Five Points" to the ravenous history student. This is no beach read or intro to Five Points. It is thick and heavy like cheesecake, but make sure you know that you love cheesecake before trying this supreme example!

If you have read "Low-Life" by Luc Sante, "Gangs of New York" by Herbert Asbury, or "New York by Gaslight" by George Foster, and enjoyed them even slightly, this book will not disappoint you. I thought the organization of the book into different aspects of life in the Five Points, instead of chronologically, was fine. It didn't confuse and seemed a logical way to organize a socially-focused history book. The author has a gift for writing some very detailed accounts and brings to life all the vibrancy and yes, squalor, held in the Five Points.

This book is guaranteed to please if you are lover of NYC history.

I thought I knew everything about lower Manhattan, but this book gave me a whole new perspective on the city. Chock full of well-documented accounts as any real history book should be, I found myself recounting the wild stories from its pages to my coworkers. They were equally amazed (and in some cases, appalled), at what went on here in the 19th century.

This is a must-read book on New York. Its meticulous details enable us to virtually see, hear and smell the Five Points neighborhood. Unlike the novels set in the same neighborhood and cited by other reviewers, I found the true stories in Five Points far more fascinating than the fiction in the novels. And knowing it was written by an historian freed me from having continually to ask myself, "Did that really happen or is the novelist making it up?"

These true stories are better (and crazier) than any fiction.

This book at its best is a great history of urban 19th century New York. At its worst - it is reminiscent of the dull Sociology books I was forced to read in college back in the early 1970's. Five Points has been "romanticized" almost the same as its equivalent London East End neighborhood "Whitechapel" and like Whitechapel, there was enough danger that the place did not need to be over hyperbolized by authors. Sure Asbury's and Sante's books tend to rely too much on contemporary newspaper accounts which tended to over exaggerate the violence and danger of the area. Yet the area of the Five Points (after the Civil War it was if you look at the map "Six Points" due to the extension of Park Street) was the most sordid neighborhood of New York ("the Old Sixth Ward") prior to the Civil War, however after the war it was no worse then the Lower East Side (4th Ward) or Hell's Kitchen.
The author can bore you to tears as he spends page after page telling about the emigration process from County Sligo or the various Savings Accounts the Pointers opened at the Emigrant Savings Bank. Yet there is still a poignancy to the story of the neighborhood which today is Chinatown. Whenever I walk throguh Chinatown (at least twice a month) in Manahattan I look for the site of Mulberry Bend (now Columbus Park) and try to figure out where Bottle Alley, Bandits Roost, etc. stood, and I look for the site of where stood first the infamous tenemant "The Old Brewery" and after it was razed it was rebuilt as "The Five Points Mission" (look for Cardinal Hayes Place near the Federal Courthouse). This is what makes urban history so fascinating - the way we need to over exaggerate the danger of admittedly dangerous neighborhoods. As a previous writer has said it would have been better to more fully cover the Draft Riots and the Astor Palce Riots. By all means read the book if you are interested in urban history but also read "Low Life" and "The Gangs of New York" by Luc Sante and Herbert Asbury respectively. Nevertheless I enjoyed this book despite the excessive statistical detail.

I had heard about the Five Points neighborhood of New York City a number of years ago, but had little familiarity with it other than that it was a slum area. The name originated where the intersection of five streets took place. This location eastward from Baxter Street, across Mulberry, Mott, Pell, and The Bowery. Roughly the area of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Author Anbinder provides us with a lengthy (441 pages) account of the history of the neighborhood mainly during the 19th century in which immigration into the United States led to the conditions connected with living in tenements. Overcrowding led to disease due to poor sanitation practices. People living in tenements took in additional boarders to help pay for the rent required by owners of the buildings. Parents often used their children to raise money on the streets during the day to be used by the parents to support their alcohol habit, and if the required amount of money was not raised the child faced a beating when he arrived home. A part I especially enjoyed was the story of Jacob Riis and his eventual success in winning the love of his life and his publication of his book "How the Other Half Lives" which brought about awareness of the plight of people living in such squalid conditions. Irving Berlin and Jimmy Durante began musical careers in this area of Manhattan, while others such as Johnny Torrio rose to infamy as gangsters. I did find the part about the politics of the Five Points area to be tedious, but that is not the fault of the book, but rather my lack of interest. Immigrants coming to this country from Ireland or any other country found the living hard, but hard as it may be to believe, an improvement over living conditions in Europe where many people died from the potato famine. Yes, the book is a rather long read, but one that gives a good description of living conditions that immigrants had to put up with when arriving into this country.

Five Points was the name given to the neighborhood that sprang up in New York on top of the Collect lake after it was drained and covered over in 1813. This neighborhood, having formed on the swampy land that was once home to only the worst of nuisance industries, became known throughout the nineteenth century for housing the dregs of humanity. As Anbinder states in his title, it truly was the "World's Most Notorious Slum." In fact, Five Points became an international tourist stop, attracting Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett, and many more to peer into the homes of the people who lived within.

Yes, Anbinder is an amazing historian. Yes, this book accomplishes many lofty goals. Anbinder introduces us to a colorful cast of characters, spotlighting the individuals, always, that make up the Five Points. In addition to newspapers and accounts from the time, which were often augmented by the prejudices of the writers, Anbinder also makes excellent use of a variety of other records, such as bank ledgers, property records, censuses, as well as a host of other valuable sources that give the reader a brief glimpse into the lives of the Five Points denizens. Anbinder's book also illustrates that the more the way Americans view poverty has changed, the more it has stayed the same. Indeed, Anbinder's history of Five Points is so exhaustive and meticulously researched, that the reader can come away with so much more than one idea about poverty, or another theory of immigrant life.

But, even more than the above, this book is exciting. It will draw you in and make you feel the humanity of all the different folks you meet. This is a history book that reads much like a novel, in the vein of "The Children's Blizzard," or "The Great Influenza." This DOES NOT read like a textbook. I can't recommend it enough.

The detailed research brings Five points to life, if you want the real story of five points and not just the scorcese/dicaprio version, this is where you will get it

After seeing "Gangs of New York", I was very much interested to learn more about the world of Five Points, but I didn't want an overly academic book to read nor an overly dumbed-down book. Anbinder provided just the right mix for me.

His writing shows that he did significant amounts of research. However, there are certain stories that are left with loose ends. Like what happens to Jacob Riis? What about the little orphan Joseph that's found in the park?

Other than this annoyance, the story of Five points from 1607 when it was first settled to the 1700s, when it was just an open grassy area where cow-herders took their cows to get watered, to the more famous slums of the mid to late 1800s and then to Chinatown and Little Italy of today, this book's a beautiful story that's told by Anbinder.

I enjoyed reading "Five Points" for the historical data it contained on a most interesting city, even to one who is not an American. Perhaps our American friends to the south are familiar with the information this book contains; however, for one who has not studied American history in detail the book proved to be quite enlightening. It is hard to imagine the abject poverty, squalor, violence and filth that prevailed in Five Points, especially when one considers the style and class often found in New York City today. Yes, every city has its share of impoverishment and homeless, even today, but none is so heart-rendering as the living conditions revealed in Five Pints.

While the book was certainly worth reading, the one major flaw seemed to be the disorganized chain of events. I found myself flipping back and forth through the pages to determine the proper sequence of events and to clarify just what happened at what time. In addition the writing style was somewhat dry in parts, and for these reasons the book lost a couple of stars in the writing. However, the book is not a lengthy one and it does contain some interesting and intriguing historical facts.

This ambitious social history of a notorious New York neighborhood is valuable for its painstaking research, maps and demographic information.
However, it often bogs down in dull detail, especially compared to the wickedly entertaining "Low Life" by Luc Sante. (The author seems particulary peeved with Sante, taking his work to task on several niggling points. He also takes potshots at Herbert Asbury.)
I felt the book's weakest aspect was its treatment of the New York Draft Riots. The strongest section is the description of the transition of Five Points from a predominantly Irish and Italian slum to present-day Chinatown.
The book is organized in a series of vignettes and capsulized biographies that make it difficult to follow a timeline. Perhaps it would have been better to divide the book into a pre-Civil War section and post-Civil War section.
Buy the book if you are passionate about the history of New York and seek something lighter (!) than "Gotham". If your interest is less scholarly, get a copy of Sante's "Low Life".