| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Tyler Anbinder. Five Points: The Nineteenth Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press. 2001. Pp. viii, 532. $30.00.

By 1829, the year that the name Five Points first appeared in the New York City press, the socioeconomic quality of the neighborhood to which the term was applied had already begun to deteriorate as its middle-class residents started to move out. Over the next two decades, the 1830s and 1840s, Five Points, a lower Manhattan district surrounding a five-way intersection of three streets—originally, Anthony, Cross, and Orange, which in 1854 were renamed Park, Worth, and Baxter—rapidly gained a reputation as a wretched, crime-ridden immigrant slum. Tyler Anbinder devotes most of his book to describing the district and its residents, never slighting the negative features of Five Points life, but also drawing attention to flashes of artistic creativity and stories of upward mobility that were part and parcel of the neighborhood's nineteenth-century history. 1

The first half of Anbinder's book focuses on the character of the neighborhood before the Civil War. Successive chapters describe the arrival of the famine Irish (who by 1855 comprised fully fifty-two percent of the district's population), the living conditions in the unsanitary and overcrowded tenements that Five Points residents endured, the types of employment available to the newcomers, the rise of Irish Democrats in Sixth Ward politics, the entertainments—dances, bare-knuckle fights, gambling, and drinking—the locals pursued, and the lawlessness and vice, including murder, prostitution, and rioting, that reinforced the neighborhood's reputation as a zone of debauchery and social disorder. . . .

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