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    Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
    Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
    Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
    Audiobook16 hours

    Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

    Written by Tyler Anbinder

    Narrated by Joe Barrett

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    Tyler Anbinder offers the first-ever history of this now forgotten neighborhood, drawing on a wealth of research among letters and diaries, newspapers and bank records, police reports and archaeological digs. Beginning with the Irish potato-famine influx in the 1840s, and ending with the rise of Chinatown in the early twentieth century, he weaves unforgettable individual stories into a tapestry of tenements, work crews, leisure pursuits both licit and otherwise, and riots and political brawls that never seemed to let up.

    Although the intimate stories that fill Anbinder's narrative are heart-wrenching, they are perhaps not so shocking as they first appear. Almost all of us trace our roots to once humble stock. Five Points is, in short, a microcosm of America.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 27, 2018
    ISBN9781541446670
    Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
    Author

    Tyler Anbinder

    Tyler Anbinder is a professor of history at George Washington University. His first book, Nativism and Slavery, was also a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Arlington, VA.

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    Reviews for Five Points

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    • 4/5
      This book is a well-written history of the famous Five Points neighborhood in New York City through the 19th century. The author documents the slums, murders, and drunkenness and provides real-life stories of the most notorious in this melting pot for poor immigrants. Ireland's potato famine, war, discrimination against Jews, and widespread poverty in mid-eighteenth-century Europe drove thousands to seek a better life in America. Some found the help they sought, but many were left to wallow in abject poverty, living in overcrowded tenement buildings and eke out a life on the streets. The Points was so famous that sometimes wealthy New Yorkers accompanied by police would tour through the poverty, brothels, brawling, and filthiness to glimpse into "life on the other side." It wasn't until laws were put in place to hold landlords accountable and most old buildings were razed in the early twentieth century that the worst slums disappeared.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book about the notorious New York neighborhood that was home to the most destitute of the city's immigrants. Yet, Anbinder shows that Five Points wasn't always as bad as its reputation and often was the home of a hard-working, multi-ethnic community making their way into the American society.
    • 4/5
      This was very interesting about a part of American history I was not aware of. In some parts it read more like a scholarly history book than a book you want to sit down and read. But for the American History buff this is a good one.
    • 4/5
      Tyler Anbinder presents a history ostensibly focused narrowly on a lower Man-hattan neighborhood. In actually, Anbinder not only delivers the history of the Five Points area, but he also conveys a larger sense of the context and background that made this neighborhood significant. Anbinder organizes his material into very approachable chapters, each preceded by a brief illustrative anecdote or incident, which relates to the theme of the specific section.