THE FIVE POINTS ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT
In the early 1990s, a group of archaeologists began an excavation in Five Points. Their research revealed that there was much more to Five Points than the filthy, poor, and crime-infested area that early visitors had described. On February 22, 1998, the Daily News published an article by Michael O. Allen that described some of their findings.
February 22, 1998
Even today, nearly 100 years after its demise, much of what is known about the old Five Points neighborhood in lower Manhattan is legend and lore. This crossroads of Old New York came to be known as a refuge for Irish immigrants, where vice, crime and unspeakable poverty prevailed. But according to a report to be delivered soon to the U.S. General Services Administration, the neighborhood was much more complex and diverse-like today’s New York.
The Daily News has obtained portions of the report based on an excavation completed in 1992 by John Milner Associates, a Philadelphia archeological and architectural firm. Archaeologists, before work could begin on the construction of the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square, dug up 14 lots in the neighborhood and looked through garbage and other buried belongings. They unearthed 850,000 artifacts, 100,000 alone from a tenement that housed 98 tenants at 472 Pearl St. Their findings challenged all known assumptions about the area.
They found expensive Asian and European porcelain, gilded bone china, household ceramics, elaborate tea sets and glass, tobacco pipes, textiles, jewelry and other household items that showed people had disposable income. They also found evidence-in the form of professionally butchered beef, lamb and pork bones-that people consumed expensive meats.
Using census data and bank records, especially those of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, founded by the Irish Emigrant Society of New York, they were able to show that lawyers, doctors, teachers, bankers and politicians lived in the neighborhood. Many people were drawn to Five Points because of its cheap housing and ready jobs, said Rebecca Yamin, the project manager on the excavation. But there were also many well-to-do families who owned property and businesses.
“When we look at this collection, we got this sense that life was very difficult, unspeakably overcrowded and unsanitary, but there was also this sense of exuberance,” Yamin said. “This was the period that New York became what it is today, which is this phenomenal thing.”
The artifacts also show clearly the city’s ability to contain vast wealth in proximity to abject poverty, said Heather Griggs, an archaeologist involved in the project. “It was a neighborhood of poor people and people who were living the American Dream,” she said. “Each apartment held a different family with a different dream. Some made it. Others didn’t. That’s the American experience.” Five Points, named for the intersection of Anthony (now Worth), Orange (now Baxter), and Cross (now Park) Streets and a small park, Paradise Square, sprouted at a low, marshy spot northeast of City Hall. Artisans and other tradespeople came, as did tanneries, breweries and slaughterhouses next to 46-acre Collect Pond. But the pond became so polluted that by 1803 the city’s Common Council ordered it filled. It was this landfill area that became known as Five Points.
The neighborhood grew to be overwhelmingly Irish, although there were a sizable number of East European Jews, Germans, blacks, Italians, Poles, East and West Indians and a smattering of Prussians. Most Irish lived in rooms, cellars and garrets of buildings along Park and Pearl Streets, Griggs said.
No sooner had the neighborhood taken shape than its image as a dangerous place began to set in. Residents worked a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs, such as construction, carpentry, masonry and dressmaking. But concerns over street peddling of fruit, oysters and sexual favors caught the attention of outsiders. In 1842, a terrified Charles Dickens said he would not venture into the neighborhood without a police escort, noting “ruined houses,” a “world of vice and misery” and “all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed.”
In recent years, Caleb Carr used Five Points as backdrop for dark doings in The Alienist, and Luc Sante offered lurid tales in Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York.
Social reformer Jacob Riis, through his book, How the Other Half Lives, persuaded the city to undertake slum clearances that in 1894 began to spell the end for Five Points. By 1919, remnants of the neighborhood were swept away with construction of the New York County Courthouse, now the state Supreme Court, as Worth and Baxter Streets.
But experts say there are vibrant, living examples of what Five Points may have been. “Chinatown is a perfect modern example of what the neighborhood may have been like,” Griggs said. “I love walking through Chinatown today because I can imagine what it was like 150 years ago when the Irish and Jews and Germans lived at Five Points. That’s what this project is about, dispelling myths of the immigrant slums.”
“Life is always more complicated than caricature makes it out to be,” Sante said. “This archaeological dig was very important. People will write interesting books about why there is this disparity between the way these people lived and how the legend got reported.”
The archaeologists also created a website that gives much more information on Five Points and includes a virtual tour of the artifacts they found.
http://schools.nycenet.edu/csd1/museums/fivepoints/points4.html
http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm
Sunday, June 29, 1997