Life in the Five Points

"How did they live in Five Points?" asked Gary Wills, one of America's finest journalists, in his article, "Salvage Archeology in Lower Manhattan." (Washington Post, Dec.29, 1991) The answer was, "Nastily, brutishly and often briefly. When after the 1832 cholera epidemic, the Mayor ordered the streets scraped of animal and human filth, a lady who had lived there all her life exclaimed, 'I never knew the strets were paved with stones.' In the 1849 epidemic, pigs rooting in the streets were, a report said, 'contaminated by the contact with children.' It was said that in death the victims continued the tenement system, buried six tiers deep."

Wills goes on to describe the conditions uncovered by "salvage archeology" at a construction site in lower Manhattan. "Most Five Points buildings, the rubble from which is now 15 to 20 feet below street level, contained a saloon. The police raided one in which 42 people were crammed in one small room, in the corner of which on a pile of dirty straw lay a woman just delivered of a child. Famous gangs like the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits and the Roach Guard fueled the riots of July 1863. They began as Draft riots, became race riots then turned to pillaging the rich."