Five Points, Tyler Anbinder
Five Points, Tyler Anbinder
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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

Author: Tyler Anbinder

Narrator: Joe Barrett

Unabridged: 16 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/27/2018


Synopsis

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.

About 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Diana on August 26, 2021

Five Points [2002] - ★★★★ In Five Points, Tyler Anbinder focuses his attention on once the most notorious area in New York – the infamous Five Points, once a densely-populated, poverty, crime, riots and disease-ridden area. The area, which was once a green place with a lake called “The Collect Pond”......more

Goodreads review by Marti on November 04, 2015

This is a must read for anyone who enjoyed the film "Gangs of New York." Unlike the book of the same name by Herbert Asbury, the author utilized statistics to debunk some of the hyperbole surrounding America's most notorious slum. There were even some fairly well-to-do merchants who chose to remain......more

Goodreads review by Arthur on July 13, 2023

A 16 hour unabridged audiobook. I wanted to give this book 4 stars because it was just full of so much useful information as to how life was back then. How far we have come. But alas it reads like a boring encyclopedia entry and that knocked it down a star.......more

Goodreads review by Rebekah on May 31, 2008

This book was big when The Gangs of New York movie came out. I picked it up because I am a sucker for 17th-19th NYC history for some reason. It is a fabulous read for a history nerd with a dark side like me.......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on May 13, 2013

I lived in New York City's Little Italy for 48 years. But before it was called Little Italy, it was called "The Five Points." This book captivated me with the details of how my neighborhood transformed from a den of iniquity, to what it was when I lived there, starting in 1953. First, the Five Point......more