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.
In this narrative history of the Mohawk River Valley and surrounding region from 1713 to 1794, Professor Richard Berleth charts the passage of the valley from a fast-growing agrarian region streaming with colonial traffic to a war-ravaged wasteland....
A brilliant, soulful, and timely portrait of a two-hundred-year-old crabbing community in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay as it faces extinction from rising sea levels—part natural history of an extraordinary ecosystem, starring the beloved ...
Broadway takes us on a mile-by-mile journey that traces the gradual evolution of the seventeenth-century's Brede Wegh, a muddy cow path in a backwater Dutch settlement, to the twentieth century's Great White Way.
How much do you actually know about New York City? Did you know they tried to anchor Zeppelins at the top of the Empire State Building? Or that the high-rent district of Park Avenue was once so dangerous it was called "Death Avenue"? Lively and comp...
Narrator: Chris Andrew Ciulla Published: 06/12/2018
In this updated and redesigned edition of the New York Times bestseller, Newt and Callista Gingrich invite you on a walking tour of America's capital city; Washington, D.C. As a reminder of God's role in the history and future of America, Newt and ...
What is Brooklyn? A bedroom suburb of Manhattan? A crumbling relic of urban decay? A collection of gorgeous million dollar brownstones? A magnet for artists and writers and hipsters and yuppies and new immigrants and real estate developers? A hotbe...
Journalist Julie Satow's thrilling, unforgettable history of how one illustrious hotel has defined our understanding of money and glamour, from the Gilded Age to the Go-Go Eighties to today's Billionaire Row. From the moment in 1907 when New York ...
Long before the specter of terrorism haunted the public imagination, a serial bomber stalked the streets of 1950s New York. The race to catch him would give birth to a new science called criminal profiling.Grand Central, Penn Station, Radio City Mu...
Mac Griswold' s The Manor is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister-- and of the family that has lived there since its founding a...
{"id":"2636722","ean":"9781541446670","abr":"Unabridged","title":"Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum","subtitle":"The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum","author":"Tyler Anbinder","rating_average":"0","narrator":"Joe Barrett","ubr_id":"2636722","abr_id":"0","ubr_price":"24.99","abr_price":"0.00","ubr_memprice":"14.99","abr_memprice":"0.00","ubr_narrator":"Joe Barrett","abr_narrator":"","ubr_length":"Unabridged: 15 hr 0 min","abr_length":"Abridged: "}
