A SENSE OF PLACE IN FIVE POINTS BY SARAH ROSE LEONARD
The land under our feet always carries more
stories than we know. The musical Paradise Square places location at the center of its story, taking its name from a park in the historic Five Points neighborhood in New York City. Today, where Five Points once flourished, Chinatown’s flurry of activity swirls and a plethora of municipal and federal buildings cast their shadow. A little digging is required to reveal the life that once infused this neighborhood. The earth itself shifted as Five Points changed. There used to be a hill hovering over Collect Pond, a modest body of water right next to what would become Paradise Square, in the 1700s. The pond provided clean drinking water for grazing cattle from nearby farms. As industrialization emerged, tanneries and slaughterhouses took over the farmland. Pollution from manufacturing poured into the pond. The City obliterated the hill to fill in Collect Pond in 1813, attempting to end the cesspool that had formed. However, the earth is not so easily manipulated. As the population of New York expanded in the early 1800s, hasty construction of houses began on the landfill. Due to the rush of construction, the land hadn’t fully settled, causing the homes to shift and tilt just a few years after their creation. Additionally, an underground spring kept feeding water into what was essentially a steaming mud pit. Mosquitoes swarmed in, and disease spread. The middle-class occupants fled, and the population shifted. Many immigrants and other less-privileged tenants moved into these misshapen houses and polluted land. Soon, sex work and crime began to rise and liquor stores cropped up throughout the neighborhood. The combination of diseases swirling around the locale and the poor inhabitants gave the neighborhood its reputation as America’s first slum by the middle of the century.
1 8 · T H E B E R K E L E Y R E P M AG A Z I N E · 2 0 1 8–1 9 · I S S U E 3
Yet a silver lining shone in the newly undesirable 20-block neighborhood: ostracized populations, such as recently arrived Irish immigrants and free-born and newly emancipated African Americans, found themselves at home in Five Points. While the Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until the 1860s, slavery in New York ended in 1827, and the number of free Blacks in the city rose. The population boom in Five Points reached a peak in the 1840s, when large numbers of Catholics fled Ireland’s Potato Famine. The populations lived side by side in relative peace. This coexistence of cultures resulted in a unique hotbed of creativity: new dance and music forms blossomed in Five Points. Dance hall competitions in basement bars sprang up as popular forms of entertainment. During one of these competitions, William Henry Lane, a free-born African-American teenager, combined elements of the Irish jig and African-American shuffle to create tap dance. His fame grew as patrons wrote about his talent, and he eventually went on European tours with his newly minted dance form. Five Points earned an international reputation, thanks to sensationalistic writing by journalists and novelists alike who were obsessed with how such a poverty-stricken place could exist in one of the most prosperous countries in the world. It was dangerous to walk at night in the neighborhood, which was rare at the time. The term “slumming” came into usage in the 19th century, used to describe a trendy pastime for upper-class people in which they ventured into the area as tourists, as spectators of poverty. English author Charles Dickens requested a visit to Five Points during a trip to America. In 1842, he wrote in his American Notes that Five Points was “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” and “all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.” Indeed, he further
