Five Points: the 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

by Tyler Anbinder

"The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stained or unavenged crime. There is a murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the word. "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. It's handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. . . . .

Hardcover

Published September 4, 2001

About the author

Tyler Anbinder is an Associate Professor of History at George Washington University. His first book, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850's, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and the winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.