Five Points the Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the Worlds Most Notorious Slum
- List Price: $30.00
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Publish date: 08/01/2001
Description:
All but forgotten today, Five Points (an intersection in lower Manhattan formed when Anthony Street was extended to meet Orange and Cross -- today's Baxter and North Streets), was the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America. Visitors from Charles Dickens to Abraham Lincoln flocked to Five Points to witness the filthy streets, bordellos, gambling dens, and tenements that housed the lowest of the low. All who saw it agreed the neighborhood contained "more squalid poverty and abominable wickedness than any area of equal size in the world".
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Yet, a close look at Five Points reveals a hidden world. As one of the most ethnically varied areas in the nation's most diverse city, The Five Points story is a classic American example of immigrant energy and ambition. From "Bowery Boy" culture (made famous by Hollywood), to the invention of tap dance, to the most famous prize-fight of the century, to the timeless photographs of Jacob Riis. Five Points vividly illuminates the colorful history of a fascinating community.
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