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| Manhattan Bridge |
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| Carin reading my guidebook outside of Smith's house |
I used my dim sum adventure to do some scavenger hunting around "Five Points" and Chinatown. I was with my friend, Carin, and she was totally game. The first stop was 25 Oliver Street and the home of Governor Alfred E. Smith, who also received the nomination to be the 1928 Democratic nominee for president. (Ch. 144) This was notable for this area of town dubbed the "Five Points" (see below). It was also notable because Smith was the first Catholic to be nominated for president. (Ch. 144) However, it was not to be and Herbert Hoover won the election in a landslide victory (by nearly 20%)! (Ch. 144) The book implies that maybe Smith was just too "New York" for the job (I that sentiment would still be true today). (Ch. 144)
A block away from here was Smith's old church, St. James (Ch. 43) In 1837, there was a fear that the current Nativist ("real American") movement would lead to more acts of violence against immigrants (more so than the early 1830s which were pretty bad). (Ch. 43) This led to the creation of one of the first unified civic organizations, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (Hibernia being Latin for Ireland), which is still alive and kicking today, at St. James Church. After the Irish Potato Famine in 1845, the Hibernians' focus shifted to helping immigrants adjust to a new city. The most well-known (or at least to the casual observer) contribution of the AOH is organizing the annual NYC St. Patrick's Day Parade. (Ch. 43) |
| "There is no other but the house of God and the gate of heaven." |
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| AOH |
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| James St. is even honorarily named for the AOH. In the back right, you can see the fabulous new building by Frank Gehry (finished just this year). |
About a block away from Smith's home and St. James, is the first cemetery of the Congregation Shearith Israel and was established in 1656. (Ch.7) The bummer about this stop on the tour was that the cemetery was closed to visitors. I was still able to get some neat photos but I always find it morbidly fascinating to figure out how long people lived before they died. This congregation was actually created by the first Jews in "New Amsterdam", who actually landed there by mistake. (Ch. 7) Spanish and Portuguese Jews were displaced during the Inquisition (trying to get to the Netherlands) but ended up being accosted by Spanish pirates. Before the pirates could make it to the Caribbean, a French privateer intercepted them and told the captives that he would take them to New Amsterdam for a fee. The Mayor at the time, Peter Stuyvesant, was not pleased about the immigrants (fearing he would have to accept immigrants from all over); however, he granted them space for a synagogue and didn't relegate them to a ghetto, which would have been typical at this time. (Ch. 7)
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| You can see the Hebrew on the gravestones. |
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| Alive and well today in the UWS. |
Next up we went to Five Points (think: Gangs of New York). "Five Points" got its name in June 1829 because it was the intersection of 3 streets Orange, Anthony and Cross (that no longer intersect) and at the time which formed an irregular five-cornered junction. Hence, Five Points. (Ch. 37) Original, eh? This neighborhood is the square mile north of Collect Pond (a subject of another Scavenger Hunt post).
In 1840, Charles Dickens visited the Five Points and it was at that point that people began to realize just how bad it was there. (Ch. 45) To quote from Charles Dickens account of his experience:
Poverty, wretchedness, and vice, are rife enough where we are going now. . . . Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. . . . Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? And why they talk instead of grunting? (Ch. 45)Umm... OUCH! Can you even imagine someone writing that now and not being crucified by the media?! Anyway, people apparently did not react to this with horror but with curiosity and took tours there. In fact, according to the book the term "slumming" it may have come from these northern NYs paying Irish policemen to take them on guided tours of Five Points! (Ch. 45)
Also related to Five Points: The infamous Civil War Draft Riots started because people could avoid the Civil War draft by buying a substitute for the equivalent of a year's wages of someone who lived in Five Points, which was a very poor and immigrant-heavy area. (Ch. 67) The proximate cause of the riots (July 11-16, 1863) was that volunteer firefighters weren't exempted from the draft and somehow the draft office started burning to the ground and so the riots started. (Ch. 67) After the riots, City Hall mounted an investigation that would lead to the destruction of Five Points in the early 1900s (Ch. 67)
The city attempted to connect the Five Points area with Chatham Square so that C. Square's "middle-class values" would influence the so-called Sixth Ward (aka Five Points and also the tongue-in-cheek name of a bar in the LES). In fact, the opposite happened!
All that's left of 5 Points is now the intersection of Worth (formerly, Anthony) & Baxter (formerly, Orange). In fact, "so thorough was the city's decimation of the area that when Herbert Asbury published The Gangs of New York in 1928", he didn't know where it was and placed it one block too far east, which made Martin Scorsese do the same in his movie! So now you know better than Martin Scorsese. That should make you feel good. :)
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| Worth & Baxter |
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