The Five Points Mission
Archibald Russell was an important contributor to the Five Points Mission.
The following is a short description of the Five Points slum and the work of the
Five Points Mission and the Five Points House of Industry
Five Points refers to a small parcel of New York City which roughly
corresponds with the present day Chinatown. The five points referred to an
intersection of Orange and Cross Streets where Worth Street terminated as it
fed in from the West. When the area became a notorious slum the city
changes the names of the streets to Baxter Street and Park Street, and later
Worth Street was extended to Chatham Square. The approximate extent of
the Five Points slum was Bowery on the east, Canal on the North, and Elm
(now Lafayette) on the west.
In the late eighteenth century, there was a fresh water lake called the
Collect (after the Dutch word kolch meaning small pond) and a hill to the north
of the lake which was a popular picnic area for New Yorkers. They could sit on
the hill and view the waters of the East and North Rivers. The area began to
run down when several tanneries and a slaughter house located on the south
side of the lake. The city fathers decided to fill in the lake using the dirt from
the hill. This happened in 1808, but the area remained swampy. Currently
Foley Square sits atop the old Collect. The area became the first housing for
immigrants after 1810, as other persons moved further north. It achieved
notoriety by 1840.
By 1840, the population consisted mostly of Irish and Jewish
immigrants and freed slaves. There was a race riot against the freed slaves in
1834, and that portion of the population dwindled progressively after, but there
were always a small group of blacks. The residents were housed in buildings
which usually were of two stories, with windows facing the street and the back,
but the rooms between had no windows and were used for bedrooms.
Observers noted that the bedrooms approximately 12 feet square often
housed 13 to 20 souls, usually sleeping on rags on the floor. There was a de
facto segregation of housing, with the Jewish occupying the east section of
Mott Street and Elizabeth Street, African Americans along Mission Place and
Park Street, and Irish in the other parts. The laws effecting tenement
construction were ineffective. One law insisted that every bedroom and
bathroom have a window. The winner of a design competition was the
'dumbbell' tenement by architect James E. Ware, which provided a narrow
indentation in the middle of the tenement, and became the dominant style of
new tenements. Builders placed two such tenements next to each other,
which formed narrow airshafts. Unfortunately, these airshafts became
collectors of garbage and items tossed out of windows. However, the
conditions of occupants did improve under changes in city law.
Why did the Irish come? Because conditions in Ireland were even
worse. The famine years devastated the population. The Irish were from
twelve counties, but the most of them arrived from Sligo, Cork and Kerry.
Cork is easily understood, as its population of 850,000 could supply plenty of
emigrants. Sligo is a sparsely populated county. The reason seems to be
that in Kerry the third marquis of Lansdowne and in Sligo Lord Palmerston
and Sir Robert Gore Booth financed programs to pay the boat fare of tenants


who would agree to move to Canada or the United States. This seems
philanthropic, but their estate foremen proved to them that sending the people
to America was cheaper than their cost to maintain the same people in poor
houses. One unfortunate side effect was that the persons chosen were often
those least capable of working; many of them did not survive the difficult
journey, and after arrival they did not have the capacity or skills to work.
How did they work? Sporadically... Most of them worked at unskilled
jobs when they could. Others became street vendors. Children were sent out
to find spare pieces of coal for fuel. Still others were beggars. When they
could work, they faced 10 hour days, 6 days per week.
Women often took in
laundry, or sewing in their own homes, being paid per piece.
How did they play and/or socialize? The housing was miserable, so
solace was sought in the 252 saloons and grocery stores in Five Points' 22
blocks. Groceries always had a small space at the end of the counter which
acted as a bar. Women generally did not enter saloons. The Bowery was a
lively street, with street vendors and performers; one visitor thought the street
"looks like a vast holiday fair two miles long." There were bars, and beer halls
with billiard tables, bowling alleys and an orchestra.
Closer to home there
was prostitution, gambling (poker and a simpler game called faro), and duck
pins. Dancing was also very popular. The people liked theater, especially
shows which portrayed themselves. Minstrels were popular, and there was
even a children's theater once visited by the Czar. Many social associations
were formed, the first being for Sligo immigrants, but the most popular
societies were the Fire Companies, which added excitement to the
neighborhood with their rivalries in fighting fires, but also formed an avenue to
advancement in the politics of the Democratic Party.
To an American Protestant society , just about everything about Five
Points was sinful. The inhabitants were foreign to the dominant Protestant
culture, spoke Gaelic or Yiddish or the accent of the blacks. Clearly they were
an inferior breed. Since the politicians did little or nothing to ameliorate the
situation, the work to reform fell to missionary societies. The standard
churches had fled the area. In 1846 there were Baptist, Episcopal,
Swedenborgian, African-American and Welsh Baptist churches; they were all
gone by 1855. There were two Roman Catholic churches just outside the Five
Points area. There were several Jewish congregations, usually housed in
upper rooms.
Beginning in 1830, a variety of evangelical Christian groups attempted
to win converts in Five Points. From the start the reformers were of two minds
concerning spiritual and worldly assistance -- a split which would last. In 1839
the American Female Moral Reform Society began giving out food and
clothing and sometimes sought jobs for the unemployed and shelter for the
homeless. The Tract Society, on the other hand, concentrated on conversion
attempts and created a separate group for its temporal work, under Robert
Hartley, who set the standards of assistance which would be adopted by
almost all charities in the nineteenth century.
These charities operated in
many areas of New York, but there soon arose operations which concentrated
strictly on Five Points.
The most famous of these was the First Union Mission, a consortium of
several Protestant groups. In May 1850 it began to operate the Five Points
Mission, and selected as it resident minister Lewis M. Pease, and innovative


Methodist minister from Lenox Massachusetts. Pease soon disagreed with
the Missionary Society on the mission's goals. The Society expected Pease to
visit potential converts, explain the 'errors' of Catholicism and the superiority
of Methodism. Pease found that this approach had little impact in Five Points.
He decided that he ought to provide help to alleviate hunger and gain skills to
enable people to be gainfully employed.
Soon he started an operation for women to sew shirts. He insisted that
they do not drink on his job, attend a church service of their own choice on the
Sabbath. He found the women had difficulty maintaining this discipline if they
returned to their shabby tenements, so he began to provide housing in a
rented building. He also insisted that the mission establish a school during the
week as well as the Sunday school. When the mission board declined to fund
these ventures, he resigned and established a second society, the Five Points
House of Industry. At first this was supported by a Temperance Society, but a
change of control in the Temperance Society led to a withdrawal of support.
Pease had by this time had impressed many with his industry and
imagination. The Rev. Gregory Bedell of the Episcopal Church of the
Ascension, which had been financing Pease's school, organized a group of
philanthropists to support Pease's work. Archibald Russell was a key figure in
this group. Some writers connect Russell to the Five Points Mission, but it is
more likely that he helped found the Five Points House of Industry and served
as its board chairman for eighteen years. The House received widespread
publicity. Even from Cleveland, a young John Rockefeller sent 10¢ of his
weekly salary of $4.00
Soon after the House of Industry established its lodging for women and
children, the Five Points Mission followed suit, and the two 'rivals' became the
dominant charitable institutions in Five Points.
Gradually the institutions
became discouraged at converting the adults and began to focus on the
children. This led to a very controversial operation, providing adoptive
parents in the West for Five Points children. Not all were orphans, some were
given over by their parents who could not provide for them, others children
asked to be adopted, and in some cases, the officers of the mission used the
court system to be awarded custody of the children. Groups of twenty or thirty
children would be placed on a train, and at each stop would perform, where
one or two would be adopted until they were all taken. The adoptive parents
were Protestant, and this aroused the ire of the Roman Catholic groups in
New York City.
One of the first measures taken by the Roman Catholic church was to
establish a parish within Five Points itself. In 1853, Archbishop Hughes
purchased the recently vacated Zion Protestant Episcopal Church and it
became the Church of the Transfiguration. The building had been erected in
1801 using stone rubble that was used to build St. Paul's Chapel, an historic
Anglican church on lower Broadway. Founded as a Lutheran parish, the
congregation later embraced the Episcopal faith in 1810. Soon the Roman
Catholic parish became the busiest in New York City, and was generally
considered an 'Irish' parish. By 1863 the New York Catholics began their own
adoption services -- because Civil War casualties created a large number of
children without fathers to support them. The Catholic Protectory sought to
avoid sending children out of the city by finding adoptive parents with New
York. But the numbers of children needing assistance grew, and the New York


Foundling Hospital was founded in 1869 and began transferring children to
predominantly Catholic communities in the Midwest.
The reader ought not assume that everything was evil about Five
Points. For many immigrants it was the first step to success in the New
World. Many moved quickly out of Five Points to other safer neighborhoods.
To cite a personal example, I have been able to trace my mother's family back
to 1848 at Broome Street, several blocks north of Five Points. The father was
from Cork, so it would not be unreasonable to believe that he spent his first
days at Five Points. By the 1870s the family had migrated to Hoboken and
Queens. This pattern would be typical of Irish immigrants.
Shortly after the Civil War the complexion of the neighborhood
changed. By 1880 there were as many Italians as Irish in Five Points, and by
1890 Italians made up 49%, Jewish 18% and Irish 10% of the population, with
another 17% unidentified. Initially most Italian immigrants came from the
province of Liguria whose capital is the port of Genoa. But another large
group came from the southern half of Italy, notable Campania (Naples) and
Basilicata just south of Campania. Before 1875, most Italians emigrated to
South America, notably Argentina, but after this date the bulk of immigrants
came to New York. Many settled north of Canal, but the most impoverished
settled in the lower part of Five Points.
Italians did not immediately adapt to New York foods, and tended to
maintain their culinary diets. This gave rise to several Italian groceries, which
also formed the social hub of the community. Many became street vendors, of
which organ grinders with their pet monkeys were the most notable. Italians
also took over the lowest status jobs which were now being abandoned by the
Irish. In a notable example, they became the railroad builders, supplanting the
Irish. Many men went across country to work on railroads during the warm
months, and then returned to Five Points during the winter, attempting to
survive on their summer earnings. Like the Irish, the Italians were not a
unified group, and rival groups struggled for informal control of the territory.
The Roman Catholic Church does not get high marks for its treatment
of the Italian immigrants. A small church servicing Italians had been
established in 1866 outside the Five Points, and the priests of Transfiguration
routinely sent their Italians there for confessions, marriages, baptisms and
funerals, even though it was 1 1/2 miles away. When the Irish pastor of
Transfiguration asked Archbishop Corrigan for an Italian speaking priest, he
confined the Italian Masses to the basement. The poor treatment of Italians,
not only in Five Points but in many parishes elsewhere, reached Rome, and in
the 1890s Pope Leo XIII expressed his displeasure at the treatment of
Italians both in writing and in meetings with American bishops. Pope Leo
asked Bishop Scalabrini to train priests in Italy to service the New York Italians
and in 1888 a separate parish was set up in Five Points for the Italian
community.
Added to ecclesiastic mistreatment by Irish-dominated clergy was
political mistreatment by Irish-dominated politicians in the Democratic party.
Some writers indicate that many Italians when they eventually joined in the
political arena became Republicans because of the political and religious
mistreatment..



By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Italians were
supplanted by Chinese. Many of these came from California because of the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the mistreatment of Chinese in California.
Like the Irish and Italians before them, the Chinese were not a uniform group,
and the famous tong wars virtually duplicated the divisions previously seen by
the Italian and Irish gangs.
Such division exist even today: Transfiguration
Church has three Sunday Masses, all in the upper church. One is in English,
another in Mandarin Chinese, and the third in Cantonese Chinese!
But this
part of Five Points history lies outside the scope of our interest, because
Archibald Russell died in 1871, and he is the reason we are writing about Five
Points ...
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, most of the Five Points
tenements were razed to erect public buildings. The Foley Square
courthouses are sited on the old Collect, and Worth Street is now extended to
Chatham Square. Five Points' reputation as the worse slum in the world lost
its claim to other parts of New York City, such as Hell's Kitchen, and to other
cities of the world.
References:
Tyler Anbinder, Five Points. the 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That
Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious
Slum, New York, The Free Press, 2001, 532 pp. Information drawn mainly from
chapter Eight: Religion and Reform, pp 235 - 268
most recent revision:
November 26, 2001
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