Cheap Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (Book) (Tyler Anbinder) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

Well researched
Great book on NYC history. Anbinder has done a good job of digging up what may seem to the casual reader as ancillary - or even tediously unnecessary - information. But going through church rolls and Emigrant Savings bank records gives a very personal and human touch to the information. This wasn't just a "slum;" this was a thriving neighborhood, in a packed city, with a multitude of characters, displaying the best and worst of human behavior.

A good text for a serious history student. Scorcese fans who want a companion book to his recent movie should get Herb Asbury's instead, which has proven to be part history, part mythology, and more in step with the film.

Sure, it was a rough neighborhood, but it can't possibly be any worse than any New York neighborhoods of the 20th century. Anbinder merely gives us the evidence that New York, for all its changes, is a timeless City.

good but flawed
I live and work just a few blocks from the intersection that was once known as the Five Points. Since I moved to the neighborhood, I've been something of a local history buff. Thus this book wasn't as informative to me as it would probably be to most readers. That does, however give me a perspective from which I can judge its strengths and weaknesses. First off, the books main weakness is the way the author chose to focus very arbitrarily on the area around the Five Points as a single neighborhood, as though the areas to the north, east and west were different neighborhoods. The Five Points was an intersection, not a neighborhood. It's true that 19th Century writers did refer to the area around the Five Points using the phrase "Five Points" as a metonymic reference for the area, but it's quite misleading to claim, is Andinder implicitly does, that the Five Points was a neighborhood distinct from the Lower East Side, for example. Then, as now, the Lower East Side, referred to a quite wide area, and the Five Points region was really just a specific part of the Lower East Side. There are other points too. But aside from that quibble, the focus on just those few blocks gives the book as a whole a somewhat blinkered quality.

The books greatest strength was in the research Anbinder did on the Irish immigrants who made up the bulk of the population of that area in the mid 19th century. It was very interesting to learn that such a large proportion of them came from a small number of Estates in the Old Country. That was not something I'd picked up from any other sources. Even there, however, Anbinder left me frustrated. For all the information he unearthed about those people, he left out what for me was one of the most important details: Nowhere does he mention what proportion of the immigrants spoke English when they arrived in New York. Perhaps Anbinder simply assumed these people, being Irish, spoke English. But if so then Anbinder is betraying a woeful ignorance of Irish history. The Famine, which led to the mass emigration, was one of the historical events that most directly led to the near-extinction of the Irish language. Generally it was the Irish speakers in the western part of Ireland who died and emigrated in the greatest numbers. Thus I would imagine that a large number of the Irish-born Five Pointers would have had to learn English from scratch, or nearly from scratch, upon their arrival in the US. The struggle to master a new language is such a basic part of the immigrant experience that it seems to me to be a huge lacuna in Anbinder's discussion that he doesn't even mention it.