Dead Ends (Norumbega Locations #1)

Dead Ends

Lt.-Col. Charles Baxter - Murderers Alley was a dark lane that ran south from the dirty green door of 14 Baxter (then called Orange) Street, past the east wall of the five-story Old Brewery, down to Pearl Street. Murderer's Row was the nickname given to the Yankees during the Babe Ruth years. Baxter Street was named after Lt.-Col. Charles Baxter, who commanded Company B of the New York Regiment at Chapultepec during the Mexican-American War. At just past 8 a.m. August 13th, 1847, Baxter was killed leading the charge by the 15-foot wall around the base of the hill.

Rosanna Peers -Five Points was famous for launching tap dancing and sprouting the seeds of organized crime. The notorious neighborhood was America's first melting pot. Emancipated African Americans mixed with Irish, Anglo, Jewish and Italian citizens of NYC. Tap dancing began in 5 Points from the mix of African dances, Irish jig, and clog dancing. In 1844, Black Master Juba out-danced White Master Diamond in a famous tap dance contest.

Five Points was set in a triangle bounded by Canal, Centre, Pearl, and Chatham (now Park Row) Streets with the Bowery. Within this neighborhood, Orange (Baxter), Cross (Mosco), Anthony (Worth), and Little Water Streets (no longer exists) created an intersection that had 5 points. Around 1850, to alter 5 Points’ negative image, Anthony Street was changed to Worth (named after Mexican War hero General William Worth), and Orange was renamed Baxter (after Mexican War hero Lt. Col. Charles Baxter).

Rosanna Peers ran a cheap green-grocery speakeasy in 1825 on Centre Street, just south of Anthony (Worth) Street. The backroom was headquarters of two Irish gangs, the Forty Thieves gang led by Edward Coleman, and the Kerryonians, who were mostly natives of County Kerry, Ireland. In time, other 5 Point gangs prospered: the Whyos, the Shirt Tails (who never tucked in their shirts to easily hide their weapons), the Chichesters (mostly absorbed by the Whyos), and the Roach Guards (who have been called the Black Birds and more famously the Dead Rabbits). The Plug Uglies were often linked with 5 Points, but they operated in Baltimore, not NYC.

Many of the shanties in 5 Points were on top of half door houses (so named because of their half-sized doors). The first floors of the half door houses were below street level and full of hookers, thieves and killers until the Board of Health banned human habitation in basements. Five Points, called the worst slum in America, may not have been as violent as history made it out to be. In the mid-1850s, only 30 murders a year were reported in the whole of NYC. During most months in all of NYC in the 5 Point era, only one murder a month was reported. Many inaccurate history books reported that there was a murder a day at the five-story Old Brewery alone, and the police were too afraid to cross the boundaries of 5 Points.

Henry Petty, the third marquis of Lansdowne, was an English nobleman who financed a massive Irish emigration program. By 1851, Petty was responsible for taking 3,500 starving paupers out of the Kenmare poorhouses in Ireland and shipping them to NYC and Quebec. Petty spent Ł9,500 (slightly more than $1 million) on emigration because it was cheaper than supporting them in the Lansdowne estate for a single year. Two hundred people a week made the 60-mile journey to Cork, where they caught emigrant ships. Lansdowne sent entire families, so instead of vigorous young men, half of the Irish immigrants were women, and many were gray-haired and aged. In 1855, out of 14,000 residents of 5 Points, two thirds of them were Irish, mostly from Sligo, Cork, and Kerry. Eight-four percent of the Irish from Kerry lived on Orange Street (Baxter) from Anthony (Worth) to Leonard and Anthony Street from Centre to Orange. Seventy-nine percent of these Kerry natives were immigrants from the Lansdowne estate.

In the late 1880s, a police reporter named Jacob Riis started shooting pictures around the dark 5 Points area with his new flash powder. His photo essay to make the world more aware of its horrible conditions was published in 1890 as "How the Other Half Lives." Broadway was full of elegance in the daytime, but at night it was the stomping ground of criminals and prostitutes.

The 5 Points district was a famous red light district in the 19th century. The first red light street in NYC was Marketveldt Street across from NYC's first fort (Fort Amsterdam); it was once called Pettycoat Lane. Corlears Hook was such a notorious area for prostitutes that the term hookers was coined there. Gramercy Park had fancy bordellos in the late 1860s. The area west of St. Paul’s Church was called the Holy Ground, and it was a huge red light district in NYC. Between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, the Rockefeller Center area between 48th and 51st Streets was a red light district once owned by Columbia University. The Times Square area was full of silk hat brothels in 1900 and still had a red light district in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jacob Riis - At the dead end of the northern side of Little Water Street by the Collect Pond landfill was the very lowest and worst place in New York, the infamous Cow Bay cul de sac. Little Water Street ran from the base of Paradise Square at Cross Street and Anthony Street (now Worth Street) to a dead end by the Collect Pond. The cul de sac was 30 feet wide at its mouth and ran about 100 feet into a dark alley next to one of the bays of the former Collect Pond where farmers once watered their cows.

Aside from the Old Brewery, Cow Bay became the most scandalous place in Five Points, thanks to the notoriety of a few interracial couples as well as the criminals, hookers and addicts who huddled there.

The most notorious tenements in Cow Bay were Jacob's Ladder, Gates of Hell, and Brickbat Mansion. Jacob's Ladder was named for its dangerous outside staircase, a rickety wooden structure that was the only way to get into this clapboard tenement, except maybe through underground passageways. The other hideous five-story tenements in Cow Bay had little furniture, and most people lived in dirt, rags and vermin.

After slavery ended in NYC on July 4th, 1827, thousands of African Americans moved into Cow Bay and Five Points for the cheap rents. This wreck of a neighborhood was taken over by Irish and Italians as the blacks moved to NYC's west side and its undeveloped north. By 1850, when the Irish came pouring into Five Points, census takers counted only 120 black men in Cow Bay, and by 1855, only 35 African Americans were left in Cow Bay.

The Five Points House of Industry superintendent would lead “depravity tours” to show how much the neighborhood needed his help. He took visitors into the worst places in the points he could find. Singling out interracial couples as one of his favorite horror stories, he also liked highlighting gays and their demonstrable lack of shame during his misery tours. He portrayed these slumming tours as the huddling of the swine amid the intolerable stench of the cesspools, with play-by-play descriptions of alcohol-fueled and drug-induced fights that often ended in death.

Historic legends claiming that Five Points had a murder a night for 15 years, however, were complete fallacies. Five Points was called the worst slum in America, but it may not have been as violent as history makes it out to be. In the mid 1850s, only 30 murders a year were reported in all of NYC. Most months in the entire city during the Five Points era had only one reported murder a month. Many inaccurate history books reported a murder a day in the five-story Old Brewery alone and that police were too afraid to cross its boundaries.

Describing the steaming filth that was inches deep in dark and dangerous stairways, temperance leaders recommended exploring Cow Bay with a handkerchief saturated in camphor to endure the horrid smells. Windowless rooms, less than 10 by 10 feet, housed five or six people. An inspection in 1857 found 23 families and their lodgers living in only 15 small rooms; 179 people! Many residents opened up their apartments as boarding homes, squeezing in tenants for a few cents a night.

The Five Points House of Industry got its way in the 1860s. The hovels of Cow Bay were condemned and demolished, conveniently enabling the House to expand their building into the former squalor of the Cow Bay site. After Cow Bay was eradicated, gawkers and do-gooders’ attention shifted to the nearby alleys of Mulberry Bend, which photographer Jacob Riis would make infamous in the 1890s.

Riis. a police reporter in the late 1880s, started shooting pictures around the dark Five Points area with his new flash powder, exposing to the world of its horrible conditions. His photo essay, “How the Other Half Lives,” was published in 1890.

Around 1850, in a bid to reverse Five Points’ negative image, Anthony Street was renamed changed Worth Street after Mexican War hero General William Worth, and Orange was renamed Baxter after Mexican War hero Lt. Col. Charles Baxter.

Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Davy Crockett and Charles Dickens -The theaters and taverns on the Bowery attracted many tourists to the Five Points neighborhood, and many upper-class people popularized “slumming.” Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Davy Crockett and Charles Dickens ventured into the neighborhood to observe depravity and soak in the slang and fashions of the many gang members. Sometimes they peeked in with police escorts, other times they brought friends. Dickens liked to go to Pete Williams Place, an African American dance hall originally called Almacks Dance Hall. Here at 67 Orange Street (now named Baxter), just south of Bayard Street, Dickens observed a dance called a break-down that blended Irish jigs and reels with African shuffle. The masters of this dance, which grew into tap dancing, included William Henry Lane and Master Juba. This music hall venue led to the blues, jazz, and eventually rock and roll. Dickens wrote about this dance hall and neighborhood in his 1842 work, “American Notes.”

Coulter's Brewery - Five Points was built over the Collect Pond landfill, completed between 1812 and 1813. Coulter's Brewery started brewing beer while the Collect Pond water was still drinkable, although Coulter still used the water after it got polluted. After landfill at the pond, Coulter stayed put and continued to brew beer until 1837, the year it was converted into a tenant house called the Old Brewery. Other industries that set up on the landfill were turpentine distilleries and glue factories. After 1820, the neighborhood sank into a slum. Figuratively and literally.

As the numbers of Irish and German immigrants surged, greed got the landlords, who split their wooden buildings into small windowless rooms in which to jam full of the unfortunate. The landfill was badly done, and when it rained, the grounds became saturated and streets and basements flooded. The damp structures decayed quickly and sank even faster into the old landfill. Without sewers in that old neighborhood, the waste water overflowed as well as basement and outdoor bathrooms. Contaminated water sickened the whole neighborhood, and between 1850 and 1860, 70% of kids under 2 died.

Poor Irish escaping the potato famine filled basement lodging rooms. All over these poor neighborhoods, they were hooked into becoming tenants as soon as they ventured off the boat. When settled, their rents were raised. When they couldn't pay, their luggage and possessions were confiscated and resold. Time after time, the desperate immigrants were tossed out onto the streets and replaced with the next batch off the boat.

The Irish and freed African Americans mixed in this area, America’s biggest melting pot, and the racial integration sometimes got volatile. Most Five Points buildings had businesses on the ground floor; mainly brothels, gambling houses, dancehalls, saloons or groggeries (grocery stores that sold cheap booze).

Down the middle of the deteriorated tenements in what would become Columbus Park were the narrow Bottle Alley, Ragpicker's Row, and Bandits Roost. At 39 Baxter were wooden tenements filled by Lansdowne immigrants. At one point in 1850, 15 Irish residents were found living in a 15-by-14-foot single-room apartment.

Edward Osterman (known as Monk Eastman) - Organized crime was influenced by Jewish Americans for over 30 years after the late 1890s. Edward Osterman (known as Monk Eastman) was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1873 and was one of the kings of NYC from the 1890s until 1904. Monk started off as a bouncer, but wound up hired killer. Other aliases Monk used were Joe Morris, Joe Marvin, Bill Delaney, and Eddie Delaney. Monk loved cats and pigeons (“I like de kits and boids”) but hated his rivals. the Five Pointers. Monk was short for Monkey because of his bullet-shaped head and mangled face, which grew uglier as a result of the amazing numbers of fights he got himself into. Monk had a broken nose, cauliflower ears, sagging jowls, no neck, and scars galore. The derby hat always worn on his messy hair was several sizes too small. The name “Monk” also came from his ability to climb walls and swing through windows.

The Eastman Gang’s many rackets in the Lower East Side included prostitution and gambling as well as strong-arm operations and voter mobilization for Tammany Hall. So many of his victims ended up in Bellevue's accident ward that ambulance drivers called it the Eastman Pavilion. The gang started out around Mangin and Goerck Streets in the notorious Corlear's Hook. The streetwalkers of Corlear's Hook are where the term “hookers” originated. When the Lower East Side became the home to so many Jewish immigrants, slum kids who would become the Eastman Gang turned into a predominantly Jewish gang. Monk Eastman also came from the Hook and was a member of the gang when it first started out, involved in petty thefts mainly.

By 1900, the gang started pimping on Allen Street where NYC's largest red light district was forming. At the turn of the century, most neighborhood brothels (or “disorderly houses”) were located between Allen and Chrystie Streets. The gang at that time was known as the Allen Street Cadets; “cadet” being slang for pimp. Often seen with loose women, the gang sold opium, ran gambling operations and (don’t forget the strong-arm work) as hired goons.

The Allen Street Cadets had their clubhouse at 64 Essex Street at the Silver Dollar Smith bar. Monk Eastman soon became the bouncer (or sheriff) and started working for Tammany Hall and other politicians running NYC. Monk was also sheriff for a bar called New Irving Hall. He carried a big club and added notches to it every time he bashed an unruly patron. According to folklore, Monk had 49 notches in the club. The gang Monk led soon was known as the Monk Eastman Gang, and then the Eastman Gang.

Monk's love of pigeons and cats led his father (a deli restaurateur) to help him open a pet shop on Broome Street, which also rented bicycles. Most of his gang members were well groomed men (called dandies) and liked to show off their wealth. Many members of the Eastman Gang rode bicycles and opened a club called the Squab Wheelman. Monk lived with his wife, Margaret, at 221 East 5th Street, just a few blocks away from Paul Kelly's New Brighton Social Club at 57 Great Jones Street.

The Eastman Gang fought for territory with the Five Points Gang, Red Onions and the Yakey Yakes. Notorious Eastman members Kid Twist and Richie Fitzpatrick both were recruited from the Five Pointers. The biggest battle between the Five Pointers and the Eastmans was on September 16th and 17th, 1903, a 4-1/2 hour battle that ended at Rivington Street under the Allen Street section of the Second Avenue elevated railroad. Tammany Hall grew tired of the two gangs, both often in their employ, feuding all the time and set up a two-hour boxing match in late 1903 between Paul Kelly and Monk Eastman. The match in a barn in the Bronx ended up a draw.

But the following year, Monk was sentenced to Sing Sing for 10 years after a February 3rd, 1904, botched mugging of a drunk (with a rich influential father), and shooting at a Pinkerton detective in Times Square. Monk spent five years in prison between 1904 to 1909. Tammany Hall tired of all the bad publicity stemming from Monk and refused to help him anymore.

When Monk went to prison, Eastman's lieutenants. Kid Twist and Richie Fitzpatrick took over parts of the gang, splitting the members between them and sparking a civil war. Kid Twist bottled his own celery tonic with his picture on it and forced all the bars to carry it.

On November 1st, 1904, Richie Fitzpatrick was shot and killed, and the rest of his former Eastman Gang members were eliminated by Kid Twist's lieutenant Vach Cyclone Louie Lewis. At 8 p.m., May 14th, 1908, Paul Kelly of the Five Points Gang arranged for Kid Twist’s (Max Zwerbach) death in Coney Island with the help of another Five Pointer, Louie the Lump Pioggi. Kid Twist’s Coney Island girlfriend was a dancehall girl named Carroll Terry.

Abe Lewis ran the Eastman Gang until 1910 when another Eastman lieutenant, Big Jack Zelig Lefkowitz took over and divided the gang again into three. One part was led by Johnny (Jack) Sirocco, owner of a Bowery gin mill heavily frequented by NYC gangsters. Sirocco wore a plaid cap pulled down over his eyes and rarely shaved. Another part of the Eastman Gang was run by Chick Tricker, who was also a Bowery saloonkeeper; at a dive called the Fleabag at 241 Bowery by Stanton Street. Zelig was killed October 5th, 1912, by Red Phil Davidson, and Sirocco and Tricker took over what was left of the Eastman Gang.

The Eastman Gang was part of the toughs that Tammany boss Big Tim Sullivan used on Election Day and for other events where violence might crop up. Kenmare Street was named for the Irish town Big Tim was born in. Other members of the 1,200-member Eastman Gang were Abe Reles, Chris Wallace, Dopey Benny Fein, Diamond Charley Torti, Lolly Meyers, Tommy Dyke, Crazy Butch, Julie Morrell, Kid Dahl, and Charles Ike the Blood Livin.

After prison, still shunned by his old gang, Monk made money selling opium and resorted to petty thievery. In 1917, at the start of WW1, 44-year-old Monk Eastman enlisted in the infantry, using the name William Delaney. His street fighting was the perfect training ground to become a professional war hero. His bravery and courage on the battlefield were skills honed as leader of the Eastman Gang. He served in France with O'Ryan's Roughnecks, the 106th Infantry Regiment of the 27th Infantry Division. Discharged in 1919, his U.S. citizenship was restored by Al Smith (Governor of New York).

Monk Eastman, leader of the Lower East Side gang the Eastmans, was shot to death on Christmas night, at 3:43 a.m., December 26th, 1920, at the SW corner of 14th Street and 4th Avenue in front of the subway station by the Bluebird Cafe at 62 East 14th Street. Monk was shot by Jerry Bohan, a Prohibition agent who was one of his partners in crime. His wartime pals paid for his military funeral and plot at the Cypress Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn.

John H. McGurk - McGurk's Suicide Hall was at 295 Bowery, between Houston and 1st Street. The elevated railroad pillar newest to this dive bar was referred to as the suicide post. Many of the patrons who came to McGurk's to kill themselves (13 attempts in 1899 alone, 6 successful) would lean against this railroad post while they swallowed poison or shot themselves. John H. McGurk, an Irish immigrant born in 1853, had a few previous bars on the Bowery. This was the last one, originally called McGurk's Saloon when it opened in 1895. This sailor dive bar featured singing waiters and a small band.

The bar first got its more unusual name in 1899 when two hookers named Blonde Madge and Big Mame tried to kill themselves by drinking carbolic acid in this four-story bar in a five-story tenement. The bar had a deep interior and a very large back room. Men could enter the barroom directly, but women had to use a long hallway. Madge succeeded in offing herself, but Mame ended up disfigured (bad news for someone who lives off her looks) and was barred from the bar. Tina Gordon also was a casualty at McGurk's, as well as others who may have dove out the window to their deaths. After all the suicides, bar workers were constantly on the lookout for customers with potential death wishes to quickly get them off McGurk's property. Still, the negative publicity brought in more customers than ever.

McGurk's bouncer was an ex-prizefighter named Thomas 'Eat Em Up' 'The Brute' Jack McManus. The neighborhood was a red light district and had one of the first electric signs in NYC. Its customers were sailors, thieves, gang members, drug addicts and prostitutes. The 5˘ glasses of whiskey were often mixed with liquid camphor, and waiters would rob customers using chloral hydrate (the ol’ Mickey Finn). McGurk's Suicide Hall’s secret passageways led out back to Horseshoe Alley, and the staff would use them during the many police raids by Inspector Cross. McGurk was often accused of promoting prostitution in his upstairs private rooms. Bar staff included Charles “Short Change Charley” Steele, John “Charles Moon” Sullivan, Bart O'Connor, Commodore Dutch, and Ray Walker on piano. NYC Mayor Seth Low closed McGurk's Suicide Hall in 1902. Some stories claim he retired to California with a half a million dollars. But he was actually killed with an iron bar to his skull after leaving a 14th Street bar called the Folly where Thomas 'Eat Em Up' 'The Brute' Jack McManus was working as the bouncer. McManus died after his skull was also bashed with an iron bar wielded by Sardinia Frank, the day after Eat Em Up shot Chick Tricker outside the New Brighton Dance Hall (owned by Paul Kelly from the 5 Point Gang) at 3rd Avenue and Great Jones Street.

Sailors Snug Harbor was a clip joint owned by John H. McGurk at 253 Bowery. Sailors frequented the bar, and it was frequently raided by police under Mayor Hewitt's administration. McGurk hired women to help the sailors spend their money, but McGurk always claimed that no sailors were ever robbed in this bar. When the bar was closed down, McGurk moved a bit further uptown on the Bowery and opened McGurk's Saloon, which became the infamous McGurk's Suicide Hall. Before Sailors Snug Harbor opened, John H. McGurk operated a dive bar called the Merrimac (starting in 1892) at 110 Third Avenue. McGurk claimed that this bar was the one dive of his that was never closed down by the police.

The Mug was in business in 1883 at 267 Bowery, between Stanton and Houston Streets. The Mug was the first of many dives owned by John McGurk, who employed waiters armed with knockout drops. Frequently raided by the police under Mayor Hewitt's administration for the many robbery complaints, it became Sammy's Bowery Follies, also called Sammy's on the Bowery, in the 1890s.

Tom & Jimmy Lee - The Dump was at 9 Bowery, just north of Division Street, from the 1890s until the turn of the century. Besides owners Jimmy Lee and Slim Reynolds, the head of the On Leong Tong, Tom Lee could have owned this criminal hangout for awhile. The Dive provided velvet rooms (sleeping quarters) for its patrons, and it was the hangout of George Washington “Chuck” Connors, the so-called mayor of Chinatown. Connors was a former bouncer who set up fake opium dens and then staged slumming party tours to witness Bowery's depravity. Connors would meet his tourists at the Bowery and Chatham Square. Connors, who coined the term “under the table,” had his tavern office around the corner from Professor O'Reilly's Tattoo Shop at Barney Flynn's Old Tree House on Bowery and Pell Street. The Dump was also a vaudeville stage where Irving Berlin sung during his early teenage days.

Tommy Dyke - The Fleabag, operated at 241 Bowery, by the SE corner of Stanton Street, from the late 1890s to just past the turn of the century. This gangster bar, owned by Chick Tricker from the Eastman Gang, later became the famous Sunshine Hotel. The manager of this Bowery dive bar was an Eastman Gang associate of Chick Tricker named Tommy Dyke, a political organizer who headed the Lenny & Dyke Association.

Piker Ryan - The Morgue, at 25 Bowery across the street from Pell Street, was Piker Ryan's Whyo's gang hangout. Irving Berlin sung here in his early days.

Coulters -Built in 1792, Coulters Brewery was one of the original NYC industries by the shores of the Collect Pond. Coulter's Brewery brewed beer until the 1830s and became the notorious tenement known as the Old Brewery when it closed during the Panic of 1837. The Panic caused a run on the banks, leaving 10,000 people homeless and starving. All these foreclosures made the rich (including John Jacob Astor) extremely wealthy, while starving mobs of homeless rioted around flour warehouses. The Five Points neighborhood grew around this old brewery that faced Paradise Square to its north.

The Old Brewery was the most densely occupied structure in NYC, housing about 1,200 Irish and African Americans in equal numbers. Painted yellow on the outside, the Old Brewery had a large room inside called the Den of Thieves, the largest of the 75 chambers filling its five stories. The upstairs of the Old Brewery was used by transients, mostly prostitutes, who hung out in the doorways competing for business with all the other door ornaments in the narrow hallways. The basement that once housed the machinery of the brewing plant was divided into 20 15-by-15-ft rooms. Officials found 26 people living in just one of these basement rooms. Rent in the tiny divided rooms of the Old Brewery cost from $2 to $10 per month. The building was torn down in 1852 and replaced by the Five Points Mission in 1853.

Historic reports that the Old Brewery had a murder a night for 15 years was fiction (in the mid-1850s, murders averaged only 30 a year all of NYC). The original Tombs prison (completed in 1838) was placed next to Five Points to regulate and frighten the criminals, prostitutes and uneducated residents of that foul neighborhood. The worst prisoners were kept on the damp lower floors of this Egyptian styled prison, while those arrested for smaller crimes got the dryer upper floors. The women's prison was located in an outer building enclosing the courtyard where the gallows were located.

Five Points - Since 1911, when NYC wanted to erase bad memories of Five Points, the land between the Baxter and Mulberry bends has been called Columbus Park. When the tenements on the site were demolished in 1897, it was first named Five Points Park, and also referred to as Mulberry Bend Park and Paradise Park.

Five Points was built over the Collect Pond landfill, completed between 1812 and 1813. Coulter's Brewery started brewing beer while the Collect Pond water was still drinkable, although Coulter still used the water after it got polluted. After landfill at the pond, Coulter stayed put and continued to brew beer until 1837, the year it was converted into a tenant house called the Old Brewery. Other industries that set up on the landfill were turpentine distilleries and glue factories. After 1820, the neighborhood sank into a slum. Figuratively and literally.

As the numbers of Irish and German immigrants surged, greed got the landlords, who split their wooden buildings into small windowless rooms in which to jam full of the unfortunate. The landfill was badly done, and when it rained, the grounds became saturated and streets and basements flooded. The damp structures decayed quickly and sank even faster into the old landfill. Without sewers in that old neighborhood, the waste water overflowed as well as basement and outdoor bathrooms. Contaminated water sickened the whole neighborhood, and between 1850 and 1860, 70% of kids under 2 died.

Poor Irish escaping the potato famine filled basement lodging rooms. All over these poor neighborhoods, they were hooked into becoming tenants as soon as they ventured off the boat. When settled, their rents were raised. When they couldn't pay, their luggage and possessions were confiscated and resold. Time after time, the desperate immigrants were tossed out onto the streets and replaced with the next batch off the boat.

The Irish and freed African Americans mixed in this area, America’s biggest melting pot, and the racial integration sometimes got volatile. Most Five Points buildings had businesses on the ground floor; mainly brothels, gambling houses, dancehalls, saloons or groggeries (grocery stores that sold cheap booze).

Down the middle of the deteriorated tenements in what would become Columbus Park were the narrow Bottle Alley, Ragpicker's Row, and Bandits Roost. At 39 Baxter were wooden tenements filled by Lansdowne immigrants. At one point in 1850, 15 Irish residents were found living in a 15-by-14-foot single-room apartment.

At the dead end of the northern side of Little Water Street by the Collect Pond landfill was the very lowest and worst place in New York, the infamous Cow Bay cul de sac. Little Water Street ran from the base of Paradise Square at Cross Street and Anthony Street (now Worth Street) to a dead end by the Collect Pond. The cul de sac was 30 feet wide at its mouth and ran about 100 feet into a dark alley next to one of the bays of the former Collect Pond where farmers once watered their cows.

Aside from the Old Brewery, Cow Bay became the most scandalous place in Five Points, thanks to the notoriety of a few interracial couples as well as the criminals, hookers and addicts who huddled there.

The most notorious tenements in Cow Bay were Jacob's Ladder, Gates of Hell, and Brickbat Mansion. Jacob's Ladder was named for its dangerous outside staircase, a rickety wooden structure that was the only way to get into this clapboard tenement, except maybe through underground passageways. The other hideous five-story tenements in Cow Bay had little furniture, and most people lived in dirt, rags and vermin.

After slavery ended in NYC on July 4th, 1827, thousands of African Americans moved into Cow Bay and Five Points for the cheap rents. This wreck of a neighborhood was taken over by Irish and Italians as the blacks moved to NYC's west side and its undeveloped north. By 1850, when the Irish came pouring into Five Points, census takers counted only 120 black men in Cow Bay, and by 1855, only 35 African Americans were left in Cow Bay.

The Five Points House of Industry superintendent would lead “depravity tours” to show how much the neighborhood needed his help. He took visitors into the worst places in the points he could find. Singling out interracial couples as one of his favorite horror stories, he also liked highlighting gays and their demonstrable lack of shame during his misery tours. He portrayed these slumming tours as the huddling of the swine amid the intolerable stench of the cesspools, with play-by-play descriptions of alcohol-fueled and drug-induced fights that often ended in death.

Historic legends claiming that Five Points had a murder a night for 15 years, however, were complete fallacies. Five Points was called the worst slum in America, but it may not have been as violent as history makes it out to be. In the mid 1850s, only 30 murders a year were reported in all of NYC. Most months in the entire city during the Five Points era had only one reported murder a month. Many inaccurate history books reported a murder a day in the five-story Old Brewery alone and that police were too afraid to cross its boundaries.

Describing the steaming filth that was inches deep in dark and dangerous stairways, temperance leaders recommended exploring Cow Bay with a handkerchief saturated in camphor to endure the horrid smells. Windowless rooms, less than 10 by 10 feet, housed five or six people. An inspection in 1857 found 23 families and their lodgers living in only 15 small rooms; 179 people! Many residents opened up their apartments as boarding homes, squeezing in tenants for a few cents a night.

The Five Points House of Industry got its way in the 1860s. The hovels of Cow Bay were condemned and demolished, conveniently enabling the House to expand their building into the former squalor of the Cow Bay site. After Cow Bay was eradicated, gawkers and do-gooders’ attention shifted to the nearby alleys of Mulberry Bend, which photographer Jacob Riis would make infamous in the 1890s.

Riis. a police reporter in the late 1880s, started shooting pictures around the dark Five Points area with his new flash powder, exposing to the world of its horrible conditions. His photo essay, “How the Other Half Lives,” was published in 1890.

Around 1850, in a bid to reverse Five Points’ negative image, Anthony Street was renamed changed Worth Street after Mexican War hero General William Worth, and Orange was renamed Baxter after Mexican War hero Lt. Col. Charles Baxter.

Five Points was famous for launching tap dancing and sprouting the seeds of organized crime. The notorious neighborhood was America's first melting pot. Emancipated African Americans mixed with Irish, Anglo, Jewish and Italian citizens of NYC. Tap dancing began in 5 Points from the mix of African dances, Irish jig, and clog dancing. In 1844, Black Master Juba out-danced White Master Diamond in a famous tap dance contest.

Five Points was set in a triangle bounded by Canal, Centre, Pearl, and Chatham (now Park Row) Streets with the Bowery. Within this neighborhood, Orange (Baxter), Cross (Mosco), Anthony (Worth), and Little Water Streets (no longer exists) created an intersection that had 5 points. Around 1850, to alter 5 Points’ negative image, Anthony Street was changed to Worth (named after Mexican War hero General William Worth), and Orange was renamed Baxter (after Mexican War hero Lt. Col. Charles Baxter).

Rosanna Peers ran a cheap green-grocery speakeasy in 1825 on Centre Street, just south of Anthony (Worth) Street. The backroom was headquarters of two Irish gangs, the Forty Thieves gang led by Edward Coleman, and the Kerryonians, who were mostly natives of County Kerry, Ireland. In time, other 5 Point gangs prospered: the Whyos, the Shirt Tails (who never tucked in their shirts to easily hide their weapons), the Chichesters (mostly absorbed by the Whyos), and the Roach Guards (who have been called the Black Birds and more famously the Dead Rabbits). The Plug Uglies were often linked with 5 Points, but they operated in Baltimore, not NYC.

Many of the shanties in 5 Points were on top of half door houses (so named because of their half-sized doors). The first floors of the half door houses were below street level and full of hookers, thieves and killers until the Board of Health banned human habitation in basements. Five Points, called the worst slum in America, may not have been as violent as history made it out to be. In the mid-1850s, only 30 murders a year were reported in the whole of NYC. During most months in all of NYC in the 5 Point era, only one murder a month was reported. Many inaccurate history books reported that there was a murder a day at the five-story Old Brewery alone, and the police were too afraid to cross the boundaries of 5 Points.

Henry Petty, the third marquis of Lansdowne, was an English nobleman who financed a massive Irish emigration program. By 1851, Petty was responsible for taking 3,500 starving paupers out of the Kenmare poorhouses in Ireland and shipping them to NYC and Quebec. Petty spent Ł9,500 (slightly more than $1 million) on emigration because it was cheaper than supporting them in the Lansdowne estate for a single year. Two hundred people a week made the 60-mile journey to Cork, where they caught emigrant ships. Lansdowne sent entire families, so instead of vigorous young men, half of the Irish immigrants were women, and many were gray-haired and aged. In 1855, out of 14,000 residents of 5 Points, two thirds of them were Irish, mostly from Sligo, Cork, and Kerry. Eight-four percent of the Irish from Kerry lived on Orange Street (Baxter) from Anthony (Worth) to Leonard and Anthony Street from Centre to Orange. Seventy-nine percent of these Kerry natives were immigrants from the Lansdowne estate.

In the late 1880s, a police reporter named Jacob Riis started shooting pictures around the dark 5 Points area with his new flash powder. His photo essay to make the world more aware of its horrible conditions was published in 1890 as "How the Other Half Lives." Broadway was full of elegance in the daytime, but at night it was the stomping ground of criminals and prostitutes.

The 5 Points district was a famous red light district in the 19th century. The first red light street in NYC was Marketveldt Street across from NYC's first fort (Fort Amsterdam); it was once called Pettycoat Lane. Corlears Hook was such a notorious area for prostitutes that the term hookers was coined there. Gramercy Park had fancy bordellos in the late 1860s. The area west of St. Paul’s Church was called the Holy Ground, and it was a huge red light district in NYC. Between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, the Rockefeller Center area between 48th and 51st Streets was a red light district once owned by Columbia University. The Times Square area was full of silk hat brothels in 1900 and still had a red light district in the 1960s and 1970s.

City Magazine or Powder House - The town’s gunpowder was originally kept in the fort behind Bowling Green. Before 1728, the magazine was sandwiched between the canal on Broad Street and the East River. The safest place to keep such dangerous powder was near plenty of water. After 1728, the town’s gunpowder was kept secure in the City Magazine or Powder House between the Collect Pond and the Little Collect Pond. The Negro slaves executed after the Negro Revolt of 1741 were hanged at the southeast corner of this powderhouse.

Corporation Yard - Leonard Street between Centre, Elm, and Franklin was the Corporation Yard that held Engine #8 (1824-1831), Engine #16 (1832-1841), Engine #17, Hose #1, and the Supply Engine. This was land filled in over the deepest part of the Collect Pond, and in 1838, was used to construct the City Prison (known as the Tombs). The first Tombs sunk and had to be demolished.

The Bowery - In 1878, elevated railroads were erected above the sidewalks on both sides of the Bowery. The horse-car lines running down the street meant the elevated tracks could not go up over the street. As a result, the steam trains sped by within a few feet of tenement windows. The dark shadows over both sidewalks started the decades-long decline of the Bowery, transforming from the street that never slept into a barren wasteland. Thieves, conmen, streetwalkers, and other criminals were allowed to lurk in the shadows under the elevated trains, sending the reputation of the Bowery spiraling downward. The theaters lost their customers and became brothels, dive bars, flophouses, boardinghouses, pawn shops, day-labor agencies, and penny arcades.

Crime, vice and depravity soon found a new strip to gather around in NYC. Cabs with rubber-necking tourists cruised up and down the Bowery to see the skid row depravity, much like visitors on wild safari. Every night people daring enough to wander down to the Bowery were sandbagged and robbed. The adventurers who used to go slumming on the Bowery moved uptown to the Tenderloin where they found NYC's newer shady sights. In 1955, the elevated railroad was torn down, giving light to the Bowery sidewalks once again.

Dog and Duck Tavern was a eight-room, early 18th century tavern with a large garden on Bowery at the two-mile stone by Rivington Street. Its rural name reflected the old days of the Bowery as a country lane. NYC in the 18th century had about 400 people living around the Bowery Village. By the mid-18th century, NYC population totaled almost 10,000. By 1790, NYC reached 33,000 people, and ten years later that number would double. Other rural taverns on the Bowery were the Black Horse Inn (52-54 Bowery), and Ye Sign of Ye King of Prussia, which was further up the Bowery.

Columbia Hall, better known as Paresis Hall, was on the Bowery at 5th Street in the 1890s. It was NYC's principal resort for male prostitutes and degenerates. That section of the Bowery was a red light district. Right across the Street was Little Bucks and down further south on the Bowery was another degenerate resort called the Jumbo.

Bouwerie Lane Theatre at 330 Bowery was built in 1874, and it was originally the Atlantic Savings Bank. It became a theatre in 1963. The Bowery’s rebirth began when two savings banks and two national banks were built. A cast iron bank was built in 1873, which turned into the Bouwerie Lane Theater at the corner of Bond Street. The Bowery Savings Bank was built in 1894 by McKim Mead & White at 130 Bowery. The Germania Bank was also built on the NW corner of Bowery and Spring Street. Skid row Bowery began big changes when many of the lodging houses were transformed into rescue missions.

Shearith Israel's 2nd Cemetery -This NYC landmark is the oldest remaining historical site in all of NYC. This, the first known Jewish cemetery in the city, was created by 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who arrived in NYC in 1654 from Recife in northeast Brazil, and they’re all buried at this site near Chatham Square. NYC Jews were part of the Shearith Israel congregation from 1654 until 1825.

In 1682 or 1683, the second Jewish Cemetery of the Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel) was created. Only 50 gravestones remain off Chatham Square in what was once a much larger plot. The first Jewish Cemetery in NYC was on a little hook of land outside the old Wall Street city limits. Peter Stuyvesant granted the site of the first burial grounds (where Asser Levy was buried) on February 22nd, 1656. Its location still remains unknown to history (but it was probably just north of Trinity Church), leading to the second graveyard at 55-57 St. James Place to be known as the first in most history sources.

The graveyard's oldest tombstone is Benjamin Bueno de Mezquita, who was buried there in 1683. The most famous was the patriot Rabbi Gershom Mendez Seixas. Burial in the famous Jewish cemetery halted in 1831. In 1776, General Charles Lee tried to stop the British with cannons placed in these ancient resting grounds. General Charles Lee was an Irish British soldier who ended up as the second in command of the Continental forces. On the outskirts of the old city, beyond the Jewish cemetery, were the British prisons whose workers dumped cartloads of dead bodies in trenches off Chatham Square during the 1776-1783 occupation.

Part of the third cemetery (1805-1829) can still be seen on the south side of West 11th Street just east of 6th Avenue. Until 1852, a fourth Jewish cemetery was used at 98-110 West 21st Street for new burials and plots displaced when West 11th Street was cut through the third cemetery in 1830.

Congregation Shearith Israel was located at 18 South William Street, which was then called Mill Street. John Street was named after shoemaker John Heperding, who in 1728 and 1729 rented out his home to the Jews of the Congregation Shearith Israel. Heperding also sold to these early NYC Jews the land at 18 South William Street for their first real NYC synagogue, which was built in 1730, and replaced in 1818 by a larger synagogue. In 1835 the congregation moved to Crosby Street, where Walt Whitman visited a few times. In 1860, the Congregation Shearith Israel moved to West 19th Street, near Fifth Avenue, before finding its present home at 70th Street and Central Park West.

The Farmers Inn was at 30 Bowery in 1825, between Pell and Bayard Streets. The Farmers Inn was near the New England Hotel that burnt down in 1826. This site on the NW corner of Bowery and Bayard became the North American Hotel / Moss Hotel, where 37 year old songwriter Stephen Foster had a fatal accident. He hit his head on a sink during a persistent fever or another drunken tizzy, and a few days after writing his most well known song “Beautiful Dreamer.” He died on January 13, 1864 at Bellevue Hospital broke (38 cents in his leather wallet along with a scrap of paper that simply said "Dear friends and gentle hearts").

a junkman - In 1882, Ragpickers Row was on the west side of Mulberry Street, just around the corner from Bayard. Mulberry Street was set in a hollow below the higher elevated Mott Street. A junkman's cellar was located at a front house on Mulberry where his rag-picking cliental would gather bales for sale to the paper mills. This rag depot once stood by a narrow courtyard that separated the front and rear tenement houses that stretched back three deep. The rag-pickers settlement in the courtyard lived in sheds built from all sorts of old boards, which were also used as drying racks for the rags they collected.

Earlier, another Ragpickers Row ran along the old East 4th Street between Avenues A and B, around 1869.

Rosanna Peers - Rosanna Peers ran a cheap green-grocery speakeasy in 1825 on Centre Street, just south of Anthony (Worth). The backroom was headquarters of two Irish gangs, the Forty Thieves led by Edward Coleman, and the Kerryonians, who were mostly natives of County Kerry, Ireland.

At the bend in Columbus Park was once Mulberry Bend's Bottle Alley, the Whyó Gang’s headquarters. Also nearby Columbus Park in 1882 was Ragpickers Row, on Mulberry as well just off Bayard. Before 1911, Columbus Park was called Mulberry Bend Park, Five Points Park, and Paradise Park, which was completed in 1897. Factoid: The average Irish gang member weighed about 130 pounds and was 5 foot 3 inches tall.

Adriaen BlockA country retreat for picnics, fishing, swimming, boating and ice skating for NYC's earliest settlers, the Collect Pond evolved into a polluted garbage dump that also ended up as NYC's most notorious slum, Five Points. The name Collect Pond derived from the Dutch “Kolch” (pronounced colicked), which means small body of water. Deep mica schist bedrock trapped the tidal waters that created Collect Pond. The northern heights of NYC have bedrock at almost ground level, while at Washington Square Park this bedrock dropped a hundred feet. On the south side of Chambers Street, the bedrock rises again to about a hundred feet under the ground and rises to the top again by the end of Manhattan. Before lower hilly NYC was leveled, glacial boulders once covered the many gravel drift hills around what was to become the Collect Pond.

In 1613, explorer Adriaen Block got shipwrecked in NYC, and his boat supposedly caught fire as it sat right off a bay by the Hudson River, either near the future World Trade Center site or Battery Park. Most historians insist that the Tiger burned just the area of the Trade Towers, and that Block’s shipmates built huts by 39-41 Broadway, but I disagree. A bigger and more navigable bay where he probably docked the boat that caught fire was off the quieter East River by a stream that flowed from the Collect Pond. This old boat could be the source of the water’s name, the Old Wreck Brook. A large bay off the East River, between Dover and James Streets, it existed before NYC widened its coast with landfill. Reports had Block's boat catching fire when it was anchored in a large bay. This bay by the eastern outlet of the Collect Pond was the largest downtown bay, and close to the Collect Fresh Water pond, which would have been the perfect place to survive.

Block stayed the winter in NYC in 1613 and 1614, but he wasn’t the first non-native to live in NYC. In 1612, a black Hispanic merchant (written out of history books) named Juan (Jan) Rodriguese (or Jan Rodriguez) was the first new New Yorker. Born in Santo Domingo, he stayed with the Indians for a year without the support of a ship in the harbor. Sadly, NYC has no plaque, statue or any real recognition of Jan Rodriguez. My insight blames NYC's racist attitude for this oversight of New York City's first real immigrant citizen.

After 1664, a free black community was allowed to settle around the Collect Pond as a northern buffer between downtown settlers and American Indians to the north. Once the town’s slaughterhouses set up shop at this freshwater source, the Collect Ponds started its downward turn. The town’s slaughterhouses moved to the Collect Ponds’ eastern shore next to a tannery associated with the Bayard family, and the combination of these two industries began the pollution of the fresh waters. Joining in were George and Jacob Shaw Tanners in 1785, whose operations were just east of the Collect Pond, off Magazine Street (Pearl Street). Other polluters followed: a gunpowder factory, potters, glue factory, turpentine distillery, brewery (Coulter's), and even a rope walk. The African American cemetery soon crossed the southern perimeter of the Little Collect Pond (south of the Collect Pond, separated by an island).

John Fitch - Before it was filled in, the Collect Pond was the site for a test run of the world’s first working steamboat. And it was built by John Fitch, not Robert Fulton. Fitch was the original inventor of the screw propeller and its combination with paddle wheels for propelling steamboats. Between 1785 and 1796, Fitch built four different steamboats designed to carry both passengers and freight. In 1785, he ran an experimental steamboat in Philadelphia. The model boat ran from Market Street up the Schuylkill river at 7 or 8 miles per hour) to Gray's Ferry (Robert Fulton and R.R. Livingston were on board). In 1787, he sketched in pencil and ink an amazing jet-powered steamboat. On August 22, 1787, his 45-foot steamboat took its trial run on the Delaware River, a larger ship soon carried passengers with freight.

Fitch, who was born January 21st, 1743, in Windsor, Connecticut and raised by his poor dad (his mother died when he was only four years old), successfully received a patent for the application of steam to navigation in 1788; Fulton (a thief?) got his patent 17 years later. By the summer of 1790, Fitch ran a successful passenger line between Philadelphia and Trenton with his steamboat. In 1793 and again in 1796, Fitch tested his steamboat on the Collect Pond using a 12-gallon pot as the boiler. In 1798, Fitch came back again to the Collect Pond to show off his steamed transportation invention. In the Spring of 1798, Fitch went to Bardstown, Kentucky, to build a 3-foot model steamboat and test it on a local stream. Concentrating on Fulton, history forgot about manic-depressive Fitch, who committed suicide in a tavern by poisoning himself with opium pills on July 2nd,1798. Fitch died penniless and was buried in Bardstown in an unmarked grave under a footpath in the central square. The Daughters of the American Revolution in 1910, placed a veteran of the American Revolutionary War marker over the spot.

Pierre L'Enfant - Pierre L'Enfant, who designed the second City Hall, conceived a plan to turn Collect Pond into a park, which would have cleaned it and created a forested barrier to the country hamlet of Greenwich (Village). If L'Enfant’s plan had happened, NYC might have been spared from the mosquitoes that eventually brought yellow fever. The town’s polluting but powerful industries killed the park idea to preserve their profits. Factoid: In 1791, Pierre L'Enfant started to design Washington D.C, but he was fired by George Washington (who only paid him $3800), replaced by Andrew Ellicott, and died broke (with about $46 worth of possessions) on June 14, 1825. Washington's only paved square, L’Enfant Plaza (also a Metro subway stop) was named after Pierre L'Enfant, the true creator of Washington D.C (before Andrew Ellicott's 1792 revision).

In 1802, NYC started to backfill the polluted pond with construction debris and more of the town’s garbage. This pigheaded idea merely flooded the marshy neighborhood worse than before. Dampness was equated with death and disease, and as yellow fever spread, this excess water became a kind of killing machine. In 1807, a plan to drain the pond was drafted, using an open 40-foot wide ditch to force the polluted water downhill into the Hudson. A few years after the depression of 1808, the Collect Pond was drained as a public works project in 1811. This smelly ditch on what would become Canal Street remained empty for 20 years after the pond was drained. In 1821, the canal was finally converted into an underground sewer and covered.

NYC's oldest church, oldest original standing structure, the city's only remaining colonial church and its oldest public building in continuous use - St Paul's Church is all of these. Beside a brownstone tower, the architect Thomas McBean constructed the Georgian-styled church using local Manhattan schist and brownstone quoins. The woodwork, carvings, and door hinges are all handmade. Fourteen 1802 cut-glass chandeliers that originally held candles still hang in St Paul's Church, and it still has its original 1804 organ case as well.

The French architect Pierre L'Enfant (who planned Washington, D.C., and tried to plan a NYC park around the Collect Pond) designed its interior. Over the altar of St Paul's Church is L'Enfant’s "Glory," with carved images depicting clouds and lightning over Mt. Sinai. It also has a triangle with the Hebrew word for "God" and illustrations of the two tablets of Ten Commandments. On the church exterior, L'Enfant carved iconography showing the birth of a new nation, depicting an eagle pulling back the night to expose 13 rays of the rising sun.

St Paul's Church was built between 1764 and 1766 at 209 Broadway, six blocks north of Trinity Church as a branch of Trinity Church. Its steeple and tower were started December 1st, 1794, and finished by 1796. Besides calling people to church, St Paul's bells were rung to warn citizens of fire or invasion. St Paul's Church was fiercely loyal to the British Crown, even during the American Revolution. Thanks to a miracle and lots of citizens with water buckets, the church was spared during the 1776 fire.

During the two years that NYC was America's capital, George Washington attended services at St. Paul's while Trinity Church was rebuilt. After his inauguration April 30th, 1789, Washington went to St. Paul’s Chapel for a special service. His pew is still on display on the north aisle with a painting of the Great Seal of the United States hanging above it). First New York State Governor George Clinton's pew is in the aisle on the south side with the Arms of the State of New York above it. Many old 18th century tombstones can be seen on the front and side of St Paul's, which fronts the Church Street side and not Broadway.

The area west of St. Paul’s Church was called the Holy Ground and a huge red light district in NYC. The city's first red light area was around the Fort (of course). Heavily walked by girls of the streets was Marketveldt Street, which was once was called Pettycoat Lane for its action. The notorious streetwalkers of Corlear's Hook at the eastern end of Grand Street were the gals that were first called hookers.

When the World Trade Center came down September 11, 2001, a tree in the churchyard shielded the blast and saved St. Paul's Church.

Bayards Mount -- the British called it Bunker Hill -- was leveled just as all the other hills surrounding the Collect Pond and helped fill in the Collect Pond and the swamps at Lispenard's Meadows. Broadway at Anthony Street (now Worth) was reduced about 25 feet to today’s level. Collect Pond was all gone by 1813, but was still a bog when the middle class started moving into the sinking and stinking neighborhood built as Paradise Square. They quickly moved out, and the poor inherited this landfill that soon became Five Points, “where,” according to Charles Dickens, "poverty, crime and destitution were a way of life." Freed slaves first took over the abandoned Paradise Square, and then in the 1830s it became a red light district. When the potato famine of 1845 sent Irish and Germans to NYC seeking cheap accommodations, it made Five Points and the bloody Sixth Ward the most densely populated neighborhood in NYC.

Just south of Paradise Square was the five-story Old Brewery (opened in 1837), formerly the Coulters Brewery. The Coulters Brewery was built in 1792 and brewed beer by the shores of the Collect Pond until the 1830s. It was replaced by a giant boardinghouse full of the poorest and most desperate characters in NYC. Collect Street became Rynders Street and today it’s Centre Street.

The rotting tenant homes were replaced by brick buildings that were the first so-called tenements. Entertainment for the residents ranged from minstrel shows to bare-knuckle prize fights, cockfights, dog fights, and rat vs terrier fights at the “rat pits,” popular at the Sportsmen's Hall by the waterfront. For the tamer entertainment in Five Points, some of the various immigrant settlers combined the Irish jig with the black shuffle to create tap dancing. Dickens Place was opened up by black saloonkeeper Pete Williams and became the most famous dance hall in Five Points.

The red light influence made the Five Points neighborhood notorious early on, and when the buildings started to tilt into the poorly filled land, it decrepit image was sealed. Five Points was at its worst between 1830 and 1840. In the 1850s Protestant groups started to clean up the slum, and by the 1860s, it was mostly calm. The Italian and Chinese succeeded the Irish in the 1870s-‘80s. Mulberry Bend was torn down in 1897 and replaced by Five Points Park, which is still standing as Columbus Park.

Murderers Alley A dark lane that ran south from the dirty green door of 14 Baxter (then called Orange) Street, past the east wall of the five-story Old Brewery, down to Pearl Street. Murderer's Row was the nickname given to the Yankees during the Babe Ruth years.

Baxter Street was named after Lt.-Col. Charles Baxter, who commanded Company B of the New York Regiment at Chapultepec during the Mexican-American War. At just past 8 a.m. August 13th, 1847, Baxter was killed leading the charge by the 15-foot wall around the base of the hill.

Coulters Brewery -Built in 1792, Coulters Brewery was one of the original NYC industries by the shores of the Collect Pond. Coulter's Brewery brewed beer until the 1830s and became the notorious tenement known as the Old Brewery when it closed during the Panic of 1837. The Panic caused a run on the banks, leaving 10,000 people homeless and starving. All these foreclosures made the rich (including John Jacob Astor) extremely wealthy, while starving mobs of homeless rioted around flour warehouses. The Five Points neighborhood grew around this old brewery that faced Paradise Square to its north.

The Old Brewery was the most densely occupied structure in NYC, housing about 1,200 Irish and African Americans in equal numbers. Painted yellow on the outside, the Old Brewery had a large room inside called the Den of Thieves, the largest of the 75 chambers filling its five stories. The upstairs of the Old Brewery was used by transients, mostly prostitutes, who hung out in the doorways competing for business with all the other door ornaments in the narrow hallways. The basement that once housed the machinery of the brewing plant was divided into 20 15-by-15-ft rooms. Officials found 26 people living in just one of these basement rooms. Rent in the tiny divided rooms of the Old Brewery cost from $2 to $10 per month. The building was torn down in 1852 and replaced by the Five Points Mission in 1853.

Historic reports that the Old Brewery had a murder a night for 15 years was fiction (in the mid-1850s, murders averaged only 30 a year all of NYC). The original Tombs prison (completed in 1838) was placed next to Five Points to regulate and frighten the criminals, prostitutes and uneducated residents of that foul neighborhood. The worst prisoners were kept on the damp lower floors of this Egyptian styled prison, while those arrested for smaller crimes got the dryer upper floors. The women's prison was located in an outer building enclosing the courtyard where the gallows were located.

The First African American Burial Ground - The first African American Burial Ground (originally referred to the Negroes' Burial Place) was largely forgotten in the history books and old maps until 1991. This seven-acre, low-lying site was used as a cemetery for slaves from 1640 until 1790, and the grounds still hold an estimated 20,000 bodies. Less than 420 of them (almost half children) are preserved at Howard University after the Federal Office Building (first called Foley Square Project federal building, now called the Ted Weiss Federal Building) at 290 Broadway (between Duane and Reade Streets) uncovered this part of NYC that was almost written out of history. It’s shocking that even though there were still enough historical references to the burial grounds, the builders could were unaware of the facts. Even though the old Negroes' Burial Grounds were covered up by 25 feet of fill (NYC first landfill project), it’s very likely that remains were first discovered under A.T. Stewart's Marble Palace when it was constructed in 1846, and possibly under the federal building next to 290 Broadway between Worth and Duane Streets.

Blacks were buried alongside whites during the Dutch era, but after the British took over NYC in 1664, things changed. In a resolution described in the vestry minutes of October 25th, 1697, Trinity Church introduced formal policies restricting burials of Negroes that took effect four weeks later. Seventy years later in 1767, Trinity's vestry designated a burial ground for Negroes on a piece of the church farm until August 19th, 1795. The site on Anthony Rutgers' land was bounded by Church, Reade, and Chapel (the former name for West Broadway between Warren and Canal) Streets. This forgotten lot is parallel to the current African Burial Ground, just a few blocks west.

The first recorded burials in the current African Burial Ground graveyard were as early as 1640 when the first African farms were established, but the 21 Africans executed after the April 6th, 1712, slave revolt got the historic recognition as being first. Records show a 1722 law prohibiting night funerals of slaves south of the Collect Pond. In March, 1741, thefts and suspicious fires led to a famous trial near the Great Negro Plot where 13 Negroes were sentenced to be burned at the stake and 17 hanged, and these famous bodies were also buried in the Negroes' Burial Ground. The 1755, the Maerschalck Plan map marked the site of the burial grounds. Burials at the Negroes’ Burial Ground ended in 1790, and the subdivision of the land for real estate interests over it began in 1795.

The site is America’s oldest African American cemetery, and NYC's only subterranean landmark that can't be seen. The northern part of the City Hall Park was used as a potter's field for the poor who died in the old Almshouse, as well as a mass burial site for American prisoners abused by the British. The burial grounds lie mostly east of Broadway and south of Duane Street to Vesey Street.

The African Burial Ground Interpretive Center is located on the 34th floor of the Federal Building at 290 Broadway. It features “Unearthed,” a finished bronze with patina sculpture by Frank Bender; “America Song,” a concrete, granite, stainless steel, and fiber optics sculpture by Clyde Lynds; “The New Ring Shout,” a terrazzo and polished brass multilayered work by Houston Cronwill, based on the historical ring shout dance of celebration performed throughout North America and the Caribbean; “Africa Rising,” a bronze sculpture with wool and silk fibers by Barbara Chase-Riboud, dealing with the transport of Africans to America, and their bondage and struggle for freedom; “Renewal,” a silkscreen on canvas mural by Tomie Arai commemorating the African Burial Ground site; and an untitled painting transformed to glass mosaics by Roger Brown.

On the outside part of the historic site is a 25-foot granite monument, titled the Door of Return. The monument includes a map of the Atlantic and was created by Haitian-American architects Rodney Leon and Nicole Hollant-Denis, who based the name on the Door of No Return. That’s what they called the slave ports on the West Africa coast where so many slaves were transported.

The one-block remainder of Elk Street has been officially renamed African Burial Ground Way. On April 19th, 1993, the African American Burial Ground site was designated the 123rd National Historic Landmark.

The second African American burial ground is hardly mentioned in articles about the first burial ground located by City Hall. The second one existed from 1795 to 1843 in the area of the B and D subway train route near what used to be the Grand Street shuttle from West 4th Street. The old site lies under the M'Finda Kalunga Garden in the Sara Roosevelt Park between Stanton, Rivington, Chrystie and Forsyth Streets. In 1827, the Protestant Episcopal St. Philip’s Church (now in Harlem) obtained ownership of this second graveyard at 195/197 Chrystie Street and supposedly disinterred and re-buried most of the remains in the St. Philip's plot in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn.

New York Institution - In 1812, Almshouse functions moved uptown to what would become Bellevue, at 26th and 1st Avenue. Until it was torn down in 1857, the vacated Almshouse building was the New York Institution, housing such other institutions as the NY Historical Society, Lyceum of Natural History, American Institute, City Library, Academy of Arts, Academy of Painting, the Deaf & Dumb Institute, and John Scudder's American Museum. Scudder's Museum occupied the top floor of the western side of the New York Institution between 1816 and 1824.

In a northeast basement room of the old vacated Almshouse, The Bank for Savings in the City of New York operated as the first savings bank established in the State of New York. A meeting on March 26, 1819, launched the Bank for Savings, which opened Saturday evening at 6 p.m. July 3rd 1819, at the New York Institution. Two years later the Chambers Street Bank moved across the street to 41 Chambers, where they installed Gayler's great iron chest, which at the time was the biggest safe (10 feet high, 21 feet wide) in the U.S. The Chambers Street Savings Bank moved west to another part of Chambers Street in 1843 (on the site of the first Unitarian Church) before moving to 67 Bleecker Street in 1856.

Rhinelander Sugar House Memorial - Behind the Municipal Building subway arcade is a prison window monument fashioned from the one window and surrounding original bricks left from the old Rhinelander Sugar House that stood until 1896. The 1893 Rhinelander Building survived as a loft building until it was torn down in 1968 because it was in the way of the $58 million police headquarters building at One Police Plaza.

Sugar houses made good strong prisons because of their thick stone structure with small windows and low ceilings. The British used three NYC sugar houses as Revolutionary War prisons: Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House, Livingston Sugar House, and Rhinelander Sugar House.

The Rhinelander Sugar House held captive 600 prisoners inside walls that once stored Caribbean sugar. All the window panes were shattered and replaced with iron grating. No blankets were given to the prisoners, and no fires were allowed even for warmth in winter. In the summer, captive prisoners lined the windows waiting for a gasp of fresh air. With no chairs or beds, the prisoners were forced to sit and sleep on vermin-filled beds of straw.

Owned by William Rhinelander, Rhinelander Sugar House was built at the southwest corner of Rose and Duane Streets between 1763 and 1765, more than a decade before the war started. Rose Street was an extension of William Street. The Rhinelander brothers, William and Frederick, were two of America’s earliest shipbuilders. The Rhinelander mansion on William Street near Rose Street was built in 1770, and family remained in the mansion until 1830.

Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House operated on the NW corner of Trinity's churchyard by Thames Street until 1852. Built in 1756, the five-story Livingston Sugar House on Liberty Street stood until 1840.

The Morris-Jumel Mansion and the Dyckman Farmhouse were also used as prisons during the British occupation as well as dissenting churches, Columbia College, the hospital, and many deadly prison boats. The North Dutch Church on William Street and the Middle Dutch Church each held 800 American patriots. The Friends Meeting House was also used. For seven years NYC was used as a prison camp by the 25,000 British and Hessian captors who used the city as their command center. In 1776 3,000 prostitutes were sailed from Liverpool to NYC to keep the soldiers happy and warm. Warmth was especially needed during the winter of 1780 when it became so cold the harbor froze over.

Food at the Rhinelander Sugar House prison for six days consisted of a moldy, worm-eaten loaf of bread, a quart of peas, one-half a pint of rice, and a pound and a half of pork. Prisoners were allowed to slowly starve to death in the years during the British and Hessian occupation between 1776 and 1783. American patriots were also poisoned, froze to death, or died of infection. British officials threw the 11,000 dead into common pits. Out of the 2,600 American prisoners captured at the battle of Fort Washington, 1,900 were killed in the 65 days that followed while held in these British prisons. Ghostly shadows were often seen for years after the British left NYC on November 25th, 1783.

Northern Boundary of the Yellow Fever Quarantine - Beekman Street marked the northern boundary of the yellow fever quarantine. Infected parts of the city were chained off and then watered down with fire hoses to clean up the abandoned contagious area. NYC once burned tar in the streets to replace the air of sickness. Sniffing camphor-soaked sponges was all the rage in 1795 to avoid the fever. Citizens also drunk vinegar to fight off sickness. Mustard baths and treatment with smelly Asefetida was another remedy. Asefetida in the early days was probably the most adulterated drug in the world market, being well-known since the 15th century.

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and head of a U.S. Army medical team, thought yellow fever was caused by rotting coffee, but he also thought rotten vegetables caused fevers. Rush believed the state of the blood vessels based on race, nationality, diet and morals caused yellow fever. The real culprit of the viral disease called yellow fever was the infected female Aedes aegypti mosquito (no longer found in NYC).

Proof of the real cause of yellow fever emerged in 1900 when an infected mosquito was tested on William E. Dean, a soldier from Troop B, Seventh Cavalry. Dean was tested in Havana Cuba by United States Army bacteriologists Dr. James Carroll, and Dr. Jesse Lazear along with Cuban surgeon Dr. Aristides Agramonte in mid September 1900. These three doctors worked for the Yellow Fever Commission headed by 49 year old Major Walter Reed, who for his insight has the Army's leading medical center named after him. The first doctor to bring up the mosquito theory was Dr. Carlos Finlay a Cuban physician in 1881. Dr. Finlay was first called a crank and a crazy old man, but became the chief health officer of Cuba from 1902 to 1909. History books credit Walter Reed for the discovery but the real credit should go to this Cuban doctor who now has a monument in Marianao in Havana and a statue in Panama City.

The Brick Presbyterian Church -The Brick Presbyterian Church and graveyard were at the NW corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets (now under the Pace building) from 1766 until 1856. During the American Revolution, the British used the church as a prison and hospital. This location was also where Cornelius Van Tienhoven (who probably faked his own death like Kenneth Lay) had his home in 1646. The hat and cane of drunken swindler Cornelius Van Tienhoven were found along the Hudson River on November 18, 1656, and the suicide of this fugitive of justice was doubted by many (he most likely escaped to the Caribbean where his brother resurfaced). Cornelius Van Tienhoven was famous for leading 80 men to what is now Hoboken NJ, in New Netherlands worst Indian massacre in history.

Beekman Street marked the northern boundary of the yellow fever quarantine. Infected parts of the city were chained off and then watered down with fire hoses to clean up the abandoned contagious area. NYC once burned tar in the streets to replace the air of sickness. Sniffing camphor-soaked sponges was all the rage in 1795 to avoid the fever. Citizens also drunk vinegar to fight off sickness.

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and head of a U.S. Army medical team, thought yellow fever was caused by rotting coffee, but he also thought rotten vegetables caused fevers. Rush believed the state of the blood vessels based on race, nationality, diet and morals caused yellow fever. The real culprit of the viral disease called yellow fever was the infected female Aedes aegypti mosquito (no longer found in NYC).

Provost Marshal Cunningham -New Gaol -The first NYC structure to be built as a jail was the New Gaol. Built in 1757 for under $12,000, just east of the first Almshouse in the 9-acre City Hall Park, the New Gaol was built at the same time the first upper barracks were built in the northern side of City Hall Park by Chambers Street. In 1764, a public whipping post, stocks, a cage, and a pillory were added opposite the jail. The New Gaol eventually stood in line with both City Hall and the Bridewell Prison. It became the Debtors' Prison in 1772, and then the Provost in 1776 when the British had patriots and officers imprisoned inside its walls, and Provost Marshal Cunningham had his office in the New Gaol, thus the name.

The entrance to the prison was from the south. American Army officers and the top local well-known patriots found their way inside the Provost. Cells were so crowded that imprisoned patriots lying on the floorboards had to all turn over all together at the call of right-left. Thousands of Americans starved, about 275 others poisoned or executed. When friends or relatives brought goodies for one of the prisoners, Cunningham would usually eat it in front of the prisoner. Sergeant O'Keefe was Cunningham's sadistic jailer. On Evacuation Day, as he was leaving, some prisoners asked what would become of them. O'Keefe replied, "You may all go to the devil!" One prisoner replied back, "Thank you, we have had too much of your company in this world, to follow you to the next." Cunningham confessed on his deathbed that he starved 2,000 Americans to death.

After the Revolutionary War ended, the building reverted to a debtor's prison. An 1830 remodeling (the third floor was cut off, and a copper roof was added) made it fireproof. In 1830, the New Gaol became the old Hall of Records after a $15,000 tune-up, but in 1832 when cholera hit NYC, the building was used as a hospital. In 1833, the renovations were complete and it was later taken over by the register, comptroller, and street commissioner. In 1869, the building finally became the Register's Office, whose staff filled the whole fireproofed building with land and legal records. The legal records were eventually transferred to the Hall of Records (Surrogate Court House) on the northwestern corner of Chambers and Centre Streets. The New Gaol building was torn down in April 1903 (to make room for the subway), exposing the basement dungeons where so many patriotic Americans were imprisoned during the Revolutionary War. When this three-story, 60-by-75-ft. building that stood 135 feet east of City Hall was demolished, it was the oldest municipal building in NYC.

Edward Delafield, M.D., and John Kearney Rodgers, M.D. - New York Eye Infirmary - On August 14th, 1820, two small rooms on the second floor of 45 Chatham Street (now 83 Park Row), a house across from City Hall became the first infirmary of Edward Delafield, M.D., and John Kearney Rodgers, M.D. Their first hours were noon to 1 PM Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. They performed the first congenital cataract operation in America.

The second office for the New York Eye Infirmary opened in 1822, off Murray Street by Broadway across from Columbia College. The first employee was hired as both an apothecary and custodian of the medical instruments. He also applied the leeches.

The third location of the infirmary was 139 Duane Street after leasing a building from New York Hospital in 1824-1826. The Infirmary moved a few times from 1826-1840, and then rented a building off Broadway at 47 Howard Street, from 1840-1845.

The first permanent home of the New York Eye Infirmary was at a building they finally bought (instead of renting since 1820) at 97 Mercer Street, where they saw patients from 1845-1856.

On April 25th, 1856, the Thirteenth Street and Second Avenue New York Eye Infirmary building was dedicated and opened. Edward Delafield himself gave the dedication address at this four-story brownstone, where 40-50 patients could be treated and bedded on its top three floors. The ground floor was used for the out-patient department.

In 1864, it became known as the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary as the doctors also treated ear problems almost from the beginning of their practice. In 1873, the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary added a throat department, and in 1890, the School of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology was founded (even though they had been teaching and giving lectures since 1821).

Three floors were added in 1890 in a remodeling handled by Stanford White. The New York Eye & Ear Infirmary's Schermerhorn Pavilion is one of the four Stanford White structures left standing in NYC (others are Washington Arch, Century Club, and the University Club).

The North Building opened in 1968 on Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, adjoining the 1856 building.

The Park Theatre -The Park Theatre was built between May 5th, 1795, when the cornerstone was laid, and opened on January 29th, 1798, at 21-25 Park Row, by Nassau Street overlooking City Hall Park. The first play was Shakespeare's "As You Like It." America's first grand Italian opera opened at the Park Theatre on November 29th, 1825, with Rossini's "Barber of Seville." On February 14th, 1842, the theatre was converted into a ballroom for a party honoring Charles Dickens; 2,500 people attended. The Park Theatre, NYC's fourth theatre, could seat 2,400 customers, and it even had a coffee room. A large glass chandelier hung from a great vaulted dome. The theatre burned down in 1820, was rebuilt the following year, but burned down again for good on December 16th, 1848.

Thomas Dunlop-Pewter Mug -Next door to Tammany Hall was the Pewter Mug, one of the most celebrated taverns in the U.S. The owner, Thomas Dunlop, greeted the highest political officials who would make pilgrimages the Pewter Mug seeking public support and Dunlop’s endorsement.

Dr. John Scudder - Scudder's Museum - Dr. John Scudder was a traveling organ-grinder who collected oddities while on the road. In 1810, he bought the Tammany Society Museum (NYC's first museum, which started in 1783) from Gardner Baker, who had acquired the museum in 1808 when it was located in a room in the City Hall on Wall Street. The original Tammany Museum featured a live lion, American Indian artifacts, art prints, and farming equipment.

Scudder moved the museum to 21 Chatham Street (now 39 Park Row) in 1810, and called it the Chatham Museum. Also known as Scudder's American Museum, it featured stuffed animals, a live anaconda, and an alligator.

In 1816, the second version of Scudder's Museum opened off Chambers Street on the north side of City Hall Park. It was located in the upper west end of the New York Institution building (the former Chamber Street Almshouse). The Chambers Street Almshouse, the second almshouse built in City Hall Park, consisted of six three-story buildings remodeled after the paupers moved out and renamed New York Institution. Scudder died in 1822, and his son (also named John) took over the museum at the New York Institution.

In 1824, Scudder's Museum moved to a five-story building at the southeast corner of Broadway and Ann Streets. Here, Barnum's American Museum opened in 1842, with John Scudder as a partner, before the 315-ft. St. Paul Building was built in 1898. The American Museum was the first marble-fronted structure built since the third (and present) City Hall, and NYC's first granite building in NYC. For $12,000, P.T. Barnum became the proprietor of the American Museum after signing a 10-year lease with the owner of the museum building, Francis W. Olmsted, on December 27th, 1841, and agreeing to buy the entire failing collection from Scudder's daughters in 1840. Barnum started out exhibiting an old woman he was passing off as George Washington's nurse at a Chatham Square coffeehouse at Bowery and Division Street.

In the basement of the Scudder Museum at 11 Park Row (then called Chatham Street) was an 1832 restaurant run by Alexander Welsh. The main attraction was its turtle soup, which suggested the restaurant’s name, Terrapin Lunch. The restaurant afterwards moved down Park Row to 66 Chatham Street.

Pierre L'Enfant - St Paul's Church - NYC's oldest church, oldest original standing structure, the city's only remaining colonial church and its oldest public building in continuous use - St Paul's Church is all of these. Beside a brownstone tower, the architect Thomas McBean constructed the Georgian-styled church using local Manhattan schist and brownstone quoins. The woodwork, carvings, and door hinges are all handmade. Fourteen 1802 cut-glass chandeliers that originally held candles still hang in St Paul's Church, and it still has its original 1804 organ case as well.

The French architect Pierre L'Enfant (who planned Washington, D.C., and tried to plan a NYC park around the Collect Pond) designed its interior. Over the altar of St Paul's Church is L'Enfant’s "Glory," with carved images depicting clouds and lightning over Mt. Sinai. It also has a triangle with the Hebrew word for "God" and illustrations of the two tablets of Ten Commandments. On the church exterior, L'Enfant carved iconography showing the birth of a new nation, depicting an eagle pulling back the night to expose 13 rays of the rising sun.

St Paul's Church was built between 1764 and 1766 at 209 Broadway, six blocks north of Trinity Church as a branch of Trinity Church. Its steeple and tower were started December 1st, 1794, and finished by 1796. Besides calling people to church, St Paul's bells were rung to warn citizens of fire or invasion. St Paul's Church was fiercely loyal to the British Crown, even during the American Revolution. Thanks to a miracle and lots of citizens with water buckets, the church was spared during the 1776 fire.

During the two years that NYC was America's capital, George Washington attended services at St. Paul's while Trinity Church was rebuilt. After his inauguration April 30th, 1789, Washington went to St. Paul’s Chapel for a special service. His pew is still on display on the north aisle with a painting of the Great Seal of the United States hanging above it). First New York State Governor George Clinton's pew is in the aisle on the south side with the Arms of the State of New York above it. Many old 18th century tombstones can be seen on the front and side of St Paul's, which fronts the Church Street side and not Broadway.

The area west of St. Paul’s Church was called the Holy Ground and a huge red light district in NYC. The city's first red light area was around the Fort (of course). Heavily walked by girls of the streets was Marketveldt Street, which was once was called Pettycoat Lane for its action. The notorious streetwalkers of Corlear's Hook at the eastern end of Grand Street were the gals that were first called hookers.

When the World Trade Center came down September 11, 2001, a tree in the churchyard shielded the blast and saved St. Paul's Church.

Levels

Norse Catholics - 1125 & 1540 - Jean Allefonsce - born 1484 in Portugal died off La Rochelle 1544 or 1549 - David Ingram signed on with English privateer John Hawkins marooned with some 100 of his shipmates near Tampico on the coast of Mexico, about 200 miles south of the present Texas/Mexico border. 11 months later, in October 1568, Ingram and two others of his original party were picked up from the coast of Nova Scotia by a French fishing vessel. 1999 British writer Richard Nathan retraced Ingram’s journey in reverse, walking from Nova Scotia to Tampico in just 9 months The Norumbegans were friendly and led Ingram to their leader, a king named the Bathshaba who lived in the city of Arembec wonderful city of Arembec

Native American - Norumbegans Explorer-Juan (Jan) Rodrigues was the 1st non native resident of NYC. This black (mulatto) crewman from the boat Jonge Tobias lived and traded among the natives in 1612 (w/o support of a harbor ship). A friend of the Indians and the keeper of the Norumbega secret. Timeline - 1612 - 1664 Topics - Indian/ Dutch, People - Adrian Block fire through Peter Stuyvesant fire proofing Places

Slave - Caesar's friend Timeline - 1712 - 1741 Topics - 1712 - 1741 Slave revolts, Dutch / British Slave/White People - Gerardus Beekman to Molly Williams (1818) Places - greenwich and rector (John Hughson tavern), Water & Wall (slave market), Hanover square-#11, Firemen's Hall-71 Fulton Street,

Inventor - Christopher Colles -1774 - NYC's first log pipeline Timeline 1742-1776 Topics - Patriots / British, Water People Places

Patriot - Burr Timeline - 1776- 1836. Topics - Patriots / Tory Loyalists, 1776 Fire, Manhattan Company Places

Ringleader - Tweed Timeline - 1823 -1878 Topics - 1835 Fire, 1845 Fire, Tammany Hall, Gangs, People - Mose Humphrey knocked senseless in 1838 Places -