Manhattan's Old Five Points Neighborhood

Are you curious as to what it is like to work in one of the high rise Manhattan office buildings? When I visited my husband at work in order to accompany him on the Big Onion walking tour they had scheduled as an outing, I snapped this photo of his workspace:

The square footage rental of office space in Manhattan is very expensive, so most companies utilize every inch, and small cubicles are the usual workstations for each employee.
If you are very lucky, you will have a cubicle or office with a window. Below is my husband's window view, looking out towards the south.

The downtown heliport is not far from the back of his office building, along the East River. This is the heliport that the President uses when he visits NYC, and where his motorcade will meet him to drive him to his destination in the city. A portion of Brooklyn can be viewed in the background. It was an overcast gray day. unfortunately, so my photos might be a little dark.


The tour began in the afternoon, after lunch, and we had to walk to meet the tour guide outside of City Hall. We had a fast scramble to be on time, but I couldn't resist taking some photos along the way.

Here is the elegant entrance to the new Tiffany & Co. located at 37 Wall Street.

An interesting older office building -- I love the rounded corners and all the windows and decorative columns.




Here are a few smiling special forces police guarding the New York Stock Exchange. Security is obviously very stringent in that area.


We finally reach City Hall and meet the group near the very pretty City Hall fountain.

The Five Points was the area named for the points created by the intersection of Park, Worth, and Baxter streets, and the neighborhood was known as a center of vice and debauchery throughout the nineteenth century. Today the points no longer exist, as office buildings, courthouses and monuments cover them, but the Martin Scorsese 's movie "Gangs Of New York" have revived an interest in this area that was once a notorious slum. An interesting National Geographic article about the "fact and fiction" of this movie can be read here.

Source
It was an overcrowded tenement neighborhood teeming with newly arrived immigrants struggling to succeed in an alien city, along with tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, almshouses, and potteries, which all contributed to making the neighborhood less than desirable. Legendary Five Points gangs existed then — the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails, the Slaughter Houses, the Swamp Angels.

A further discussion about the anti-immigrant sentiment, corrupt politics, and discrimination that was rampant at the time is complex, and more than I could begin to describe in my blog, but a few interesting sociological articles about the Five Points can be read here and here.

The first stop of the tour was The Tweed Courthouse, which is located on the north side of City Hall Park, behind City Hall, on Chambers Street. (there was quite a bit of scaffolding around the building because of ongoing restoration, so this was the best photo I was able to take)

An interesting overview of the checkered past of the Tweed Courthouse, the corrupt"Boss" William M. Tweed, and his Tammany Hall political organization can be read here. Today, the courthouse is used by the New York Board of Education.

Across from the Tweed Courthouse is the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. The bank was founded by Irish emigrants as a mutual savings bank in 1850. By the 1920's it had grown to become the largest savings bank in the nation. This limestone-faced skyscraper in the Beaux-Arts style was the first to be laid out on an H-plan, providing light and air to almost all office spaces. The richly decorated banking hall has marble walls and floors, bronze grilles, original tellers' cages, and a series of stained-glass skylights with allegorical figures representing mining, manufacturing, agriculture, and other modes of employment.

To the east of the Tweed Courthouse is the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street. It is a 40-story building built to accommodate increased governmental space demands after the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs. Its design was influenced by the "City Beautiful" movement of the 1890s which promoted plans for creating public buildings in landscaped parks.

On the top, above the middle section of the building, there are three tiered drums on top of another, flanked by four smaller pinnacle turrets, symbolizing the four boroughs joined to Manhattan. At the height of 177 m stands the 6 m high statue Civic Fame by Adolph A. Weinman, New York City's second largest statue after the Statue of Liberty. The statue holds a crown with five turrets, also symbolizing New York City's five boroughs.

We walked towards the Municipal building, turned right and walked back towards City Hall, whose eastern facade faces the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, which is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. It stretches over the East River. Construction began in January 3, 1870, and was completed thirteen years later and opened for use on May 24, 1883

We turn the corner on the right and walked down the block to see "The Marble Palace" at 280 Broadway, which was built in 1846 as the site of America's first department store. It later housed The New York Sun newspaper and is now used for municipal offices for New York City. Built by Alexander Turney Stewart, it was among the first to set fixed prices for goods and drew female customers through special sales and fashion shows. According to our tour guide, this store changed the way goods were displayed and sold and had the first dressing rooms to try on garments.

Across the street from City Hall Park is the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, standing at a height of 792 feet, 1 inch. Conceived by Frank W. Woolworth, designed by Cass Gilbert and engineered by Gunvald Aus, it was designed and built to be the tallest building in the world. It is a Gothic-style skyscraper located on Broadway, between Park Place and Barclay Street.

We then walked to an area that is now the African American Burial Ground, but I will do a separate entry about that next blog entry, as it is very interesting, and I took quite a few photos there.
The next stop on the tour was Foley Square between Worth and Pearl Streets, where The New York State Supreme Court is located.


The New York State Supreme Court was established in 1691, making it the oldest continuing court of general jurisdiction in the United States. The courthouse rises above a 100-foot wide flight of steps to an imposing colonnade of 10 granite fluted Corinthian columns. Above the columns are engraved words of George Washington: "The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government."
Foley Square was named after a prominent Tammany Hall district leader and local saloon owner, Thomas F. “Big Tom” Foley. Its location was originally the Collect Pond, which was one of the original fresh water sources for the City of New York but was drained and filled-in in 1811 due to its severely polluted state, and its implication in typhus and cholera outbreaks at the time. Besides The New York State Supreme Court, the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse and the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse surround Foley Square.
We then walked into the neighborhood known as Chinatown. Chinatown started on Mott Street, Park, Pell and Doyers streets, east of the notorious Five Points district, and is both a residential area as well as commercial area, with a dense population of more than 300,000 people. The housing stock of Chinatown is still mostly composed of cramped tenement buildings, some of which are over 100 years old. Today, many Chinese are moving to the boroughs and the suburbs as their standards of living improve.





The last stop of the tour was The Church Of the Transfiguration, which is also known as the "Church of Immigrants," as there has been an active church located here since 1801, serving successive waves of immigrants who have settled in New York. In 1801, the English-speaking descendants of German Lutheran emigres spent $15,000 to build the substantial stone church, before it passed into the hands of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The church was purchased by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York in 1853, as Father Felix Varela, a Cuban-born pioneer of Catholic journalism, had founded the parish in 1827. The church building is the oldest Catholic Church building in New York City.

The streets are very narrow here, and there was too much traffic to get a good position to take a long shot of the church, but you can see photos of it here.

The tour was over, but most of the group walked a little longer to the Little Italy neighborhood to enjoy a tasty dinner! Very few Italians live in this area anymore, but there is a profusion of many wonderful restaurants competing for business, and it is a fun place to visit, along with Chinatown, and have lunch or dinner when you visit New York City.




I hope you enjoyed this glimpse of New York City, some of its historical evolution, and some of the rich tapestry of ethnicity's that make up its population.