The Bloody Ould Sixth Ward: Crime and Society in Five Points, New York
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Date
2012-06
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Today, the intersection of Worth and Baxter Street in New York City is a place of little consequence. In 1820, however, five streets converged at the bustling intersection, known as Paradise Square for the park at its center. The park’s name quickly grew ironic as it became the center of the Five Points neighborhood, the most notorious slum in American history. The Five Points vied with Charles Dickens’ infamous London East End for the title of the world’s most crime ridden and destitute neighborhood.
This project focuses on the different aspects of the nineteenth century that contributed the heightened crime level within the sixth ward of New York City, the government sector that contained the Five Points neighborhood. The Five Points was a distinctly immigrant neighborhood, consisting of mostly Irish immigrants, although it also housed Jews, former Germans, and African Americans. The Irish had left a politically unstable Ireland in the grips of the potato famine. This left the people with minimal economic means upon their arrival, contributing to the depressed status and the high crime of the Five Points.
The turbulent political state of the Sixth Ward, the government district that claimed the Five Points, had a large impact on the criminal culture of the neighborhood as well. During the early to mid-nineteenth century, the native born Americans were fiercely opposed to the foreigners they saw as encroaching on their land. The Nativists took up residence in the neighboring slum, referred to as “The Bowery.” Violent, criminal gangs emerged in response to the conflict between the Nativists and Irish, creating the first street gangs in the United States.
My research is based on primary resource work performed at the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society as well as the secondary sources available at the Ohio State University library. Original contribution consists of extensive study of coroner’s inquests from New York City between 1833-1835 and 1847-1849. This study highlights the effect of immigration, prejudice, and poverty on crime within a society, an issue that is not of little importance in the modern era.
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Keywords
19th Century, criminal history, Five Points, New York