In lower Manhattan, where courthouses and parking lots now stand, there was once a forty-eight-acre freshwater pond — the primary drinking water source for colonial New York. When the city poisoned it, buried it, and built on top of it, the ground began to sink. What rose from that unstable earth was Five Points, the most notorious neighborhood in nineteenth-century America. This is the story of the Collect Pond and everything it destroyed: the Old Brewery tenement where a thousand people lived in a hundred rooms, the Egyptian Revival prison that sank into its own foundation, the Tammany Hall political machine that turned immigrant votes into raw power, the Dead Rabbits Riot of 1857, the gang wars that produced Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, and the basement dance hall at 67 Orange Street where a teenager named Master Juba invented tap dance while Charles Dickens watched. It is also the story of what 850,000 artifacts buried in the dirt told us about the people who actually lived there — and how different their lives were from the legends.
Sources
Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001).
Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842).
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890).
Rebecca Yamin, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York, vols. I–VI. General Services Administration Five Points Archaeological Project (John Milner Associates, 2000).
"Poisoning the Well: The Exploitation of Collect Pond and Its Impact on Social Formation in Early Industrial Manhattan," Princeton Historical Review, Summer 2024.
"What Lies Beneath: A History of Collect Pond," Tenement Museum Blog, April 2016.