Five Points owed its misery to bad engineering. For two centuries, the Collect Pond -- also called Fresh Water Pond -- had been Manhattan's primary drinking water source. But by the early 1700s, tanneries, slaughterhouses, and a brewery had polluted it beyond recovery. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the architect who designed Washington, D.C., proposed cleaning the pond and turning it into a public park. The city rejected his plan and instead decided to fill it in. The landfill was completed in 1811, and middle-class homes were built on the reclaimed land. But the fill was unstable. Buildings sank and shifted. The soil stayed damp. Within a generation, the respectable homeowners had fled, and the neighborhood had become a slum. The five-pointed intersection, formed around 1809 when Anthony Street was extended east to meet Cross and Orange streets, gave the district its name.

What made Five Points unique was not just its poverty but its population. After New York ended enslavement through gradual emancipation on July 4, 1827, newly freed Black Americans settled alongside Irish immigrants who had maintained a small presence in the area since the 1600s. Their cohabitation was the first large-scale instance of voluntary racial integration in American history. It was tense, fraught with competition for jobs and housing, and punctuated by violence. But it also produced something remarkable. At a dance hall called Almack's on Orange Street, Irish reels and jigs merged with African shuffle dancing, creating a hybrid form that gave rise to tap dance -- a performer known as Master Juba became its first star. In the long term, the musical cross-pollination at Five Points became a major precursor to jazz and rock and roll.

Five Points became synonymous with gang violence. The Dead Rabbits Riot of July 1857 erupted when one faction destroyed the headquarters of the Bowery Boys at 26 Bowery. The fighting raged back and forth on Bayard Street between the Bowery and Mulberry Street for three days. An estimated 800 to 1,000 gang members took part, along with hundreds of looters. Eight people were killed and more than 100 seriously injured before the New York State Militia restored order. The riot was the largest civil disturbance since the Astor Place Riot of 1849. Historian Tyler Anbinder later noted that the 'Dead Rabbits' name likely never described an actual gang -- the press simply 'continued to use it despite the abundant evidence that no such club or gang existed' because it so captured the public imagination.

Disease haunted Five Points from its founding. Cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, malaria, and yellow fever swept through the overcrowded tenements with devastating regularity. In June 1832, a cholera outbreak that began in Five Points spread across all of New York City. The neighborhood's most notorious building, the Old Brewery -- originally Coulthard's Brewery from the 1790s, converted to a tenement in 1837 -- was said to house over 1,000 people and, according to urban legend, averaged a murder a night for 15 years. The only census taken in 1850 counted 221 people crammed into 35 apartments. Reformer Jacob Riis documented the squalor in his landmark 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, and his photographs of Mulberry Bend became some of the most powerful images of American poverty ever captured.

The destruction of Five Points took decades. Merchants first called for slum clearance in 1829. Methodist women purchased and demolished the Old Brewery in 1852, replacing it with a mission house. Riis's advocacy led to the razing of Mulberry Bend, which was redesigned as a park by landscape architect Calvert Vaux and opened as Mulberry Bend Park in 1897 -- now Columbus Park. Through the 20th century, streets were closed, buildings demolished, and the area absorbed into the expanding Civic Center and Chinatown. The Tombs prison, where many Five Points criminals were incarcerated and executed, stood near the site until 2023. Today, the intersection of Worth and Baxter bears a co-naming sign, and Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York brought the neighborhood's story to a global audience. The tenement buildings that remain on the surrounding streets are the last physical traces of a place that, for all its suffering, helped forge the cultural identity of a nation.