There is a corner of Lower Manhattan where history has been paved over. A park stands there now, with children playing in the shadow of court buildings. But beneath the neat paths and the modern paving, the memory of Five Points remains — the most notorious immigrant neighbourhood in American history, and the place where generations of Irish families arrived, suffered, survived, and eventually changed the city for ever.
If your family name is Murphy, Brennan, Connolly, or Callahan — if you have any ancestor who left Ireland between 1820 and 1880 — there is a good chance they passed through Five Points.
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What Was Five Points?
Five Points took its name from the intersection of five streets in lower Manhattan: Anthony Street (now Worth Street), Cross Street (now Mosco Street), Orange Street (now Baxter Street), Little Water Street (since demolished), and Mulberry Street. The neighbourhood sat directly over the former Collect Pond, a natural lake that had been drained and filled in 1811. The ground was swampy and unstable. Buildings sank into it. Drainage was nearly impossible.
By the 1820s, the area had become what contemporary observers called the worst slum in the world. Middle-class New Yorkers had long since fled. In their place came the poorest of the poor — African American residents who had nowhere else to go, recent immigrants from Germany and Ireland, and the desperate working poor who could not afford to live anywhere else.
Into this place came thousands of Irish immigrants — first a trickle, then a flood. After the Great Famine struck Ireland in 1845, the trickle became a torrent. Between 1845 and 1852, more than a million people died of starvation and disease in Ireland. Another million emigrated. Many of them came to New York, and those with the fewest resources ended up in Five Points.
They arrived with almost nothing. A transatlantic crossing in steerage cost roughly the price of a month’s wages for a labourer. Many families spent their last savings to get one member across, sending money back once work was found. They were hungry, exhausted, and utterly unprepared for the city that met them. The boarding-house runners who greeted ships at the docks herded the most vulnerable into the tenements of Five Points before they had even found their bearings.
Life in the Five Points Tenements
The most notorious building in American history may have been a former brewery on the corner of Anthony and Orange Streets. The Old Brewery, built in 1792, had stopped making beer by 1837 and was converted into housing. By the 1840s, it reportedly held more than a thousand residents — Irish and African American families, single men and women with children — crammed into rooms with no ventilation, no running water, and no sanitation beyond a shared outdoor privy.
Contemporary accounts described floorboards rotting away, walls black with damp, and a constant smell that no visitor could forget. One reform document from 1849 described finding a family of seven sleeping in a single room with a ceiling so low that an adult could not stand upright.
But the Old Brewery was only the most extreme example of a wider pattern. Throughout Five Points, tenement buildings were divided and subdivided into rooms that families of six or eight shared. Rents were collected weekly by landlords who rarely visited. The work that could be found was whatever the city needed most urgently and paid least: digging the Croton Aqueduct, loading ships at the East River docks, collecting rags, rolling cigars, making matches in dangerous conditions.
Women often worked as domestic servants, walking long distances each day to the homes of wealthier New Yorkers and returning at night to the tenement. Men who found stable work in the building trades or the docks considered themselves fortunate. The alternative was casual day labour — turning up at a corner each morning and waiting to be picked for a job, with no guarantee of income.
Charles Dickens visited Five Points in 1842, a decade before the worst years of Famine immigration. He wrote in American Notes that he had seen poverty in England that shocked him, but nothing had prepared him for this. “Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old,” he wrote. “See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays.”
What Dickens did not see — or chose not to describe — was the community that sustained people through these conditions.
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The Irish Community That Grew
The Catholic Church was the anchor of Irish Five Points. St Patrick’s Old Cathedral — built in 1815 on Mott Street, just blocks from the worst tenements — served simultaneously as a church, a school, and a community refuge. Archbishop John Hughes, who had himself emigrated from County Tyrone in Ireland as a teenager, became one of the most powerful advocates for Irish immigrant rights in the city. When a Protestant mob threatened to burn the cathedral in 1836, Hughes organised hundreds of Irish men to surround the building in defence. The thick outer walls that still surround St Patrick’s Old Cathedral today were built partly as a result of that threat.
Alongside the Church, mutual aid societies formed that connected people from the same Irish county. Men from County Mayo would pool resources to pay for funerals, support sick members, and help newly arrived neighbours find their first night’s lodgings. These societies became the skeleton of political organisation.
Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party machine that controlled New York politics for decades, built much of its power by delivering services to Irish immigrant voters that the official city government refused to provide. A Tammany district leader would appear at the tenement door when a man lost his job, when a family was evicted, when someone needed bail money. In return, on election day, the vote was expected to go one way. For all its corruption, Tammany Hall connected Five Points residents to the machinery of American civic life in a way that nothing else did at the time.
By the 1870s, Irish-Americans held positions throughout the city’s police department, fire service, and public works. The men and women who had arrived with nothing in the 1840s and 1850s had produced children and grandchildren who were building careers in the institutions of the city. The same story that played out in the Irish New Yorkers who went on to shape American culture began in streets like these.
The Neighbourhood Transforms
By the 1880s, Five Points was already changing. The Irish families who had arrived in the 1840s and 1850s had begun moving northward — to Hell’s Kitchen on the west side, to the South Bronx, eventually to Queens and the suburbs. In their place came new waves: Italians establishing the community documented in Little Italy’s history, Eastern European Jews who would settle the Lower East Side tenements, and Chinese workers building what would become today’s Chinatown.
Jacob Riis, a Danish-American journalist, photographed and documented the neighbourhood in his landmark 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. His images of Five Points — dark stairwells, cramped sleeping quarters, children on muddy streets — galvanised public opinion and contributed to the tenement reform movement. It was partly because of Riis’s work that politicians began to take slum conditions seriously.
In 1852, the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Church purchased the Old Brewery. They demolished it and replaced it with a mission house and school. The building that had embodied the worst of Five Points was gone. But the community around it took another generation to disperse.
In 1896, the remaining worst blocks of Five Points were cleared. In 1897, Columbus Park was created on the site, giving the neighbourhood’s surviving children somewhere to play that was not a street or an alley. The streets were renumbered and renamed. Little Water Street disappeared entirely. The neighbourhood that had defined immigrant New York faded into official memory as a cautionary tale — though for millions of Americans with Irish ancestry, it is something far more personal than that.
Where to Visit Today
Five Points no longer exists as a neighbourhood, but you can still walk its streets — or what has replaced them.
Columbus Park occupies the heart of the former Five Points. The park opened in 1897 and today is a gathering place for the Chinatown community. Stand in the centre and you are standing on the ground where the Old Brewery once stood, where your Irish ancestors might have lived in their first years in America.
Foley Square, directly north of the park, sits above the former Collect Pond — the fetid lake around which Five Points was built. The New York County Courthouse and the US Federal Courthouse now frame what was once a natural feature of the landscape.
St Patrick’s Old Cathedral, at 263 Mott Street, has served the community since 1815. The thick outer walls were built partly as a defensive measure against nativist attacks. The church survived everything Five Points could throw at it and is still an active parish. Guided tours are available and are among the most historically rich experiences in lower Manhattan.
The Tenement Museum, at 97 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, is slightly east of Five Points proper but tells the same story of immigrant tenement life in the same period. Restored apartments show exactly how families lived — room by room, object by object. Booking in advance is essential.
The New York Public Library’s digital collections hold thousands of photographs of Five Points and the surrounding area from the 1880s through the early 1900s. If you know a family name and approximate street, the archives can be searched online for free at digitalcollections.nypl.org.
How to Find Your Family’s Connection
If your family has Irish roots and arrived in New York before 1890, Five Points is one of the most likely points of early settlement — particularly if your ancestors came from the west of Ireland, from counties Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, or Clare.
The New York City Municipal Archives hold vital records — birth, marriage, and death certificates — from 1847 onwards. The 1880 US Census (available free at FamilySearch.org) can identify a specific street address from that era. If you find an ancestor living on Mulberry Street, Baxter Street, or Worth Street in 1880, you can place them precisely within the former Five Points area.
St Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott Street holds baptism, marriage, and burial records going back to the early 19th century, and many of these are now accessible through genealogy databases. If your ancestor was Catholic and lived in Five Points between 1820 and 1890, this parish is where their most important life events were recorded.
Our step-by-step guide to tracing New York City ancestry walks you through all of these resources, with direct links and advice on what to do when records are incomplete or unclear.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where exactly was Five Points in New York City?
Five Points was in lower Manhattan, roughly where Columbus Park and the surrounding court buildings now stand. It was centred on the intersection of five streets in the Civic Centre area, between modern-day Canal Street to the north and Chambers Street to the south, near today’s Chinatown.
When did Irish immigrants arrive in Five Points?
Irish immigrants began settling in Five Points from around 1820. Numbers increased sharply after the Great Famine of 1845–1852, when over a million Irish people emigrated to America. By the 1850s, Irish-born residents made up roughly 40 per cent of Five Points’ population.
What was the Old Brewery in Five Points?
The Old Brewery was a former brewing building on the corner of Anthony and Orange Streets that was converted into tenement housing around 1837. By the 1840s it reportedly housed over a thousand people in extremely overcrowded and dangerous conditions. It was demolished in 1852 when the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society purchased the site to build a mission house.
Can you still visit Five Points in New York today?
The neighbourhood no longer exists as it did in the 19th century. Columbus Park was built on its site in 1897. You can visit the park, walk the surrounding streets, tour St Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott Street (built 1815), and visit the nearby Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. The New York Public Library’s digital archives also hold extensive historical photographs of the area.
What happened to the Irish families who lived in Five Points?
As wages improved and opportunities opened up through political and civic participation, Irish families gradually moved out of Five Points from the 1870s onwards, settling in Hell’s Kitchen, the South Bronx, and eventually Queens. By the 1890s, Five Points had become primarily Italian and Chinese in character, continuing the pattern of successive waves of immigrant settlement that has defined New York City.