Gangs of New York: Five Points Walking Tour

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Photo: wallyg / Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

You're standing on top of a crime scene—literally. Under your feet lies forty-eight acres of landfill covering what was once Manhattan's main water source, a seventy-foot-deep spring-fed pond that Dutch settlers called the Kalch-Hook. By 1800, the tanneries, breweries, and slaughterhouses ringing this pond had turned i…

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Photo: deshaunicus / Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Stand here in Foley Square and you're looking at the civic center's grand courthouse facades – the New York State Supreme Court, the federal courthouse, all that marble and columns projecting authority. Named for "Big Tom" Foley, a Tammany Hall boss who ran this district from his saloon in the 1880s, this square embodi…

Photo: wallyg / Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Photo: ajay_suresh / Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Photo: wallyg / Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The founders who rest in Trinity Church left us an incomplete revolution—one that excluded the very people who helped build this city. Beneath this memorial lie the remains of more than 15,000 free and enslaved Africans who built colonial New York. When construction workers discovered this burial ground in 1991, they u…

Photo: Billy Wilson Photography / Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

Photo: Billy Wilson Photography / Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

Look down through this glass panel at your feet. Those stone fragments beneath us—part of the Stadt Huys from 1642 and the Lovelace Tavern from 1670—are all that's left of Dutch New Amsterdam, physically preserved in place. When they excavated this site in 1975, they found over eleven thousand pieces of glass and twent…

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Photo: Zruda / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Stand here where eight streets collide, and you're at the exact center of Five Points gang territory. This intersection—where the Bowery meets East Broadway, Mott, Worth, and four other streets—was the most contested ground in nineteenth-century New York. Every street belonged to a different gang, and Chatham Square wa…

Photo: edenpictures / Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Photo: Hobo Matt / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Gothic Revival building in front of you went up in 1849, just as Five Points was reaching peak chaos a few blocks south. While the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys were cracking skulls over territory, this Episcopal church was quietly doing something radical: serving whoever walked through its doors. First came the Iri…

Photo: Ken Lund / Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Photo: Ken Lund / Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

For those who made the trek here, you're standing in front of America's first Catholic cathedral, built between 1809 and 1815 when this was still the edge of the city. Look at that Gothic Revival facade on Mulberry Street—architect Joseph-François Mangin designed it to announce that Irish Catholics weren't hiding anymo…