Before it was the most notorious slum in New York, Five Points was Collect Pond, a spring fed lake 48 acres across and 60 feet deep that supplied Manhattan’s drinking water. Breweries, tanneries, and a slaughterhouse poisoned it. Pierre Charles L’Enfant proposed cleaning the pond and building a park around it, but the city chose to fill the basin with loose soil, brush, and street sweepings. The fill rotted, leaked methane, and never compacted, so the new houses sank and the middle class fled.

Into the cheapest housing in the city came two groups shut out everywhere else: Black New Yorkers freed in a slow emancipation that ended on July 4th, 1827, and Irish Catholics escaping the great famine. Their forced closeness produced tension, disease, and riots, and also the first large scale voluntary racial integration in American history. This episode follows the neighborhood from its poisoned ground to its erasure beneath Columbus Park and the courthouses of Foley Square.

• At Almack’s, a Black owned dance hall also known as Pete Williams Place, Irish jigs met the African shuffle in dance battles that produced tap, popularized by Master Juba.
• When cholera struck in June 1832, wealthy New Yorkers blamed bad air and immorality instead of the missing sewers.
• The penny press claimed the Old Brewery tenement saw a murder a night for 15 years, though the 1850 census counted only about 220 residents there.
• The Dead Rabbits riot of 1857 began on July 4th, drew an estimated 800 to 1,000 gang members, and ended only when the state militia arrived.
• After Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, the city razed Mulberry Bend and hired Calvert Vaux to build the park that opened in 1897.