Writing the histories of cities has been a focus for archaeology throughout the history of the discipline. Many of these “urban” excavations—of Pompeii, Rome, Nineveh, Athens, Troy, Ur, York, and Novgorod—are archaeological milestones in their own right. More recently, historical archaeology has made substantial contributions to unraveling the development of modern cities around the world. In particular, the excavation of a nineteenth-century site in New York City’s “Five Points” helped rewrite the social history of the immigrant and working class people that lived in that city’s most notorious slum.
Urban renewal and redevelopment in the centers of many modern cities has threatened the integrity of the archaeological remains to be found there. In 1991 the excavation of the Five Points site, before the erection of a new courthouse in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, uncovered the remains of a nineteenth-century mixed, residential-commercial working-class neighborhood that was the home of many recently arrived immigrants, primarily from Ireland and eastern Europe.
Located northeast of New York’s City Hall, on what is now the southern edge of Chinatown, Five Points got its name from the five corners created by the intersection of three streets, and it has been described as “the most chronicled neighborhood in the U. S.A.” As early as the 1840s British author Charles Dickens was one of many writers and slum reformers who visited and wrote about Five Points, which became the source of many newspaper stories about its lurid goings on and squalid tenements, saloons, prostitutes, and dance halls. The demonization of Five Points was used primarily to prove the superiority of the observers—be they from other countries, other parts of the United States, or adherents of religions not strongly represented at Five Points.
Notwithstanding the fact that within this working-class community there were real tensions between “Nativists,” that is, those born in America, and the large numbers of the Irish migrants, recent work by historians has argued that the bad reputations of slum districts were much exaggerated for political purposes. No one could deny that there was great poverty and desperation, unsanitary conditions, vice, and drunkenness at Five Points. However, there is also evidence, from housing, census, and taxation records, that many of the slum’s inhabitants were hard-working people with strong family ties, who lived relatively “normal” lives, and who were trying to achieve something better for themselves or even to leave the slum.
Eventually, the Five Points district was pulled down, and the remains of its houses were covered by new buildings in the early twentieth century. In the 1990s these too were demolished. In the meantime federal legislation in the United States provided for the funding of archaeological excavation as part of the budgeted costs of construction projects. With this new redevelopment, almost a century after they had been covered, the remains of the district of Five Points reappeared, and the excavation and its analysis, directed by Dr. Rebecca Yamin for John Milner and Associates, provided a fascinating window on New York City’s history.
Yamin and her team excavated twenty-two archaeological features on the site, dating from 1790 to 1890. During this one hundred-year period Five Points changed from an outlying industrial area to one of the most congested residential neighborhoods in New York City. The excavations recovered 850,000 artifacts from twenty-two abandoned privies and cisterns on fourteen historic properties, which included a brothel, a brewery, an eating house, an oyster house, a bakery, and a saloon, as well as from residences and an Irish tenement.
During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the population and buildings of Five Points comprised workplaces that were also the homes of artisans and their families. By the 1840s these had been demolished and replaced by large tenements to cheaply house numerous newly arrived German and Irish migrants. Lot 6, 472 Pearl Street, the most intensively investigated of all the features uncovered, perfectly illustrates these changes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was the home of carpenters and their families. In the 1840s it was the home of a rabbi/tailor and his family, students, and apprentices. In 1848 it became a five-story tenement, owned and built by an Irish migrant made good to house refugees from the Irish potato famine.
Almost 100,000 artifacts associated with this tenement site were found, and most of this material relates directly to women, and provides evidence of their domestic lives. Many women cooked, cleaned, and laundered not only for their family members, but for paying boarders, particularly single men, as well. There is evidence that residents engaged in sewing, rug making, and clothing recycling. They cared about their surroundings, because the remains of ornaments and flowerpots have been found, and they placed Staffordshire figurines of shepherds and shepherdesses on their mantle-pieces, set their dining tables with matching sets of dishes, and drank tea from teacups and saucers imported from England. The residents also ate large quantities of meat, primarily pork, and in the earlier years of the century, they also ate fish. These remains are also proof that some residents did not live in abject poverty.
Some of the people of Five Points had money for luxuries as well, testified by the large number of tobacco pipes found in the site. From the remains of medical items, some residents could also afford to buy treatments from pharmacies or drugstores, and from the remains of toys and slate pencils, some parents had enough money to spend some on their children. Women could afford to wear ornamental hair combs and buy mirrors.
Most Irish residents were laborers but there is evidence of cottage industries undertaken in their homes, such as jewelry and toothbrush making. Most of the residents from eastern Europe were Jewish and were tailors and dealers in secondhand clothing. These ethnic differences can also be seen in the remains of different diets and choices of consumer goods. Archaeological evidence in the form of large numbers of chamber pots, washbowls, and lice combs, along with census information taken at different times, reveals that living conditions in the tenement were overcrowded and unsanitary.
In addition to the assemblages derived from residential contexts, the artifacts from public buildings provide a more balanced picture of life in the slum. While numerous glass bottles were found from the saloon site, many small plates and master ink bottles were also found. The former were used to serve the free lunch that came with the alcohol purchased. The latter were used to decant ink into smaller bottles for use by residents.
The assemblages excavated from Five Points were stored in the basement of the World Trade Center. None of it could be salvaged after the destruction of the twin towers on September 11. Fortunately, much of it had been analyzed, researched, and published, so not all was lost. Five Points set many archaeological benchmarks—and the archaeology of the modern city is now a global phenomenon. Other urban sites that have been recently excavated and have provided a wealth of alternative information about the recently vanished past include Cape Town, South Africa; Sydney and Melbourne, Australia; Quebec, Canada; Lowell, Massachusetts; West Oakland, California; Washington D. C,; and London and Sheffield in the United Kingdom.
See also Historical Archaeology First Taught at University (1960); Publication of A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America (1970); Publication of In Small Things Forgotten (1977); Discovery of the African Burial Ground (1991).
Further Reading
Mayne, A., and T. Murray, eds. 2001. The archaeology of urban landscapes: Explorations in Slumland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yamin, R. 1997. New York’s mythic slum: Digging lower Manhattan’s infamous Five Points Archaeology 50 (2): 44-53.
Yamin, R. 1998. Lurid tales and homely stories of New York’s notorious Five Points Historical Archaeology 32 (1): 74-85.
Yamin, R., ed. 2000. Tales of Five Points: Wording class life in nineteenth century New York. 6 vols. New York: General Services Administration.
World History
