I appreciated this book as an excellent piece of historical research, but I fear that the publishers did themselves no favors by yowling that it was a source for the Scorsese film about the neighborhood, for this is a meticulous academic delve into ethnological minutiae. It is difficult to categorize this sprawl, but it is at bottom an ethnology, albeit one with innumerable tangents, some fairly relevant (e.g., Tammany Hall politics), others not (e.g., a mini-history of the Irish potato famine). In any case, readers looking for titillation or a healthy does of Scorsesean "neat" violence are likely to come away disappointed. I found readability fair at times, but most of his tangents and his painstaking analyses of national and even county origins of the residents of individual tenement buildings were of no interest; when presented tabularly they could be skipped or skimmed, but too often one had to wade through text. ( )

The history, to some extent, of the events depicted in Martin Scorcese's film Gangs of New York (which is also the name of a book by Herbert Asbury first published in the late 1920s).

This book is a well-written history of the famous Five Points neighborhood in New York City through the 19th century. The author documents the slums, murders, and drunkenness and provides real-life stories of the most notorious in this melting pot for poor immigrants. Ireland's potato famine, war, discrimination against Jews, and widespread poverty in mid-eighteenth-century Europe drove thousands to seek a better life in America. Some found the help they sought, but many were left to wallow in abject poverty, living in overcrowded tenement buildings and eke out a life on the streets. The Points was so famous that sometimes wealthy New Yorkers accompanied by police would tour through the poverty, brothels, brawling, and filthiness to glimpse into "life on the other side." It wasn't until laws were put in place to hold landlords accountable and most old buildings were razed in the early twentieth century that the worst slums disappeared. ( )

I'm ravenously interested in New York history period, and when I lived in New York, I found the Five Points area (which is now almost entirely Chinatown and civic and municipal buildings) deeply odd--the dark, serpentine streets, the ancient-seeming tenement buildings, the sudden thoroughfares, the random parks. I've been meaning to read Five Points for some time. It's a dense but mostly readable book, with a few quirks. There is a sense of relentlessness about some of it, which I suppose is to be expected in any account of a poverty-stricken area, particularly one that has been poverty-stricken for roughly one hundred and fifty years. But there was a density here that could have been shot through with a little more oxygen. I also found the author's passive-aggressive handling of fellow Five Points chronicler Luc Sante strange. There are two instances where he specifically calls Sante's scholarship out with disdain. And there were also sloppy typos and inconsistencies. For example, in the otherwise extremely well handled section on Jacob Riis, the author indicates that "...on June 5, 1875" Riis wrote a letter to the woman he'd been pining over for more than a decade, who was living overseas, telling her he loved her, wanted her to come to America, etc. Then on the next page, he indicates that Elisabeth responded to his letter a full year earlier than he sent it ("November 1, 1874" has Riis staring dumbly at the reply to that letter, from Elisabeth, which she'd delayed writing for months and months). Little things like that throw me off, perhaps because I'm an editor myself.

But for sheer scope and depth of scholarship, I was truly impressed. I got exactly what I wanted when I looked for a book on Five Points. I hear the voices of the people here, as Anbinder does a great job of weaving those first person accounts into the narrative, and is also good at pointing out the media's complicity through the decades of perpetuating negative stereotypes about the various ethnicities that inhabited Five Points. I would have liked to have seen far more on the African-Americans' day-to-day lives in the Five Points, but I imagine the research material for such an approach is scant to nonexistent. ( )

An excellent book about the notorious New York neighborhood that was home to the most destitute of the city's immigrants. Yet, Anbinder shows that Five Points wasn't always as bad as its reputation and often was the home of a hard-working, multi-ethnic community making their way into the American society. ( )