Five Points

The park spreading out on your right, with its basketball courts and shade trees, sits on ground that was once called the most dangerous few blocks in America, a slum built over a buried pond that the city never should have filled in.

In the early eighteen hundreds, workers drained and filled the Collect Pond, a freshwater source that had become choked with waste from surrounding tanneries and slaughterhouses. The landfill was shoddy, and the ground sank unevenly for decades afterward, leaving behind standing water, mosquitoes, and buildings that tilted and cracked. Immigrants with nowhere else to go crowded into the resulting slum, which took its name, Five Points, from the five cornered intersection of streets at its heart.

By the mid eighteen hundreds, Five Points had become notorious for gang warfare. Rival factions, including a mostly Irish immigrant gang nicknamed the Dead Rabbits and a nativist gang called the Bowery Boys, fought repeated battles in these streets over territory and politics. The worst came on the Fourth of July in eighteen fifty seven, when the Dead Rabbits destroyed a Bowery Boys clubhouse and the two sides fought for hours along Bayard Street, building barricades and throwing paving stones, until the state militia finally restored order. By the time it ended, roughly eight people were dead and more than a hundred injured. The English novelist Charles Dickens toured the slum in eighteen forty two and came away stunned by what he saw, later writing about conditions there that shocked even a writer who had spent his career describing poverty.

The worst block, known as Mulberry Bend, was finally demolished in the eighteen nineties after years of pressure from reformers, and a park opened on the site in eighteen ninety seven. Landscape architects redesigned it in nineteen eleven and gave it the name it carries today, Columbus Park, a quiet green space built directly over one of the most violent neighborhoods the city ever produced.