Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [383]
Slavery’s grip had lasted longest in outlying farm country; as late as 1820 slaves constituted one-sixth the population of the agricultural communities of Kings County. When liberated, blacks relocated to nearby towns, flowing into Brooklyn Village, Jamaica, and Flushing’s Crow Hill. They were also drawn to Manhattan, by the availability of jobs as domestics, barbers, caterers, launderers, hucksters, wood sawyers, whitewashes, swill gatherers, ragpickers, chimney sweeps, and day laborers.
The Five Points, 1827 (from Valentine s Manual, 1855). A cartoonish rendering of Paradise Square, heart of the Points—now the southwest corner of Columbus Park. Anthony Street (now Worth) heads diagonally off to the left while Orange Street (now Baxter) angles off to the right; Cross Street (later Park) runs left to right. The emphasis is on liquor, brawling, and pigs—all of which no doubt scandalized the dandyish outsider in the foreground. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
In Manhattan, some blacks settled in the northern countryside: in 1825 members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church purchased parcels of farmland between 83rd and 88th streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues and erected several one-story unpainted cabins, forming the core of what would emerge as Seneca Village. A larger number moved to Greenwich Village, especially near Minetta Creek, where blacks had lived since Dutch days. Coachmen settled along a stable alleyway (it would evolve into Gay Street), but most took rooms in cramped and segregated boardinghouses. A bit farther south, still more blacks were drawn to the sunken Fifth Ward lots of the filled-in Lispenard Meadows, just behind New York Hospital. Others situated themselves along the strip of land spearing east along Chambers and Anthony (atop the Negro Burial Ground) or in the Five Points itself, where they occupied houses perched on insecurely reclaimed swampland, often in cellars, a scant few feet above water level, which flooded routinely.
Many of New York’s African Americans thus lived in close proximity to the newly arrived Irish and longer-established Anglo-Dutch working people—creating a mélange one genteel observer characterized as “the vilest rabble, black & white, mixt together.” There was no black ghetto, though some blocks were more single-hued than others. Bancker Street was notably black, overcrowded, and susceptible to disease. Of the 296 people killed by fever in the latter half of 1820,138 were African Americans, and half of these died in the vicinity of Bancker Street. So bad was its reputation that the Bancker family (Rutgers relatives) demanded their name be struck off, and in 1826 Bancker was renamed Madison.
THEY GATHERED AT THE RIVER
The broad-spectrum quality of the working-class quarters extended to their religious institutions. Though the plebeian wards were theologically underserved in comparison to the thickly steepled gentry precincts, new houses of worship did arise, usually Catholic, Jewish, or evangelical Protestant, rather than Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Dutch Reformed (the dominant patrician denominations).
Even before the war, Father Kohlmann, Jesuit rector of St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, believed that many of his sixteen thousand parishioners were “so neglected in all respects that it goes beyond conception.” A second building was needed, especially for the growing number of Catholics “outside the city.” As New York had been made a see in 1808, Kohlmann decided to provide the forthcoming new bishop