The Five Points was a run-down neighbourhood with a bad reputation; the greatest underworld hive in all of the United States. In parts, it was no more than a shantytown, inhabited by the poorest and most low-down of souls. Its workers were employed in clandestine factories, immigrants and freed slaves all vying to make a living in the squalor of the Five Points. Life on these streets was difficult, violent and often short: the gangs ran their territories with fire and blood. Race riots often erupted, and disease blew through the tenements like dust in the wind. The Five Points was a playground for famous thieves and was infested with whorehouses and brutally violent gangs. Each of these gangs had its calling card: the Bowery Boys always wore red shirts, while the Dead Rabbits would throw animal corpses at their enemies’ feet before a brawl.
In this back-alley of the Five Points, the Dead Rabbits were on the lookout. They oversaw the comings and goings of the street’s inhabitants. Every man coming in was searched as a matter of course, to ensure that any man going out was not carrying anything that belonged to the Dead Rabbits. They also protected the prostitutes, who brought in hefty revenues for the gang. They were armed and on the alert, knives and revolvers in hand, knowing that any altercation in their neighbourhood could lead to a riot. They were Irishmen who’d arrived in the Five Points by boat like slaves, whipped and beaten all the way across the Atlantic. Many of them had died at sea. But here in the Five Points, nobody pushed them around. No more would they be treated like dirt or be seen as half-men. The Dead Rabbits had built their gang and their cause here in the Five Points, and that cause was survival.
Anything was acceptable in the name of survival, especially when the cold came. You did whatever you could and whatever you had to. The sewer water was dirty, but when boiled over coal it became almost crystal clear. The people washed their clothes in buckets and threw the dirty water out on the street, hanging their clothes on ropes strung up between the buildings. The night watch was kept to candlelight. Most of the time, people were hungry. Nothing went to waste; the smallest carcass, the slightest crumb of bread was good enough to be eaten. Every morsel mattered as they gathered their strength for winter.
The Five Points was home to the Mulberry vegetable market. Food was plentiful at the market, but you had to have money to buy vegetables, potatoes or grains. Children often scampered through Mulberry trying to gather up cabbage leaves, carrot skins, a potato or even a slice of apple. This manna from heaven was carried home to their parents, who put everything together in a bucket to cook, and all the members of the Dead Rabbits would come round to eat it. It wasn’t pauper’s soup, but something worse: famine soup. You did what you had to in the Five Points, living one day to the next.
Lately, a lot of slaves had made their way to the Five Points after fleeing the south, settling in this infamously poor neighbourhood. The Dead Rabbits took a neutral position, but they sympathised with the slaves. They did not wish to side with the Union, which was fighting for abolition, nor with the Confederates who wanted slavery to reign forever. But their arrival was something of a godsend — the Dead Rabbits often found that former slaves could help them in vital ways. The freemen had found work at the homes of rich New Yorkers. They worked in huge town houses, mansions even — the homes of the most powerful men in the Union, men of business and titans of industry.
Alan Alfredo Geday