Chatham Square / Worth Street / Bowery		(40.713724,-73.998907)
Chatham Theatre	167 Chatham Street between James and Roosevelt Streets	(40.713378, -73.999615)
Windmill Hill was the site of the old Chatham Theatre located a few blocks south of the Bowery’s starting point, on the east side of Chatham Street between James Street and the old Roosevelt Street. (Chatham Street is now Park Row, which runs east of the original Chatham Street.) The Chatham Theatre opened September 11th, 1839, with noted actors performing dramatic and comedic plays, but closed in January 1840. In 1844, the theatre was featuring blackface minstrel shows, and by 1847 it was a circus before becoming a low-class playhouse. For two years the venue was known as Chanfrau's National Theatre starting on February 28th, 1848, and became the famous Purdy's National Theatre, opening April 19th, 1852. On August 23rd, 1852, America’s first non-comedic version of Uncle Tom's Cabin opened at Purdy's National Theatre and ran for 11 nights. A more successful version of Uncle Tom's Cabin ran between July 18th, 1853, and April 19th, 1854. A special section with a separate entrance for African Americans was created at Purdy's on August 15th and enlarged on October 29th. Purdy spent too much on advertising and gifts for the star, Cordelia Howard, so he ended up losing money. During Purdy's sixth season he erected a statue of George Washington on top of the old Chatham Theatre. The Chatham Theatre was managed by A.H. Purdy until the Panic of 1857. After a fire, it reopened as the Chatham Amphitheatre on November 14th, 1859, to feature circuses, and became the National Concert Saloon on March 8th, 1860. By July 3rd, 1860, the old Chatham Theatre switched to a playhouse for melodrama called the National Theatre. It switched back to a concert saloon, then became home to a German troupe. The last restoration of the old Chatham Theatre, as the National Music Hall, opened to the public November 16th, 1861. Most of it was torn down in October 1862 and remaining structures became shops.
Tea Water Pump	166 Chatham Street	(40.713419, -74.000162)
The Tea Water Pump, the source of the freshest and most famous water in Manhattan, is now guarded like Fort Knox with 24-hour police protection. The old gardens that used to be here have been replaced by a small, inaccessible patch of green that has an old, spooky concrete shack next to a strange sculpture apparently covering the old well. Old Wreck Brook flowed just south of Roosevelt Street (east of Baxter) from the Collect on Centre Street. The brook once entered the East River at the foot of James Street (just south of Catherine) and was also called Ould Kill and Versch water. This brook had the freshest water and was tapped at the Tea Water Pump on Park Row and Baxter. The Manhattan Company doomed the tea water pumps and any attempt to construct a more reliable supply. Dog carts once pulled water from clean wells and pumps and took away garbage, and they were prohibited from NYC streets in 1870.
Kissing Bridge	Roosevelt Street and Park Row	(40.713431, -73.99999)
NYC's first Kissing Bridge crossed the Old Wreck Brook (also called Tamkill Creek, Ould Kill and Versch Water) just south of the old Roosevelt Street (east of Baxter). This old bridge was used to get from Park Row to the Bowery. The brook had the freshest water and was tapped at the Tea Water Pump on Park Row and Baxter. The Kissing Bridge was an early NYC bridge crossing the high area on Park Row between Collect Pond and Beekman's swamp. It was the first NYC bridge to be called the Kissing Bridge, the second was the Stone Broadway bridge over Canal Street (also called the Stone bridge), and the third, at 77th Street and 3rd Avenue, became NYC's most famous Kissing Bridge. The old brook that led up Roosevelt Street to the old Collect Pond still discharges in spurts into the East River during part of the day. The old NYC shoreline came up to Cherry Street, and the largest cove in lower NYC was close to NYC's first kissing bridge. The name Old Wreck Brook could have originated with Adrian Block’s boat, the Tiger, after it caught fire at night while docked in a cove off lower Manhattan. This supposedly happened right off the Hudson River coast next to what much later became the World Trade Center site, but I believe his boat caught fire off the East River by the Collect Pond stream, its burned-out wreck of a hull remaining to suggest the name. He could have camped for the winter at the old ruins of Norumbega with access to plenty of fresh water from the Collect Pond and fish, foot-long oysters, clams, and lobsters galore. The area around Collect Pond was so low that during spring floods, Indians could paddle across NYC from the Hudson River through the stream where Canal Street is now to the the Pond. Tamkill Creek flowed under the kissing bridge that flowed from the Collect Pond by Park Row and Roosevelt Street.
Five Points	Baxter (Orange), Mosco (Cross), Worth (Anthony), and Little Water Streets	(40.714419, -74.000591)
Five Points was famous for launching tap dancing and sprouting the seeds of organized crime. The notorious neighborhood was America's first melting pot. Emancipated African Americans mixed with Irish, Anglo, Jewish and Italian citizens of NYC. Tap dancing began in 5 Points from the mix of African dances, Irish jig, and clog dancing. In 1844, Black Master Juba out-danced White Master Diamond in a famous tap dance contest. Five Points was set in a triangle bounded by Canal, Centre, Pearl, and Chatham (now Park Row) Streets with the Bowery. Within this neighborhood, Orange (Baxter), Cross (Mosco), Anthony (Worth), and Little Water Streets (no longer exists) created an intersection that had 5 points. Around 1850, to alter 5 Points’ negative image, Anthony Street was changed to Worth (named after Mexican War hero General William Worth), and Orange was renamed Baxter (after Mexican War hero Lt. Col. Charles Baxter). Rosanna Peers ran a cheap green-grocery speakeasy in 1825 on Centre Street, just south of Anthony (Worth) Street. The backroom was headquarters of two Irish gangs, the Forty Thieves gang led by Edward Coleman, and the Kerryonians, who were mostly natives of County Kerry, Ireland. In time, other 5 Point gangs prospered: the Whyos, the Shirt Tails (who never tucked in their shirts to easily hide their weapons), the Chichesters (mostly absorbed by the Whyos), and the Roach Guards (who have been called the Black Birds and more famously the Dead Rabbits). The Plug Uglies were often linked with 5 Points, but they operated in Baltimore, not NYC. Many of the shanties in 5 Points were on top of half door houses (so named because of their half-sized doors). The first floors of the half door houses were below street level and full of hookers, thieves and killers until the Board of Health banned human habitation in basements. Five Points, called the worst slum in America, may not have been as violent as history made it out to be. In the mid-1850s, only 30 murders a year were reported in the whole of NYC. During most months in all of NYC in the 5 Point era, only one murder a month was reported. Many inaccurate history books reported that there was a murder a day at the five-story Old Brewery alone, and the police were too afraid to cross the boundaries of 5 Points. Henry Petty, the third marquis of Lansdowne, was an English nobleman who financed a massive Irish emigration program. By 1851, Petty was responsible for taking 3,500 starving paupers out of the Kenmare poorhouses in Ireland and shipping them to NYC and Quebec. Petty spent £9,500 (slightly more than $1 million) on emigration because it was cheaper than supporting them in the Lansdowne estate for a single year. Two hundred people a week made the 60-mile journey to Cork, where they caught emigrant ships. Lansdowne sent entire families, so instead of vigorous young men, half of the Irish immigrants were women, and many were gray-haired and aged. In 1855, out of 14,000 residents of 5 Points, two thirds of them were Irish, mostly from Sligo, Cork, and Kerry. Eight-four percent of the Irish from Kerry lived on Orange Street (Baxter) from Anthony (Worth) to Leonard and Anthony Street from Centre to Orange. Seventy-nine percent of these Kerry natives were immigrants from the Lansdowne estate. In the late 1880s, a police reporter named Jacob Riis started shooting pictures around the dark 5 Points area with his new flash powder. His photo essay to make the world more aware of its horrible conditions was published in 1890 as "How the Other Half Lives." Broadway was full of elegance in the daytime, but at night it was the stomping ground of criminals and prostitutes. The 5 Points district was a famous red light district in the 19th century. The first red light street in NYC was Marketveldt Street across from NYC's first fort (Fort Amsterdam); it was once called Pettycoat Lane. Corlears Hook was such a notorious area for prostitutes that the term hookers was coined there. Gramercy Park had fancy bordellos in the late 1860s. The area west of St. Paul’s Church was called the Holy Ground, and it was a huge red light district in NYC. Between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, the Rockefeller Center area between 48th and 51st Streets was a red light district once owned by Columbia University. The Times Square area was full of silk hat brothels in 1900 and still had a red light district in the 1960s and 1970s.
Whyó Gang	Mulberry Bend	(40.715143, -73.999733)
At the bend in Columbus Park was once Mulberry Bend's Bottle Alley, the Whyó Gang’s headquarters. Also nearby Columbus Park in 1882 was Ragpickers Row, on Mulberry as well just off Bayard. Before 1911, Columbus Park was called Mulberry Bend Park, Five Points Park, and Paradise Park, which was completed in 1897. Factoid: The average Irish gang member weighed about 130 pounds and was 5 foot 3 inches tall.
Columbus Park	Between Anthony (Worth), Orange (Baxter), Bayard and Mulberry Streets	(40.715216, -74.000033)
Since 1911, when NYC wanted to erase bad memories of Five Points, the land between the Baxter and Mulberry bends has been called Columbus Park. When the tenements on the site were demolished in 1897, it was first named Five Points Park, and also referred to as Mulberry Bend Park and Paradise Park. Five Points was built over the Collect Pond landfill, completed between 1812 and 1813. Coulter's Brewery started brewing beer while the Collect Pond water was still drinkable, although Coulter still used the water after it got polluted. After landfill at the pond, Coulter stayed put and continued to brew beer until 1837, the year it was converted into a tenant house called the Old Brewery. Other industries that set up on the landfill were turpentine distilleries and glue factories. After 1820, the neighborhood sank into a slum. Figuratively and literally. As the numbers of Irish and German immigrants surged, greed got the landlords, who split their wooden buildings into small windowless rooms in which to jam full of the unfortunate. The landfill was badly done, and when it rained, the grounds became saturated and streets and basements flooded. The damp structures decayed quickly and sank even faster into the old landfill. Without sewers in that old neighborhood, the waste water overflowed as well as basement and outdoor bathrooms. Contaminated water sickened the whole neighborhood, and between 1850 and 1860, 70% of kids under 2 died. Poor Irish escaping the potato famine filled basement lodging rooms. All over these poor neighborhoods, they were hooked into becoming tenants as soon as they ventured off the boat. When settled, their rents were raised. When they couldn't pay, their luggage and possessions were confiscated and resold. Time after time, the desperate immigrants were tossed out onto the streets and replaced with the next batch off the boat. The Irish and freed African Americans mixed in this area, America’s biggest melting pot, and the racial integration sometimes got volatile. Most Five Points buildings had businesses on the ground floor; mainly brothels, gambling houses, dancehalls, saloons or groggeries (grocery stores that sold cheap booze). Down the middle of the deteriorated tenements in what would become Columbus Park were the narrow Bottle Alley, Ragpicker's Row, and Bandits Roost. At 39 Baxter were wooden tenements filled by Lansdowne immigrants. At one point in 1850, 15 Irish residents were found living in a 15-by-14-foot single-room apartment.
Murderers Alley	14 Baxter Street	(40.714078, -74.000258)
Murderers Alley was a dark lane that ran south from the dirty green door of 14 Baxter (then called Orange) Street, past the east wall of the five-story Old Brewery, down to Pearl Street. Murderer's Row was the nickname given to the Yankees during the Babe Ruth years. Baxter Street was named after Lt.-Col. Charles Baxter, who commanded Company B of the New York Regiment at Chapultepec during the Mexican-American War. At just past 8 a.m. August 13th, 1847, Baxter was killed leading the charge by the 15-foot wall around the base of the hill.
Bottle Alley	Mulberry Bend	(40.715224, -74.000462)
The stomping grounds of the Whyó Gang, Bottle Alley was a courtyard east of where Baxter Street still bends, between two old tenements numbered 47 and 49. On the eastern end of Bottle Alley was the notorious Mulberry Bend. Between the 1840s and 1880s, murderers, thieves and alcoholics haunted Bottle Alley. Police were afraid to tread in this dark alley where immigrants from Sligo (the northwestern coast of Ireland) were concentrated. According to the marriage register from the Church of Transfiguration, more Irish residents in Five Points were born in the tiny county of Sligo than any other part of Ireland (Cork and Kerry counties followed close behind). The potato blight (which started in 1845) was most severe in the western part of Ireland so the highest numbers of immigrants came from there. About three-quarters of NYC's Irish Catholics were from western Ireland, about 44% from Sligo, Cork and Kerry alone. This high concentration from these western Irish counties was also because three workhouse landlords there (Sligo's Robert Gore Booth, Lord Palmerston, and Kerry's Third Marquis of Lansdowne) paid for the ocean passage of 6,500 rather than try to feed them. The Marquis of Lansdowne estate alone was home to 13,000 poverty-stricken farmers and laborers. The trip was in December 1850, and unfortunately these poor and wretched were not dressed for a winter voyage. Henry Petty, the third marquis of Lansdowne, was an English nobleman who financed a massive Irish emigration program. He took 3,500 starving paupers out of the poorhouses in Ireland, and by 1851, had spent £9,500 (slightly more than $1 million today) on emigration. That was cheaper than supporting them in the Lansdowne estate Kenmare workhouse/poorhouse for a single year. Two-hundred people a week made the 60-mile journey to Cork, where they caught the ship to America (mainly NYC) and Quebec. There was some indignation because Lansdowne sent entire families; so instead of vigorous young men, half the Irish immigrants were women and many were gray-haired and aged. In 1855, out of 14,000 residents of Five Points, two-thirds of them were Irish. The dominant Irish subgroups were from Sligo, Cork, and Kerry. 84% of the Irish from Kerry, lived on Orange Street (Baxter) from Anthony (Worth) to Leonard and Anthony Street from Centre to Orange. Seventy-nine percent of these Kerry natives were emigrates from the Lansdowne estate. Sligo immigrants lived in the northern section of Five Points since 1810, way before the Great Famine. These Irish immigrants were the first to send money for food and passage to starving Sligo relatives and friends who moved in close to their countrymen in Five Points, in many cases right into their homes. Most Irish residents withdrew their money from the Emigrant Savings Bank, founded around 1852 by and for Irish emigrants. The Bend district was between Broadway and the Bowery, south of Canal, and northwest of Chatham Street (now Park Row). This small overcrowded neighborhood once had 4,376 apartments. The main block of the Bend was between Bayard, Mulberry, Baxter and Park Street (now Mosco). Another Irish-inhabited location around the maze of narrow Mulberry Bend passageways was called Maloney's Allley. Close by was a ramshackle Mulberry Street tenement that was aptly named the House of Blazes because of the fire hazard risk due to illegal overcrowding.
Ragpickers Row	West Side of Mulberry Street by Bayard Street	(40.715298, -73.999701)
In 1882, Ragpickers Row was on the west side of Mulberry Street, just around the corner from Bayard. Mulberry Street was set in a hollow below the higher elevated Mott Street. A junkman's cellar was located at a front house on Mulberry where his rag-picking cliental would gather bales for sale to the paper mills. This rag depot once stood by a narrow courtyard that separated the front and rear tenement houses that stretched back three deep. The rag-pickers settlement in the courtyard lived in sheds built from all sorts of old boards, which were also used as drying racks for the rags they collected. Earlier, another Ragpickers Row ran along the old East 4th Street between Avenues A and B, around 1869.
Bandits Roost	59 1/2 Mulberry Street	(40.715794, -73.999507)
Bandits Roost sat on the bend at 59 1/2 Mulberry Street between Bayard, Cross (now called Mosco), Mulberry and Orange (now called Baxter) Streets. The whole west side of Mulberry between Anthony (Worth) and Bayard was torn down in 1896. Mosco was named in 1982 after neighborhood leader Frank Mosco. Only one block remains of Cross Street (now Mosco, also called Park before 1982), but it used to run through Columbus Park and crossed Anthony (now Worth) to the middle of the Courthouse, where it turned south towards City Hall Park. In 1850, Worth Street was named after the mason General William Jenkins Worth, who fought in the Florida Seminole War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War. Also the namesake of Fort Worth, Texas, Worth raised the flag over Mexico City himself when it fell to the American forces, adding California, Arizona and New Mexico to the U.S. Worth died in 1849 and was temporarily buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn until a fitting monument was erected close to Madison Square Park at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, just north of 24th Street. Worth was buried there on November 25th, 1857. Besides Grants Tomb in Riverside Park, the Worth Monument is the only grave of the military kind in NYC. Bandits Roost inspired a D.W. Griffith's two-reel film made in 1912, “The Musketeers of Pig Alley.” This Griffith two-reeler is considered the very first gangster film. Martin Scorsese's “Gangs of New York” also recreated Bandits Alley as a visual reference to the famous Jacob Riis photo used on some versions of the same-named Herbert Asbury book.
Pete Williams Place	67 Orange Street (Baxter), just south of Bayard Street	(40.715533, -74.000355)
The theaters and taverns on the Bowery attracted many tourists to the Five Points neighborhood, and many upper-class people popularized “slumming.” Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Davy Crockett and Charles Dickens ventured into the neighborhood to observe depravity and soak in the slang and fashions of the many gang members. Sometimes they peeked in with police escorts, other times they brought friends. Dickens liked to go to Pete Williams Place, an African American dance hall originally called Almacks Dance Hall. Here at 67 Orange Street (now named Baxter), just south of Bayard Street, Dickens observed a dance called a break-down that blended Irish jigs and reels with African shuffle. The masters of this dance, which grew into tap dancing, included William Henry Lane and Master Juba. This music hall venue led to the blues, jazz, and eventually rock and roll. Dickens wrote about this dance hall and neighborhood in his 1842 work, “American Notes.”
Old Brewery (Coulter's Brewery)	East side of Cross Street (Mosco), on the south side of Anthony Street (Worth).	(40.71435, -74.001224)
Built in 1792, Coulters Brewery was one of the original NYC industries by the shores of the Collect Pond. Coulter's Brewery brewed beer until the 1830s and became the notorious tenement known as the Old Brewery when it closed during the Panic of 1837. The Panic caused a run on the banks, leaving 10,000 people homeless and starving. All these foreclosures made the rich (including John Jacob Astor) extremely wealthy, while starving mobs of homeless rioted around flour warehouses. The Five Points neighborhood grew around this old brewery that faced Paradise Square to its north. The Old Brewery was the most densely occupied structure in NYC, housing about 1,200 Irish and African Americans in equal numbers. Painted yellow on the outside, the Old Brewery had a large room inside called the Den of Thieves, the largest of the 75 chambers filling its five stories. The upstairs of the Old Brewery was used by transients, mostly prostitutes, who hung out in the doorways competing for business with all the other door ornaments in the narrow hallways. The basement that once housed the machinery of the brewing plant was divided into 20 15-by-15-ft rooms. Officials found 26 people living in just one of these basement rooms. Rent in the tiny divided rooms of the Old Brewery cost from $2 to $10 per month. The building was torn down in 1852 and replaced by the Five Points Mission in 1853. Historic reports that the Old Brewery had a murder a night for 15 years was fiction (in the mid-1850s, murders averaged only 30 a year all of NYC). The original Tombs prison (completed in 1838) was placed next to Five Points to regulate and frighten the criminals, prostitutes and uneducated residents of that foul neighborhood. The worst prisoners were kept on the damp lower floors of this Egyptian styled prison, while those arrested for smaller crimes got the dryer upper floors. The women's prison was located in an outer building enclosing the courtyard where the gallows were located.
Cow Bay	Little Water Street off Anthony (Worth) Street	(40.715078, -74.001589)
At the dead end of the northern side of Little Water Street by the Collect Pond landfill was the very lowest and worst place in New York, the infamous Cow Bay cul de sac. Little Water Street ran from the base of Paradise Square at Cross Street and Anthony Street (now Worth Street) to a dead end by the Collect Pond. The cul de sac was 30 feet wide at its mouth and ran about 100 feet into a dark alley next to one of the bays of the former Collect Pond where farmers once watered their cows. Aside from the Old Brewery, Cow Bay became the most scandalous place in Five Points, thanks to the notoriety of a few interracial couples as well as the criminals, hookers and addicts who huddled there. The most notorious tenements in Cow Bay were Jacob's Ladder, Gates of Hell, and Brickbat Mansion. Jacob's Ladder was named for its dangerous outside staircase, a rickety wooden structure that was the only way to get into this clapboard tenement, except maybe through underground passageways. The other hideous five-story tenements in Cow Bay had little furniture, and most people lived in dirt, rags and vermin. After slavery ended in NYC on July 4th, 1827, thousands of African Americans moved into Cow Bay and Five Points for the cheap rents. This wreck of a neighborhood was taken over by Irish and Italians as the blacks moved to NYC's west side and its undeveloped north. By 1850, when the Irish came pouring into Five Points, census takers counted only 120 black men in Cow Bay, and by 1855, only 35 African Americans were left in Cow Bay. The Five Points House of Industry superintendent would lead “depravity tours” to show how much the neighborhood needed his help. He took visitors into the worst places in the points he could find. Singling out interracial couples as one of his favorite horror stories, he also liked highlighting gays and their demonstrable lack of shame during his misery tours. He portrayed these slumming tours as the huddling of the swine amid the intolerable stench of the cesspools, with play-by-play descriptions of alcohol-fueled and drug-induced fights that often ended in death. Historic legends claiming that Five Points had a murder a night for 15 years, however, were complete fallacies. Five Points was called the worst slum in America, but it may not have been as violent as history makes it out to be. In the mid 1850s, only 30 murders a year were reported in all of NYC. Most months in the entire city during the Five Points era had only one reported murder a month. Many inaccurate history books reported a murder a day in the five-story Old Brewery alone and that police were too afraid to cross its boundaries. Describing the steaming filth that was inches deep in dark and dangerous stairways, temperance leaders recommended exploring Cow Bay with a handkerchief saturated in camphor to endure the horrid smells. Windowless rooms, less than 10 by 10 feet, housed five or six people. An inspection in 1857 found 23 families and their lodgers living in only 15 small rooms; 179 people! Many residents opened up their apartments as boarding homes, squeezing in tenants for a few cents a night. The Five Points House of Industry got its way in the 1860s. The hovels of Cow Bay were condemned and demolished, conveniently enabling the House to expand their building into the former squalor of the Cow Bay site. After Cow Bay was eradicated, gawkers and do-gooders’ attention shifted to the nearby alleys of Mulberry Bend, which photographer Jacob Riis would make infamous in the 1890s. Riis. a police reporter in the late 1880s, started shooting pictures around the dark Five Points area with his new flash powder, exposing to the world of its horrible conditions. His photo essay, “How the Other Half Lives,” was published in 1890. Around 1850, in a bid to reverse Five Points’ negative image, Anthony Street was renamed changed Worth Street after Mexican War hero General William Worth, and Orange was renamed Baxter after Mexican War hero Lt. Col. Charles Baxter.
Rosanna Peers Grog Shop	Centre Street South of Anthony (Worth)	(40.714891, -74.002082)
Rosanna Peers ran a cheap green-grocery speakeasy in 1825 on Centre Street, just south of Anthony (Worth). The backroom was headquarters of two Irish gangs, the Forty Thieves led by Edward Coleman, and the Kerryonians, who were mostly natives of County Kerry, Ireland.
African Methodist Episcopal Church	Cross Street (now Mosco), between Mulberry and Orange (now Baxter) Streets.	(40.714362, -73.999996)
The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded by Peter Williams Senior, who was one of ten children born to George and Diana Williams. Peter's parents were slaves of James Aymar, a loyalist tobacconist who lived on Beekman Street. Aymar encouraged Peter (expert cigar maker) to attend services at Wesley Chapel, the first Methodist Episcopal Church. Sitting in the church's slave gallery, he became a devout Methodist and the first sexton of the Wesley Chapel. Peter met and married another slave who belong to Aymar, Mary (Molly) Durham, who later became famous as the first woman firefighter. Molly was originally from St. Kitts, in the West Indies. They were married at the Wesley Chapel. James Aymar sold the Williams family to the John Street Methodist Church in 1783. The two slaves got their freedom after taking care of the John Street chapel for many years. A free Peter Williams made a fortune when he went into the tobacco business and saved for his dream of starting a Negro church. A son, Peter Williams Jr., attended the New York African Free School (destroyed by fire in December 1813) run by the Manumission Society, at 65 Cliff Street (NW corner of Fulton), before becoming the first rector of St. Philip's Church. In 1795, Peter Williams Sr. led many African Americans away from John Street Church because they weren’t treated with the same consideration and respect as white members. James Varick, the first superintendent of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, led religious meetings for his people as early as 1780. Varick, Francis Jacobs, and the elder Peter Williams established the African Methodist Episcopal Church in October 1796. Bishop Asbury gave permission on August 1796 to start in a makeshift church what would become the Zion Church. The first location for Zion Church was at William Miller's cabinet maker's shop (a former stable) on Cross Street (once Park Street, currently Mosco Street) between Mulberry and Orange (now Baxter) Streets. That section of Cross Street is now part of Columbus Park. NYC church members who were licensed preachers included June Scott, Abraham Thompson, Thomas Miller (treasurer), and William Miller. Other free black members included William Brown, Samuel Pointer, William Hamilton, George E Moore, David Bias, George White, George Collins, Thomas Cook, John Teesman, and Thomas Sipkins. Sipkins was eventually expelled for insubordination and started the Asbury Church on Elizabeth Street with William Miller. On July 30, 1800, Peter Williams laid the cornerstone for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, at Leonard and Church Streets. By 1807, NYC prohibited burials in the church grounds so they used the Potter's Field located in the Parade Grounds in Washington Square Park, and then at Seneca Village between 85th and 86th Streets (until 1852). After 1852, when NYC became off limits to burials, the church used Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. In 1813, the second African Methodist Episcopal church was built on Elizabeth Street; it was named Asbury Church. In 1820, the word Zion was added to the church’s names. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church became organized as a national body in 1821. William Hamilton edited The Anglo-African, the first newspaper established in 1860 by the A. M. E. Zion Church.
Collect Pond	Between Baxter, Reade, White and Lafayette Streets	(40.715147, -74.002125)
A country retreat for picnics, fishing, swimming, boating and ice skating for NYC's earliest settlers, the Collect Pond evolved into a polluted garbage dump that also ended up as NYC's most notorious slum, Five Points. The name Collect Pond derived from the Dutch “Kolch” (pronounced colicked), which means small body of water. Deep mica schist bedrock trapped the tidal waters that created Collect Pond. The northern heights of NYC have bedrock at almost ground level, while at Washington Square Park this bedrock dropped a hundred feet. On the south side of Chambers Street, the bedrock rises again to about a hundred feet under the ground and rises to the top again by the end of Manhattan. Before lower hilly NYC was leveled, glacial boulders once covered the many gravel drift hills around what was to become the Collect Pond. In 1613, explorer Adriaen Block got shipwrecked in NYC, and his boat supposedly caught fire as it sat right off a bay by the Hudson River, either near the future World Trade Center site or Battery Park. Most historians insist that the Tiger burned just the area of the Trade Towers, and that Block’s shipmates built huts by 39-41 Broadway, but I disagree. A bigger and more navigable bay where he probably docked the boat that caught fire was off the quieter East River by a stream that flowed from the Collect Pond. This old boat could be the source of the water’s name, the Old Wreck Brook. A large bay off the East River, between Dover and James Streets, it existed before NYC widened its coast with landfill. Reports had Block's boat catching fire when it was anchored in a large bay. This bay by the eastern outlet of the Collect Pond was the largest downtown bay, and close to the Collect Fresh Water pond, which would have been the perfect place to survive. Block stayed the winter in NYC in 1613 and 1614, but he wasn’t the first non-native to live in NYC. In 1612, a black Hispanic merchant (written out of history books) named Juan (Jan) Rodriguese (or Jan Rodriguez) was the first new New Yorker. Born in Santo Domingo, he stayed with the Indians for a year without the support of a ship in the harbor. Sadly, NYC has no plaque, statue or any real recognition of Jan Rodriguez. My insight blames NYC's racist attitude for this oversight of New York City's first real immigrant citizen. After 1664, a free black community was allowed to settle around the Collect Pond as a northern buffer between downtown settlers and American Indians to the north. Once the town’s slaughterhouses set up shop at this freshwater source, the Collect Ponds started its downward turn. The town’s slaughterhouses moved to the Collect Ponds’ eastern shore next to a tannery associated with the Bayard family, and the combination of these two industries began the pollution of the fresh waters. Joining in were George and Jacob Shaw Tanners in 1785, whose operations were just east of the Collect Pond, off Magazine Street (Pearl Street). Other polluters followed: a gunpowder factory, potters, glue factory, turpentine distillery, brewery (Coulter's), and even a rope walk. The African American cemetery soon crossed the southern perimeter of the Little Collect Pond (south of the Collect Pond, separated by an island). Before it was filled in, the Collect Pond was the site for a test run of the world’s first working steamboat. And it was built by John Fitch, not Robert Fulton. Fitch was the original inventor of the screw propeller and its combination with paddle wheels for propelling steamboats. Between 1785 and 1796, Fitch built four different steamboats designed to carry both passengers and freight. In 1785, he ran an experimental steamboat in Philadelphia. The model boat ran from Market Street up the Schuylkill river at 7 or 8 miles per hour) to Gray's Ferry (Robert Fulton and R.R. Livingston were on board). In 1787, he sketched in pencil and ink an amazing jet-powered steamboat. On August 22, 1787, his 45-foot steamboat took its trial run on the Delaware River, a larger ship soon carried passengers with freight. Fitch, who was born January 21st, 1743, in Windsor, Connecticut and raised by his poor dad (his mother died when he was only four years old), successfully received a patent for the application of steam to navigation in 1788; Fulton (a thief?) got his patent 17 years later. By the summer of 1790, Fitch ran a successful passenger line between Philadelphia and Trenton with his steamboat. In 1793 and again in 1796, Fitch tested his steamboat on the Collect Pond using a 12-gallon pot as the boiler. In 1798, Fitch came back again to the Collect Pond to show off his steamed transportation invention. In the Spring of 1798, Fitch went to Bardstown, Kentucky, to build a 3-foot model steamboat and test it on a local stream. Concentrating on Fulton, history forgot about manic-depressive Fitch, who committed suicide in a tavern by poisoning himself with opium pills on July 2nd,1798. Fitch died penniless and was buried in Bardstown in an unmarked grave under a footpath in the central square. The Daughters of the American Revolution in 1910, placed a veteran of the American Revolutionary War marker over the spot. Pierre L'Enfant, who designed the second City Hall, conceived a plan to turn Collect Pond into a park, which would have cleaned it and created a forested barrier to the country hamlet of Greenwich (Village). If L'Enfant’s plan had happened, NYC might have been spared from the mosquitoes that eventually brought yellow fever. The town’s polluting but powerful industries killed the park idea to preserve their profits. Factoid: In 1791, Pierre L'Enfant started to design Washington D.C, but he was fired by George Washington (who only paid him $3800), replaced by Andrew Ellicott, and died broke (with about $46 worth of possessions) on June 14, 1825. Washington's only paved square, L’Enfant Plaza (also a Metro subway stop) was named after Pierre L'Enfant, the true creator of Washington D.C (before Andrew Ellicott's 1792 revision). In 1802, NYC started to backfill the polluted pond with construction debris and more of the town’s garbage. This pigheaded idea merely flooded the marshy neighborhood worse than before. Dampness was equated with death and disease, and as yellow fever spread, this excess water became a kind of killing machine. In 1807, a plan to drain the pond was drafted, using an open 40-foot wide ditch to force the polluted water downhill into the Hudson. A few years after the depression of 1808, the Collect Pond was drained as a public works project in 1811. This smelly ditch on what would become Canal Street remained empty for 20 years after the pond was drained. In 1821, the canal was finally converted into an underground sewer and covered. Bayards Mount -- the British called it Bunker Hill -- was leveled just as all the other hills surrounding the Collect Pond and helped fill in the Collect Pond and the swamps at Lispenard's Meadows. Broadway at Anthony Street (now Worth) was reduced about 25 feet to today’s level. Collect Pond was all gone by 1813, but was still a bog when the middle class started moving into the sinking and stinking neighborhood built as Paradise Square. They quickly moved out, and the poor inherited this landfill that soon became Five Points, “where,” according to Charles Dickens, "poverty, crime and destitution were a way of life." Freed slaves first took over the abandoned Paradise Square, and then in the 1830s it became a red light district. When the potato famine of 1845 sent Irish and Germans to NYC seeking cheap accommodations, it made Five Points and the bloody Sixth Ward the most densely populated neighborhood in NYC. Just south of Paradise Square was the five-story Old Brewery (opened in 1837), formerly the Coulters Brewery. The Coulters Brewery was built in 1792 and brewed beer by the shores of the Collect Pond until the 1830s. It was replaced by a giant boardinghouse full of the poorest and most desperate characters in NYC. Collect Street became Rynders Street and today it’s Centre Street. The rotting tenant homes were replaced by brick buildings that were the first so-called tenements. Entertainment for the residents ranged from minstrel shows to bare-knuckle prize fights, cockfights, dog fights, and rat vs terrier fights at the “rat pits,” popular at the Sportsmen's Hall by the waterfront. For the tamer entertainment in Five Points, some of the various immigrant settlers combined the Irish jig with the black shuffle to create tap dancing. Dickens Place was opened up by black saloonkeeper Pete Williams and became the most famous dance hall in Five Points. The red light influence made the Five Points neighborhood notorious early on, and when the buildings started to tilt into the poorly filled land, it decrepit image was sealed. Five Points was at its worst between 1830 and 1840. In the 1850s Protestant groups started to clean up the slum, and by the 1860s, it was mostly calm. The Italian and Chinese succeeded the Irish in the 1870s-‘80s. Mulberry Bend was torn down in 1897 and replaced by Five Points Park, which is still standing as Columbus Park.
Fried Dumpling	106 Mosco Street (212 693-1060)	(-73.999298, 40.714494)
Fried Dumplings $1 Fried Pork Buns $1 Frozen Dumplings $5 Soy Bean Juice Small $.75 Soy Bean Juice Large $1.50 Hot and Sour Soup Small $1 Hot and Sour Soup Large $2
Tasty Dumpling	54 Mulberry Street (212 349-0070)	(-73.999482, 40.715346)
Chives and Pork Fried Dumplings $1.25 Cabbage and Pork Fried Dumplings $1.25 Chives and Pork Boiled Dumplings $3 Cabbage and Pork Boiled Dumplings $3 Mushroom and Chicken Boiled Dumplings $3 Shrimp and Chives Boiled Dumplings $3 Vegetable Boiled Dumplings $3 Dumplings in Soup $4 Cabbage and Pork Pancake $1.50 Golden Pancake $1 Pancake and Beef $2 Hot and Sour Soup Small $1.25 Hot and Sour Soup Large $2.50 Chicken and Corn Soup Small $1.25 Chicken and Corn Soup Large $2.50 Pork Wonton Soup Small $1.25 Pork Wonton Soup Large $2.50 Soy Bean Milk Small $1 Soy Bean Milk Large $2 Beef Stew Noodle Soup $4.25 Fish Ball Noodle Soup $4.25 Dumpling Noodle Soup $3.75 Wonton Noodle Soup $3.75 Vegetable Noodle Soup $3 Noodle with Meat and Bean Sauce $3 Noodle with Ma La Sauce (Hot or Cold) $3 Noodle with Sesame Sauce (Hot or Cold) $3 Spicy Cucumber $3 Spicy Cabbage $2 Bean Curd with Scallion $2 Aromatic Sliced Beef $6 Frozen Cabbage and Pork Dumplings Boiled $8 Frozen Chives and Pork Dumplings Boiled $8 Frozen Cabbage and Pork Dumplings Fried $8 Frozen Chives and Pork Dumplings Fried $8 Mushroom and Chicken Dumplings $12 Shrimp and Chives Dumplings $12 Vegetable Dumplings $12 Steamed Pork Buns $12 String Bean and Pork Dumplings $10 Celery and Pork Dumplings $10 Dill and Pork Dumplings $10
Bus Schedule
Weekdays	Saturdays	Sundays
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