Pearl Street / RF Wagner Sr. Place		(40.710442,-74.000787)
Gotham Court	38 Cherry Street to 81 Roosevelt Street	(40.709995, -73.999121)
After the Old Brewery at Five Points was demolished, Gotham Court in the Fourth Ward became the worst tenement complex in NYC. Located near George Washington’s first presidential mansion, Gotham Court (Sweeney's Shambles) was a single huge boxlike building that packed together a complex of 16 back-to-back tenements under one roof. A Quaker named Silas Wood built Gotham Court in 1850-1851 to rescue the poor who were living in cellar holes in the neighborhood. Its two rows of five-story tenements were designed for 140 families but actually held over 240 families by 1879. Most of the original families were Italian or Irish with a handful of African Americans and Germans, who would battle each other at all hours. By the end of Gotham Court’s 40-year existence, about a third of the tenants were Greek. Gotham Court was located just south of James Street, between Franklin Square (Pearl and Cherry Streets) and Roosevelt Street. It opened onto alleys off 36 and 38 Cherry Street. Each tenement had two 10-by-14-ft. dwellings subdivided into two rooms with no cross-ventilation. The eight buildings on each side of Gotham Court were connected to the 6-ft.-wide Single Alley on one side and the 9-ft.-wide Double Alley (also known at Paradise Alley) on the other. These alleys served as the roofs on giant underground sewer tunnels. A 4-foot wide alley at the western side of Gotham Court connected to the middle of the block on Roosevelt Street. This narrow alley was a favorite for thieves and gangs such as the Swamp Angels, who could escape through the nearby sewer lines. The Swamp Angels gang used Gotham Court as their headquarters and the sewer system as their way to raid the East River dockyards. The main large vaulted sewer in that part of NYC ran right under Gotham Court, and many criminals cut holes into the basements of Gotham Court to aid their escape. Toxic odors and vapors seeped into the residential building, making it one of the unhealthiest locations in NYC. The cholera epidemic of the 1860s hit Gotham Court hard, magnifying its problems to NYC reformers. Out of 183 children born in Gotham Court in three years, 61 died after a few weeks of tenement life. Many children were also killed by the big rats invading through all the holes cut by the gang of Einsteins. When Gotham Court was condemned in July 1871, all its tenants were evicted until this huge building could be properly renovated. On July 20th, 1871, the fat Irishman Sweeney who ran the shambles for 21 years told the Board of Health that his tenants didn’t pay rent for two months so they had funds to seek other accommodations. The city repaired the tenements but made sure they were unoccupied during the hottest months of the summer. Gotham Court, the second biggest tenement in NYC after Big Flats, was considered the worst building in NYC, ravaged by crime, disease, disorder and drunkenness. Thanks to reformers like Jacob Riis and the 1985 1885 ]]]right?[ Tenement House Law, Gotham Court was demolished in 1895. The largest tenement complex, Big Flats was located at 98 Mott Street. Most tenements in the 1850s charged only $2 to $3 per month rent, and 75 people would share one bathroom. In 1879, a NYC tenement design competition in Plumbing and Sanitation Engineer magazine was held and the winner (James Ware) came up with the dumbbell plan (based on the shape of the buildings footprint) to bring air to the cramped living spaces through small air shafts between sections of the back-to-back and side-to-side tenement floor plans. It turned out to be a dumbbell idea because it caused more sanitation problems when tenement dwellers tossed garbage, dirty water and other waste into these air shafts. These smelly air shafts also acted as a duct which spread fire between apartments. Another notorious tenement was called the Ship, and it was occupied mostly by poor Italians and Russians. It was located at the head of Hamilton Street at Cherry Hill where the Old Ship Saloon once stood. The janitor of the ship was named Mickey the Pilot.
Blindman's Alley	Rear of 26 Cherry Street	(40.709979, -73.999529)
Blindman's Alley was a half a stone's throw away from Gotham Court at the rear of 26 Cherry Street. Daniel Murphy was the blind landlord of tenements around an alley just south of Cherry Street's Gotham Court. It was home to a colony of blind beggars. The superintendent of Out-door Poor gave out $20,000 a year to the poor blind city dwellers, that day the money was doled out was the loudest night each year in Blindman's Alley (due to the celebration). Murphy protested, but the New York Board of Health ordered him to clean up the tenements surrounding Blindman's Alley, but the improvements ruined the homey feeling of the old alley, and many of the blind tenants moved out.
Old Wreck Brook	South of Roosevelt Street from Centre Street to the East River	(40.712947, -73.999797)
The old brook that led up Roosevelt Street to the old Collect Pond still discharges in spurts at some point during the day. The old shoreline came up to Cherry Street, and this was the largest cove in lower NYC. Old Wreck Brook flowed just south of Roosevelt Street (east of Baxter) from the Collect Pond on Centre Street. The brook that once entered the East River at the foot of James Street was also called Ould Kill and Versch water. This brook had the freshest water, which was tapped at the Tea Water Pump on Park Row and Baxter. During spring floods the area around Collect Pond was so low, Indians could paddle across NYC from the East River to the Hudson River through the Collect Pond. Tamkill Creek flowed under the kissing bridge that went from the Collect Pond by Park Row and Roosevelt Street. Searching for the fast and easy passage to the Orient was the first reason so that wasn’t what kept them coming back to America. Colonization wasn’t motivating Dutch explorers to keep coming to the New World. The English in Jamestown, Virginia, were the ones who came to colonize. The English colonists in Jamestown were the ones hyped up about the gold the Spanish found in Mexico. The Dutch traded simple items like beads and tools for valuable furs, and that is what kept bringing the Dutch explorers to NYC. The name Old Wreck Brook could have come from the wreckage of Adrian Block’s boat, The Tiger, which supposedly caught fire at night while it was docked in a cove off lower Manhattan, right off a Hudson River by the eventual site of the World Trade Center or Battery Park. Most historians insist that the plot of the former Trade Towers was the location of the Tiger’s burning, and that the shipmates built huts by 39-41 Broadway, but probably not. A bigger and more easily navigable bay where his boat was probably docked was off the quieter East River, up the Collect Pond stream. He could have camped for the winter at the old ruins of Norumbega, with plenty of fresh water from the Collect Pond and fish, foot long oysters, clams and lobsters galore. This large bay off the East River between Dover and James Streets existed before NYC's widening of the coast through landfill. Block’s boat caught fire when it was anchored in a bay, and the bay by the outlet of the Collect Pond was the largest downtown bay, close to the freshwater pond, which would have been the perfect place to survive. Adrian Block's boat was shipwrecked in 1613 and he stayed the winter. (He was not the first non-native; Juan (Jan) Rodriguese was.) The Werpoes befriended and saved Block and his crew from a long winter after the boat fire, and they helped them get timbers for their huts and oak and hickory trees for constructing their escape boat they called Restless.
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