FIVE POINTS.
Leave Broadway opposite the New York Hospital, and pass down Pearl
street in an easterly direction. Five minutes walking will bring you to
the abode of poverty and suffering, a locality which contrasts
strangely with the elegant thoroughfare we have just left. Cross Centre
street, and continue your eastward course, and a few minutes will bring
you to Park street. Turn short to the left, follow the line of Park
street, and in a few minutes you will see that blessed beacon light in
this great sea of human misery and sin, the "Five Points Mission." You
are now fairly in the heart of the Five Points district. It is a
horrible place, and you shudder as you look at it. The streets are dark
and narrow, the dwellings are foul and gloomy, and seem filled with
mystery and crime. It is the worst quarter of the city, and from here,
over to East River, you will scarcely find it any better.
Yet, bad as it is, it is infinitely better than the Five Points of
fifteen or even ten years ago. Then the place was notorious for its
crimes. Murders, robberies, outrages of all kinds, were of daily
occurrence. The officers of the law dared not enter the district for
the purpose of suppressing crime, and fugitives from justice found a
safe refuge here. A man who entered the district carried his life in
his hand, and unless he was either in secret or open league with the
denizens of the quarter, was tolerably sure of losing it. Now there is
vice and crime enough there, Heaven knows, but the neighborhood has
vastly improved. The steady advance of business and trade up the island
has broken up many of the vilest dens of the quarter, and has made
travel through its streets more constant. Besides this, the new police
system has made the neighborhood safe, except at certain hours of the
night, by thoroughly patrolling it, and promptly punishing disorder and
violence. The character of the inhabitants has also improved, and the
district now contains thousands who are poor without being criminal.
The disreputable classes have been scattered, too, and no longer herd
together around the "Old Brewery," which was once the chosen
headquarters of crime. The Mission now occupies that locality, and the
work of the Lord is going on where the Devil once reigned supreme.
THE POPULATION.
Still, as we have said, crime and want are plentiful at the Five
Points. The Fourth, and Sixth wards, which constitute this district,
are known as the most wretched and criminal in the City. They are also
the most densely populated--one of them containing more people than the
entire State of Delaware.
The streets of this section of the city are generally narrow and
crooked, and the intense squalor and filth which disfigure them, cause
them to seem much darker than they really are. Every house is packed to
its utmost capacity. In some of these houses are to be found merely the
poor. In others the character of the inmates is such, that no policeman
will enter them alone, and not even in parties unless well armed.
These buildings seem overflowing with human beings. Half a million of
people are crowded into this and the adjacent quarters of the City. One
block of this district is said to contain three hundred and eighty-two
families. Dirt and filth of all kinds prevail.
[Illustration: A den in Baxter street.]
Few of the people can read or write, and the only education the
children receive is in crime. The houses are almost all entirely out of
repair. The stairways are ricketty, and seem on the point of giving way
beneath one's feet. The entries are dark and foul. As many as a dozen
people are crowded into a single room. Morality and decency are never
heard of. The cellars, so dark that one unaccustomed to them cannot see
a foot before him, without a bright light, are filled with wretched
inmates. Some of these have secret passages connecting them with other
buildings, and are used for purposes of crime, or they have hiding
places known only to the initiated, where the offender against the law
may hide from the police, or where a ruffian may conceal or imprison
his victim, without fear of detection. Rum, gin, whisky, and other
liquors of the vilest kind, are used in profusion here. Some of these
wretches never leave their dens, but remain in them "the year round,"
stupefied with liquor, to procure which their wives, children, or
husbands, will beg or steal. Thousands of children are born in these
foul places every year. They never see the light of day, until they are
able to crawl into the streets. They die at a fearful, but happy rate,
for they draw in with the air they breathe, disease of every
description.
It is said that there are forty thousand vagrant and destitute children
in this section of the great city. These are chiefly of foreign
parentage. They do not attend the public schools, for they have not the
clothes necessary to enable them to do so, and are too dirty and full
of vermin to render them safe companions for the other children. The
poor little wretches have no friends, but the pious and hard-working
_attachés_ of the Missions which have been located in their midst. In
the morning those who have charge of them drive them out of their
dreadful homes to pick rags, bones, cinders, or any thing that can be
used or sold, or to beg, or steal, for they are carefully trained in
dishonesty. They are disgustingly dirty, and all but the missionaries
shrink from contact with them. Some of them have the fatal gift of
beauty, but the majority are old looking and ugly. From the time they
are capable of noticing any thing they are familiar with vice and crime,
for they see them all around them. They grow up surely and steadily to
acquire the ways of their elders. The boys recruit the ranks of the
pick-pockets, thieves, murderers, and "thugs" of the City; the girls
become waiters in the concert saloons, or street walkers, and sink
thence down to the lowest depths of infamy. Water street alone can show
a thousand proofs of this assertion.
THE LITTLE THIEF.
A few years ago, there lived in the great city a little girl, so small
that no one would ever have thought her nine years old. Yet she had
passed nine sad years on earth. She lived with a couple who had a
cellar of their own at the Five Points. They were coarse, brutal
people, and spent the greater part of their time in drinking and
fighting. Little Nellie, for so we shall call her, went in rags, and
was frequently beaten with severity by those who called themselves her
parents, though no one knew whether she was their child or not. In the
long winters she almost perished with the cold, and was nearly half
famished with hunger. It was a wonder how she managed to live; for in
the coldest weather she was sent back and forth, through the freezing
streets, by her so-called parents, her only protection being a ragged
shawl, which she wrapped tightly around her head. Her little feet and
legs were bare and frost-bitten, and often left red tracks on the pure
white snow. At night her bed was a piece of old carpeting in a dark
corner of the cellar, where she cried herself to sleep, and wished she
could die. Young as she was, death was not terrible to her, for she
regarded it as a release from her sufferings. Had she known how to
pray, she would have prayed for it; but, in her ignorance she merely
wished to die.
Do not be shocked, reader, when we say she never prayed. The truth is
that, with the exception of the constant blasphemy of the people with
whom she lived, and of this she heard too much, she rarely heard of
God. Once she went into a church, and heard a man talk about Him in a
way she could not understand. When she heard the organ it sounded so
sweet that she thought God must be up there, and tried to see him; but
a great rough man put her out of the church, and told her it was no
place for such as her, (alas! God's house no place for the poor!) and
that if she ever came there again he would hand her over to the police.
She went away feeling shocked and hurt, and fully convinced that God
did not like beggars. Then she remembered how nice and warm the church
was, and how fine the people were dressed, and she began to wonder why
she had been made so poor and helpless.
"Ah! me," she sighed, "I'm not God's child. He wouldn't notice me, I'm
so poor, and dirty, and my feet are so frost-bitten."
She had no one to tell her how much God cares for the poor, how he
watches over them, and notes every good and bad deed done to them. She
thought he was careless of her; and when some one told her he could do
every thing, she wondered why he did not make her more comfortable, and
give her nice warm clothes to wear. Finally, little Nellie began to
think him a cruel, harsh God, and at last she came to hate him.
Terribly depraved, you will say, dear reader; but, alack, was she to
blame? God help us! there are many more like her in the great city.
When Nellie was eight years old, the husband of the woman with whom she
lived died, and the woman took to drinking harder than ever. This made
Nellie's lot worse than before the man's death. Then she had had some
brief respite from persecution; for, though the man had often beaten
her, he had sometimes saved her from the fury of his drunken wife. Now
there was no one to befriend her. The woman was rarely free from the
influence of liquor, and blows were showered upon the child more
frequently than ever. Poor little Nellie! her troubles increased every
day, and her desire to die became more eager. Sometimes she would go
down to the piers, and gaze on the dark waters that swept beneath them,
and would wonder if she would be at peace if she drowned herself. But,
though not afraid of death, the waters looked so fierce and angry that
they frightened her, and she would go away shuddering with a dread that
she could not understand. But for this, she would have sought in the
cool waves the rest for which she longed.
Matters went on from bad to worse, but at last they came to an end, but
not in the way Nellie wished. The woman with whom she lived began to
think that the child was old enough to be of some use to her, for she
was now nine years old. Alas! the use she made of her. There was
nothing honest which so young a child could do, so she resolved to try
her at dishonesty. It was a fearfully cold winter, and the woman's
intemperate habits had prevented her from earning a living. To remedy
this, she sent Nellie out with a basket, and told her to go to a
certain street where she had seen a number of bales of cotton, partly
opened, lying before a store. She bade the child watch her opportunity,
and, when no one was looking, to fill the basket, and run away with it
to her as rapidly as possible. Nellie did not like the undertaking, and
begged that she might not be sent; but the woman brutally told her if
she did not go and return in an hour, she would kill her.
Nellie started out with a heavy heart, for she had a vague foreboding
that something terrible was about to happen to her. She reached the
place, found the cotton, and, as no one was looking, soon filled her
basket. She was turning away, when a heavy hand was laid upon her
shoulder, and a rough voice exclaimed:
"You little thief! I've caught you, have I?"
Nellie glanced up in terror. A richly dressed man had hold of her, and
was shaking her roughly.
"Please, sir, let me go, and I'll put the cotton back."
"No you will not," he said coldly. "I'll teach you a lesson."
As he spoke, he beckoned a policeman from across the street, and told
him to arrest the child for stealing a dollar's worth of cotton. Nellie
was taken before a magistrate, and, the theft being proved, was sent on
for trial at the next term of the Court, and the merchant went away
satisfied. There was no one to "go bail" for her, and she was remanded
to the Tombs until the session of the court.
It made the jailer's heart ache to see that little child enter the cell
in which his duty compelled him to place her. He wondered why she had
not been sent to one of the numerous reformatory establishments, where
she might be saved from a life of crime. But no, the child had been
charged with theft, and the law required her to be tried for the crime,
and if convicted, to be sent to prison, to share the company of felons,
and sink, perhaps into infamy. God Help us, if this is always to be the
character of New York justice.
Nellie's life in prison was both pleasant and terrible. It was
pleasant, inasmuch as it freed her from the brutal woman with whom she
had lived, and terrible, because it left her alone all night in a cold,
dark cell.
At last, however, the end came. It was a terribly cold night, and the
prisoners in their cells suffered intensely. Some heard low sobs in
little Nellie's cell, but no attention was paid to them. The next
morning the turnkey went to visit her on his morning rounds, and he
found her lying stiff and cold. She had frozen to death during the
night, and her wish had been granted. The little thief had gone to the
bar of a judge who tempers justice with mercy, and who cares for those
who are helpless and oppressed.
There are some in the great city who will remember this incident, as it
has not been very long since its occurrence.
THE HOME MISSION.
Seventeen years ago the "Old Brewery," on Park street, was the centre
of crime in New York. The attention of the humane had been frequently
called to the amount of suffering and vice surrounding it, but all
seemed agreed that nothing could be done with the Five Points. Few had
the courage to venture there, and those who knew the place smiled
incredulously at the idea of reforming it. The "Old Brewery" was used
as a tenement house, and contained one thousand inmates, and a viler,
and more wretched set of people was not to be found in the great city.
A number of Christian women of position and means, who knew the
locality only by reputation, determined, with a courage peculiar to
their sex, to break up this den, and make it a stronghold of religion
and virtue. Their plan was regarded as chimerical; but undismayed by
the difficulties against them, they went to work, trusting in the help
of Him in whose cause they were laboring. A school was opened in Park
street, immediately facing the "Old Brewery," and placed in charge of
the Rev. Mr. L. M. Pease, of the Methodist Church. This school at once
gathered in the ragged, dirty children of the neighborhood, and at
first it seemed up-hill work to do any thing with them. Patience and
energy triumphed at last, however. The school became a success. Then
the ladies who had projected it, resolved to enlarge it. They purchased
the "Old Brewery," pulled it down, and built the present "Mission,"
which is now in charge of the Rev. Mr. Shaffer.
The Mission is dependent upon voluntary contributions for its support.
Food, clothing, money, and every thing that can be useful in such an
establishment, are given to it. They come in from all parts of the
country, for the Mission is widely known, and thousands of Christians
are working for it. The railroad and express companies send all
packages for it over their lines without charge.
Children are the chief care of the Mission. Those in charge of it
believe that first impressions are the strongest and most lasting. They
take young children away from the haunts of vice and crime, and clothe
and care for them. They are regularly and carefully instructed in the
rudiments of an English education, and are trained to serve the Lord,
who has raised up such kind friends to them. At a proper age they are
provided, with homes, or respectable employment, and placed in the way
to become Christian men and women. Hundreds, nay, thousands of good and
useful men and women have been reared by the institution since its
establishment. They were snatched from the haunts of crime when
children, and owe their present positions to the Mission. Year after
year the work goes on. Children are taken in every day as far as the
accommodations will permit, and are carefully trained in virtue and
intelligence, and every year the "Home," as its inmates love to call
it, sends out a band of bright, brave, useful young hearts into the
world, which but for its blessed aid would have been so many more
wretches added to the criminal class of the country.
Reader, if you can do any thing for this noble institution, do not hold
back your hand, but do it. Your help is needed.
OTHER MISSIONS.
Besides the "Home" to which we have referred, the "City Mission Home
for Little Wanderers," and the "Five Points House of Industry," are all
working hard for the purpose of bettering the condition of the poor and
wretched of the City. They are employing a band of energetic, hard-
working Christian men and women, and are doing good daily. There is no
doubt, however, that they succeed best with children. After the devil
has set his mark on men and women, it is very difficult to efface it;
but with children the case is different. They are too young to be
utterly abandoned or depraved, and they can, by care and patience, in
nine cases out of ten, be won over to the side of right.
Not only are persons drawn away from crime and vice by the active
efforts of the missionaries, but the Missions themselves do good. They
are well known, and they are constant reminders to the fallen that they
have a chance to rise. Some few avail themselves of the chance. Men and
women, especially young ones, frequently come in and appeal to the
missionaries to help them to reform. They want advice, assistance, or
protection. Whatever is needed is given, if it be within the means of
the institution. If it is not, the missionary seeks it elsewhere, and
rarely fails to find it. Few who are ignorant of the workings of these
institutions, can rightly estimate the amount of good done by them.
They are indeed "Cities of Refuge," to which no one ever goes in vain.
A part of the work of the "City Mission" is to distribute tracts and
simple religious instruction. These are simple little documents, but
they do a deal of good. They have reformed drunkards, converted the
irreligious, shut the mouth of the swearer, and have brought peace to
more than one heart. The work is done so silently and unpretendingly
that few but those engaged in it know how great are its effects. They
are encouraged by the evidences which they have, and continue their
work gladly.
Again, these Missionaries are constantly going into sections of the
City, from which the "popular preachers" shrink in dismay, and but for
their devotion there are thousands of our poor who would never have the
Gospel preached to them. They watch beside the bedside of the sick and
dying, administer the last rites of religion to the repentant pauper,
and offer to the Great Judge the only appeal for mercy that is ever
made in behalf of many a soul that departs in its sins. They shrink
from no trouble, no sacrifice. They are a hard-working, self-denying,
noble band.
THE HOME FOR LITTLE WANDERERS.
This institution is situated on the Bowery, near Pearl street, and is
in charge of the Rev. Mr. Van Meter. It is also called the "Howard
Mission." While striving to relieve all who call upon it for aid, its
care is chiefly given to children. Its object is to rescue the little
ones from want and suffering, and make them comfortable. They are
educated, and taught their duty as children of the Lord, and at a
certain age are provided with homes or trades. Little ones, starving or
freezing in the streets, are picked up constantly and brought in here.
The police often bring in such guests. All are welcomed and made as
comfortable as possible. You may see them warmly and neatly clad, or
tucked away in a snug bed, little children, even babies, who but the
night before were almost dying with cold in the streets.
Like the "Ladies' Home," the "Little Wanderers' Home" is entirely
dependent on voluntary contributions for its support.
[Illustration: Fifth Avenue Hotel.]