Five Points (Columbus Park)

Today this park is one of the liveliest corners of Chinatown: basketball courts, games of xiangqi, Chinese chess, and neighbors practicing tai chi at dawn. It's hard to imagine that this was the heart of the most famous, and most feared, neighborhood of 19th-century New York: Five Points.

1Five corners

The name came from an intersection of three streets that formed five corners, next to the southwest end of today's park. On the sinking ground of the old Collect Pond, tenements piled up, home to Irish immigrants, free African Americans, and later Italians and Chinese, in brutal conditions.

2Dickens, gangs and a movie

In 1842 Charles Dickens toured the neighborhood with a police escort and described it with horror in his «American Notes». There were gangs with names like the Dead Rabbits, who in July 1857 fought the Bowery Boys in one of the worst riots of the era. In 1928 Herbert Asbury gathered those stories, mixing fact with exaggeration, in «The Gangs of New York», which Martin Scorsese brought to the screen in 2002.

Five Points was also a melting pot: in its dance halls, Irish jigs mixed with African American rhythms.

In the late 19th century, the photographer and journalist Jacob Riis exposed the conditions of the so-called Mulberry Bend in «How the Other Half Lives» (1890). His campaign helped get the tenements torn down and this park opened in 1897.

3What to look for

• The stone pavilion with arches, one of the oldest features of the park.
• The curve of Mulberry Street, the «Mulberry Bend» that Riis photographed.
• The Centre Street courthouses, built over part of the old neighborhood.