The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky

Author:Mark Kurlansky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781588365910
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Something ought to be done for the honour of the city, if for no other reason than to render the place less disgusting and pernicious, it being the resort of thieves and rogues of the lowest degree, and by its filthy state and villainous smells keeps respectable people from residing near it.

There was a growing outcry to simply raze the neighborhood, which in 1829 the press started referring to as “Five Points” after a five-pointed intersection where Anthony Street intersected Cross and Orange. Today it is where downtown meets Chinatown, the area at the foot of Pearl, Mulberry, and Mott Street below Canal Street. The idea of slum clearance was born. The fate of the Collect began a pattern that was to be repeated over the years throughout New York. A beautiful place is allowed to fall into disrepair, becoming the home of the poor and immigrants, who are the only ones willing to live there. Ignored and abused, it becomes an infamous slum and then there is an outcry to just level the terrible place and build something else.

Along with Davy Crockett, Charles Dickens, the phenomenally popular British novelist and inveterate slummer, was one of the early Five Points visitors. On his 1842 trip to America, already a literary star and just turning thirty, barely looking that old, he visited the slum.

It is usually said that Dickens came to America bearing a grudge because American copyright laws failed to guarantee him the enormous sums that his popularity in the United States should have earned him. But his account, American Notes, was certainly no more grumpy than Domestic Manners of the Americans, the journal that launched the literary career of Fanny Trollope on her disastrous 1827 trip to build a utopian community in America. The mother of the future novelist Anthony Trollope observed that “The Americans have certainly not the same besoin of being amused, as other people; they may be the wiser for this, perhaps, but it makes them less agreeable to a looker-on.”

She also explained:

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