Abstract
For 150 years, the Five Points has been depicted as New York’s center of vice and debauchery. Recent historical and archaeological investigations conclude that while the area contained abysmal sanitary conditions, poverty, and prostitution, many of the oft-told stories of the Five Points’ depravity are gross exaggerations. This article examines how literature produced by 19th-century missionaries and moral reformers helped create these myths. Throughout these works, the Five Points symbolized the immorality of urban life and was used to show middle-class readers the importance of their own ideology of domesticity. The reformers exaggerated the area’s poverty and stereotyped its inhabitants to illustrate the consequences of not adhering to middle-class principles of respectability and domesticity. By creating a sensational and one-sided image of urban poverty, writers created a stereotype of 19th-century working-class neighborhoods that would survive into the mid-20th century.
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Fitts, R. The rhetoric of reform: The five points missions and the cult of domesticity. Hist Arch 35, 115–132 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374397
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374397