Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public History, and Representations of Poverty, Crime, and Race in New York City

The past is never truly past, nor are historians/archaeologists privileged stewards of a city's memory. The moment ground was broken at Five Points, researchers encountered a public avidly interested in the history of New York's legendary nineteenth-century slum. From the 1840s this Manhattan neighborhood provided journalists with grist for lurid tabloid tales, creating a grim literary legacy that lingers in popular historical memory into the twenty-first century and also continues to shape public perceptions of poverty and antipoverty policies. New York's press remains steeped in memories of a crime-infested Five Points. Even as researchers uncovered nineteenth-century accounts of gangs, prostitution, and sweat-shop labor at the Five Points, our own newspapers arrived with blaring headlines drawing on nineteenth-century stereotypes of poverty, race, and place. The struggle to create alternative accounts of life in Five Points based on archaeological evidence clashed with these tenacious narratives and the class interests informing them.