"Prayer-Time in the Nursery - Five Points House of Industry."
Photograph by Jacob Riis, featured in his book How the Other Half Lives (1890).
Five Points was a crime- and poverty-ridden area in southern Manhattan (New York City).
In 1890, the Five Points neighborhood remained a notorious byword for urban squalor. Though its most violent era had passed, the Lower Manhattan slum was still a densely packed, disease-ridden district of crumbling tenements, sweatshops, and saloons. A melting pot of impoverished Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Chinese immigrants, it was a place of relentless struggle, yet also possessed a raw, vibrant energy that was uniquely New York.
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