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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I went searching for the Five Points when I first came to New York, and couldn't find them anywhere. Not a single point left sticking up, it seemed, even in the thornier city of the early eighties. The Five Points, I knew from the book I clutched in my hand as I went looking, was an intersection of three downtown streets--Anthony, Orange, and Cross (later Worth, Baxter, and Park)--which formed five corners, and it had once been the legendary neighborhood of New York crime and New York criminals. These weren't the kind of criminals we had now but a more interesting sort, with neat names and great hats. It was the place where the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies and the Shirt Tails had lived and fought, a place that had supported a life more engagingly violent than the mundanely violent city I had come to seemed able to entertain. But there was nothing--not a plaque, much less a point--to suggest where all that had been, and so I ate a Chinese lunch around the corner, and went home. (Even today, in the company of crack city historians, you can't get a clear answer about just where the Five Points were: just shrugs and vague gestures toward an area of concrete and park benches down near the Foley Square courthouse--somewhere around here, those points, all five of them.)
Like many another newcomer to New York, I was looking for the Five Points because I had been caught in the spell of what struck me as a really cool book, Herbert Asbury's "The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld," published in 1928, which I had found in a first edition in a secondhand bookstore on East Eighty-sixth Street. Its subject is the low life of New York during the nineteenth century, particularly the world of Five Points and the gangs that grew up there, and the dives they made, and the municipal riots of 1857, and the Draft Riots of 1863, which gets two chapters. "The Gangs of New York," which has recently been reissued in a paperback edition by Thunder's Mouth ($14.95), remains an incomparably incoherent, disorganized, and curiously enrapturing book.
The bookstore is gone now, as are most of the German restaurants that surrounded it, in what is still sometimes called Yorkville, and this gives, perhaps, the first clue to the spell cast by Asbury's book: "Gangs" provided a New York romantic with something that wasn't otherwise in evidence--a richly feudal and ritualistic past. (And newcomers to New York are romantics, or they wouldn't have come.) In its raffish invocation of a lost subculture, it seemed heart-lifting, thrilling, even if the more sober parts of your mind knew that Asbury's violent criminals were no different from the violent criminals who were still around to make your life miserable.
Not long after I bought the book, I found that it was the center of a cult. Copies changed hands with the excitement of Dylan bootlegs; my copy changed hands and stayed there. Although Asbury's book is local, its spell was not provincial. It was intense enough to reach all the way down south to Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, who one would have thought had plenty of violent urban mythology of his own to contemplate without need of a transfusion from lower Manhattan. In 1933, Borges wrote a feverish short story...
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