five points neighborhood

Who lived in Five Points? Recently emancipated African Americans first peopled Five Points during the 1790's. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, due to the early wave of European (mainly Irish and German) immigration into the city, the area was one of New York's most densely populated and diverse neighborhoods. At the time approximately 31 percent of the city's immigrant population and nearly 12 percent of the city's African American population lived there.

Beginning in the mid-1820s and reaching its peak between 1845 and the eve of the Civil War, a huge influx of European immigrants arrived in the Five Points district. Some of the native-born Euro- and African-American residents left the neighborhood. Five Points became predominantly Irish, although there was a large German population as well.