Five Points was a place both mythical and material. It was a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan that ran from Bowery to Centre Street, south of Canal Street, where gangs with names like the Forty Thieves and the Bowery Boys battled nightly. Five Points was an inner-city slum; the people there were largely new immigrants from Italy, Germany, and Ireland. Thousands of women who arrived in New York unaccompanied or who had families to support spent short, brutal lives there as prostitutes. Sewage from the nearby canal poisoned the water and the ground, and airless tenements housed sometimes dozens of men, women, and children in one room. Along the canal stood a prison known as the Tombs.
In the eighteenth century, however, Five Points had been the site of a beautiful clear lake called “the collect pond.” Nearby Bunker Hill emerged out of miles of forest there, and from its crest you could see birds rippling the waters of the lake: egrets, woodpeckers, black-eyed blue jays, and cardinals in their showy red cloaks. A winding horse path led to small homes, and beyond that the white walls of mercantile buildings, all dwarfed by the spire of St. Paul’s Chapel.
Then, around the lake grew a row of slaughterhouses and tanneries, which began to fill the Collect Pond with their offal. By the time Charlotte walked into Five Points in 1839 it was America’s first slum. When Charles Dickens visited the neighborhood on his American tour, he found it at least as bad as the London slums he fictionalized in Oliver Twist: “narrow ways diverging to the left and right, and reeking every where with dirt and filth.” Seeing pigs in the streets, Dickens asked, “Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all fours?” The aristocrats of Five Points, it was said, were the butchers, because their children never went hungry.
Collect Pond, New York (1798)
Middle-class tourists might pay to go “slumming” in Five Points with a police escort, holding camphor-soaked handkerchiefs to their noses to see how the poor really lived, but women rarely went there unless they were dedicated social reformers. A woman did not wander off there alone, without telling anyone where she was going.
Walking alone among the smell of roasted corn and the cries of the “hot corn girls,” Charlotte heard music spilling out onto the street from nearly every bar and public house, and a new kind of percussive dancing born in Five Points called “tap.” When she got thirsty, she could buy a lemonade or shandy from a German street vendor. Passing a dilapidated building called “the old Brewery” that housed more than a thousand people (once a cheerful yellow, it now squatted in the neighborhood like a toad), Charlotte walked the same streets Whitman frequented. While even well-meaning social reformers tended to think of violence and crime as the special talent of the poor, Whitman saw Five Points as a wellspring of “the Republic’s most needed asset, the wealth of stout poor men who will work.” Immigrants did their best to make tenement apartments into homes, decorating their mantels with pictures and keepsakes of the life they’d left behind. Although Charlotte’s family had come to America on the Mayflower, she was driven by the same dream as these new immigrants.
She was empathetic toward the prostitutes she met, and she watched them carefully to find the spark of recognition that would help her bring Nancy to life. She had no trouble finding prostitutes, since, as one observer wrote, “every house was a brothel” and “every brothel a hell.” Charlotte also saw generational poverty, and how the lack of opportunities for work was especially crushing for women and girls. It was not unusual, wrote one journalist, for a mother and two or three daughters “to receive their ‘men’ at the same time in the same room.”
As with the character of Meg, the authenticity of Nancy’s costume could help her feel real to the audience. During one of her walks, Charlotte offered to trade clothes with a dying prostitute. She gave up a simple but well-made silk dress and put on the woman’s rags. These would be Nancy’s clothes.
The grass around the Park Theatre was crisscrossed with shortcuts. Street vendors sold hunks of gingerbread, oysters, fried beefsteak, and pungent pickled red herring scooped from a barrel. Behind the theatre, Charlotte carefully navigated an alley knee-deep with filth. In the bag slung over her arm were a dead woman’s clothes. Like the heroine of the Brothers Grimm’s “Allerleirauh,” she’d traded her fine dress for rags, and it had been a fair trade.
In the green room, Charlotte’s fellow actors made strange sounds and movements as they warmed up their voices and did calisthenics. She warmed up and dressed in secret. Waiting in the wings for her cue, she could hear the audience laughing and gasping as Dickens’s drama unfolded. The warmth of the gaslight dried their wet woolen winter clothes. The theatre was full, from the plush, velvet-lined box seats to the benches where women spread out their wide, rigid skirts. The galleries were draped in a swath of baize, the bright kelly green of a billiard table. Behind the galleries the walls were brilliantly whitewashed and the iron columns that supported them were made to look as though “covered with burnished gold.”
Of the three main theatres in New York the Park was the only one considered fashionable, though some secretly thought the Bowery was more beautiful. The third competitor, the Chatham Theatre, was out of favor, “so utterly condemned by bon ton, that it require[d] some courage to decide upon going there.” But even in the audience at the Park men stripped off their coats and hung them over the gallery railing, showed up with unshaven upper lips stained by tobacco. The European
