The Vibrant Culture of Five Points, an 1830’s New York Slum

Culture is subjective. It is an element that ‘people’ carry with them, a means of celebrating themselves and their ‘identities’. A certain space becomes culturally rich when its inhabitants start projecting their traditions into their living space and its vicinity. In countries where culture is highly evident, it is usually a part of the everyday chores of the inhabitants, embedded in how they live their lives, what activities they perform, what food they eat, what is their leisure like etc. It’s a way of expressing and projecting an image of a certain community. New York City has always been a city of immigrants, absorbing and welcoming different cultures from all around the globe. The culture of New York is devised by the types of ethnicities that occupy a certain region at a certain frame in time. Five Points was a slum in New York that was a set example of how culture evolves or drastically changes with changes in ethnic groups. The paper explores culture and its meaning in the notorious slum of ‘Five Points’. It highlights the various cultural activities that existed and started in the slum, making it a culturally vibrant place. The paper not only tries to understand the cultural activities but also maps out the change in these activities with shifts in ethnicities occupying the slum area. ‘Culture’ is subjective to the ‘people’ and with a slum clearance, there is not just eradication of a slum, but also displacement of its people, stripping off the culture of the space. Through the course of the research, the paper also tries to understand the effect of displacement on the slum and the detrimental effects of slum clearances/redevelopment on culture. The paper tries to identify the cultural richness of Five Points, link the cultural shift to time and people, and establish the loss of culture with the ‘loss’ (displacement) of people.