Irish Immigration-Background:

The potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s spurred the migration of thousands of impoverished Irish to the United States. The new immigrants—rural, Catholic, and starving—settled in the poorest districts of large cities in the East, including in New York’s Five Points neighborhood in downtown Manhattan. They were poor when they arrived and settled in one of New York’s poorest and most run-down neighborhoods. On top of this, Irish Five Pointers worked for some of the lowest wages in the most dangerous and unstable jobs in the city. 

The 1850s marked the start of rapid change in American society, as the country became more urban, more industrialized, and, because of changes in transportation and communication technologies, more connected. Immigration is an important part of this story, both because immigrants contributed to the growing urban population and because their cheap labor fueled the factories and built the roads, canals, tunnels, and rail lines of the emerging industrial order.

“Sunshine and Shadow.” Source: Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1866)This image depicts New York City as two opposite, polar societies: one wealthy and successful, the other poor and diseased.

Mid-nineteenth-century publications presented the East’s industrializing cities, such as New York, as fractured societies. According to articles, novels, and city guides, New York was really two cities: one

orderly, prosperous, and bathed in “sunlight,” the other menacing, poor, and steeped in “darkness.”

Artifact K) New York State Census Page of Five Points, 1855Source: James McDonough, "Population, Census of the Inhabitants in the Fifth Election District of the Sixth Ward of the City in the County of New York," New York, 1855.

This page from the 1855 census for New York City's Sixth Ward, the home of the Five Points neighborhood, includes residents of two buildings. The census shows the age, birthplace, occupation, years living in New York, and household of each individual listed.