3reckner - Remembering Gotham

P1: GCP/GVG/GIR/GOQ P2: GMX/GCZ
International Journal of Historical Archaeology [jha] pp519-ijha-375290 June 18, 2002 12:28 Style file version June 4th, 2002
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2002 (°

C 2002)
Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public

History, and Representations of Poverty,
Crime, and Race in New York City
Paul Reckner1
The “past” is never truly past, nor are historians/archaeologists privileged

stewards of a city’s memory. The moment ground was broken at Five Points,
researchers encountered a public avidly interested in the history of New York’s
legendary nineteenth-century “slum.” From the 1840s this Manhattan neighbor-
hood provided journalists with grist for lurid tabloid tales, creating a grim literary
legacy that lingers in popular historical memory into the twenty-first century and
also continues to shape public perceptions of poverty and antipoverty policies. New
York’s press remains steeped in memories of a crime-infested Five Points. Even
as researchers uncovered nineteenth-century accounts of gangs, prostitution, and
sweat-shop labor at the Five Points, our own newspapers arrived with blaring
headlines drawing on nineteenth-century stereotypes of poverty, race, and place.
The struggle to create alternative accounts of life in Five Points based on archae-
ological evidence clashed with these tenacious narratives and the class interests
informing them.
KEY WORDS: historical memory; public archaeology; narrative representation; public policy and
poverty.
FIVE POINTS MEETS THE PRESS—A PROLOGUE
In 1995, after several years of research on archaeological material recovered

from Five Points, New York City’s signature “slum” of the nineteenth century, a
reporter from a hip and widely read city paper, The Village Voice, approached the
project’s principal investigator regarding the possibility of doing a story. Portrayals
of Five Points in nineteenth-century newspapers, reformist literature, and voyeuris-
tic “Urban Sketches” genre literature focused on the vice, immorality, and brutality
1 Department
of Anthropology, State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton, Binghamton,
New York 13902-6000; e-mail: cluny@igc.org.
95
1092-7697/02/0600-0095/0 °
C 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation
96 Reckner
of the impoverished and working-class neighborhood. The project’s research de-

sign drew on archaeological evidence to recuperate other aspects of the community
that had been silenced (sensu Trouillot, 1995) by the interests of zealous reformers
and tabloid journalists (see Yamin, 1998a; Yamin and Milne, 1994, on the Five
Points).
The article, crafted by Voice reporter Julie Lobbia, made precisely the points
the archaeologists hoped to convey, albeit under the racy title, “Let Us Now Praise
Famous Slums” (Lobbia, 1996). Project staff remained blissfully unaware of the
public debate regarding the nature of historical knowledge about to commence.
A scathing editorial appeared on the cover of another New York weekly, the New
York Press. The Voice reporter was chided for covering an overly fashionable piece
of New York history, that “slummy hellhole of a neighborhood,” and for failing to
note her debt to Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York (Asbury, 1927/1990; New
York Press, 1996a). Five Points researchers assumed that the editor had misread,
or simply had not read, the Voice article. The distinctions between our conceptions
of Five Points and those of Asbury were ignored.
The following week, more letters appeared in the Press seconding the primacy
of Asbury’s text (New York Press, 1996b,c). One letter further claimed that the
recent bestseller, Low Life (Sante, 1991), was “nothing but a phony, hipster rewrite”
of Asbury’s Gangs (New York Press, 1996c). A coworker and I grew frustrated
and penned a response emphasizing that, as entertaining as Asbury’s and Sante’s
yarns are, they rely heavily on police crime blotters and other highly biased sources.
Lobbia’s Voice article (and our research) attempted to look beyond slum stereotypes
to the politics of representations of poverty, race, and crime in past and present.
The letter appeared in the following week’s Press under the dubious heading,
“On the Square,” along with yet another letter boasting of Asbury’s “perfectly struc-
tured and infinitely quotable historical masterpiece” (New York Press, 1996d,e).
The writer implied that archaeologists’ efforts to “sanitize” Five Points’ criminal
history reeked of politically “right-wing” revisionism (New York Press, 1996e).
Project researchers were perplexed and a bit disappointed. Why this invest-
ment in tales of the impoverished and criminal world of New York’s slums? Why
was the debate focused on popular writers who had drawn on the City’s seedy his-
tory rather than on the content of Lobbia’s article? And what was it that led one critic
to see in our work a strand of conservatism linked to the sanitizing of New York’s
past? This essay attempts to untangle some of the strands of the Five Points debate
by focusing attention on the interests (often multiple and even contradictory) and
groups that invest in particular representations of the past, and, equally important,
the work of historical memory in framing public policy debates in the present.
THE PRODUCTION OF HISTORICAL MEMORY: AN OVERVIEW
At the heart of the Voice–Press debate, and other struggles over histori-
cal representations, lies the nature of the production of historical memory itself.
Remembering Gotham 97
Reference to a past (or pasts) permeates social life and communication (Connerton,
1989). Long before historians’ formal work reaches the attention of most read-
ers (if it ever does), images of the past in the form of novels and newspapers,
movies, and television programs have powerfully shaped popular understand-
ings of the past (Barthes, 1988; Leone and Silberman, 1995). This is particularly
true in a place like New York City, which figures prominently in national me-
dia and mythology (Bodnar, 1992). The investment of different groups of New
Yorkers in particular historical narratives is shaped by experiences, social iden-
tity, and class position. Social identities are deeply rooted in historical visions
which are strongly defined along intersecting axes of race/ethnicity, class, and
gender.
Newspaper stories and novels do more than simply inform “public” historical
memories, however. The narratives these sources employ also impact journalists
(as well as historians and researchers) as consumers of popular media in their
own right (Di Leonardo, 1998). The relationship between academic, popular, and
journalistic literatures is more complex than generally acknowledged. While each
may represent a different discourse on the past, and critiques of the form and
content of these genre as separate and distinct texts can be very fruitful (e.g.,
Leone and Silberman, 1995), the boundaries that separate academic and popu-
lar literatures are also quite permeable (Di Leonardo, 1998, pp. 20–24). Denying
their interpenetration conceals the influences they exert on one another. Cross-
fertilization between literatures is in no way unidirectional—so-called academic
research shapes popular historical narratives, but the impact of popular images of
the past on research-driven history is equally powerful and rarely acknowledged or
interrogated (Di Leonardo, 1998, pp. 20–24). Di Leonardo (1998, p. 21) observes
that “representations are authorized inside the symbiotic relationship between of-
ficial scholarship and popular interpretation.” Attention to narrative forms and
discursive frameworks helps bridge the academic–popular literature split.
Narratives, as common and widely understood discursive frameworks, en-
able particular types of communication and explanation while foreclosing others
(Foucault, 1972, 1980; Galloway, 1991; Roseberry, 1996; Vansina, 1987). Trouillot
(1995, pp. 70–107) usefully characterizes the power of narratives as shaping what is
“thinkable,” and conversely (but perhaps more importantly) what is “unthinkable,”
about the past.
This study is an effort to grapple with the dynamics of historical memory and
the struggles fought through and over remembered pasts. From the perspective
of the Five Points Archaeological Project, particular narratives of race, poverty,
and crime in nineteenth-century journalistic and reformist literature continue to
shape popular understandings of New York’s past and present. The pervasiveness
of these narratives in newspaper reports, novels, television shows, and movies
makes it difficult for researchers to interject alternative interpretations of the past
into public debates (see Baker, 1992; Leone et al., 1987; Potter, 1994; Stahl et al.,
2000, on similar conflicts in other archaeological contexts). Five Points project
98 Reckner
archaeologists were by no means sequestered from mainstream narratives, and

these stories resonated with and refracted our emerging understandings of Five
Points history.
TALES OF GOTHAM OR THE CRAZED, THE CRIMINAL,

AND “THE DANGEROUS CLASSES”
The changing constellation of meanings associated with New York’s other

nickname, Gotham, serves as a touchstone for contemplating the emergence of a
distinctly urban, bourgeois rhetoric of the relationship between poverty, race, and
criminality in the nineteenth century (see Foucault, 1977, on similar developments
in France). For recent generations of Americans, Gotham evokes a vision of New
York City as seen through the eyes of Batman (see Kane, 1989, p. 44, on the origins
of the Caped Crusader’s city). Gotham is the dark underbelly of a universalized
urban landscape. However, Washington Irving actually coined the name of Gotham
for New York City in his 1807 Salmagundi Papers (Burrows and Wallace, 1999,
p. xii). He pinched the moniker from a series of tales dated as early as 1200 C.E.
relating a bewildering array of foolish and thick-headed acts alleged to have been
committed by residents of the Nottinghamshire village of Gotham (Kahrl, 1965;
Stapleton, 1900/1975). The course of Gotham’s lexical transformation from foolish
to threatening and criminal parallels the emergence of a distinctly urban, middle-
class discourse on the nature of poverty, crime, and race in the city.
In 1842, Charles Dickens described New York City’s Five Points district in
his American Notes, “This is the place, these narrow ways, diverting to the right
and left, and reeking everywhere of dirt and filth” (Dickens, 1842/1985, p. 80).
During the midnineteenth century, journalists and writers made forays into the
impoverished “back slums” of major urban centers all over the world, returning to
shock and educate their typically middle-class readers with startling images of the
material and moral conditions of the urban poor (see Mayne, 1993, on the extent
of the genre).2 This genre became known variously as “Sunshine and Shadows”
or “Urban Sketches” literature, and its formula involved bombarding readers with
images (allegedly witnessed firsthand by the author) of the prosperous and ener-
getic urban bourgeoisie contrasted against the poverty, vice, and immorality of the
city’s swelling underclasses. In the United States, the categorization of impover-
ished city dwellers as “other” was also accomplished through reference to racial,
ethnic, and national identities that set these groups apart from the predominantly
Anglo-Protestant, American-born middle class (Mayne, 1993; Ward, 1989). The
notion that such different lives could be lived a mere city block away both titillated
and terrified bourgeois readers.
2 By the 1880s, paralleling the crystallization of the Urban Sketches genre, the practice of “slumming,”
touring impoverished sections of a city by “reformers . . . bourgeois journalists and tourists,” became
codified in common language usage (Mayne, 1993, p. 128).
Later detective novel genres (including the early Batman serials) and radio and
television detective/crime series owe a direct debt to the Urban Sketches format.
The narrative structure deployed in these genres exerted, and continues to exert, a
powerful influence, shaping middle-class readers’ identities, their understandings
of impoverished urban dwellers, and, most importantly, the way they conceive of
the urban world and its social order (Blumin, 1990). Urban spaces such as Five
Points, so often labeled as marginal, have, paradoxically, been at the heart of public
discourses on poverty and the poor for at least two centuries.
FIVE POINTS: SLUM AND SYMBOL
Five Points describes, in spatial terms, the intersection of Anthony (later

Worth), Orange (later Baxter), and Cross (later Park) streets on Manhattan’s Lower
East Side. The square formed at this confluence was a mecca of working-class
street life, replete with saloons, oyster houses, and a bustling commercial district.
Symbolically, the boundaries of “Five Points as slum” were more indeterminate,
overshadowed by the imagined and symbolic places constructed through repre-
sentation (Mayne, 1993, pp. 150–165). The authors of the Urban Sketches genre
and related literature crafted this mythological landscape for their readers.3
An example from Dickens (1842/1985) illustrates how images of the slum
and slum dwellers reified popular middle-class ideologies. In the company of two
police officers the author toured the Five Points neighborhood where he claimed
that “Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old . . . [and] nearly every
house is a low tavern” (Dickens, 1842/1985, p. 80). He observed that “Such lives
as are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces
at the doors have counterparts at home [in England] and all the wide world over”
(Dickens, 1842/1985, p. 80). This last refers readers back to Dickens’s surveys
of impoverished areas of Manchester. Dickens describes the landlady of a fash-
ionable Five Points gathering places as “A buxom fat mulatto woman” (Dickens,
1842/1985, p. 80). The theme of racial mixing among the poor, another fear of
the urban, Euro-American middle-class, appears in different forms in many Urban
Sketches pieces.
George Foster’s vision of Five Points echoes elements of Dickens’s text
(Foster, 1850/1990). Foster’s New York by Gas–Light makes an oblique refer-
ence to the already well known “moral geography” of the neighborhood, and the
piece entitled “The Points at Midnight” reveals “a sad, an awful sight—a sight to
make the blood slowly congeal and the heart to grow fearful and cease its beatings”
(Foster, 1850/1990, p. 120).
Foster claims to have witnessed mother-and-daughter prostitute teams,
“sailors, Negroes and the worst of loafers and vagabonds . . . enticed and per-
haps even dragged in by the painted Jezebels [prostitutes]” and cellar-level oyster
3 See Cook (1998) for an analysis of visual representations of Five Points.
100 Reckner
saloons “for the accommodation of thieves, burglars, low gamblers and vagabonds”
(Foster, 1850/1990, pp. 121–123). The reader is regaled with stories of battles in
an alley called “Cow Bay” between “the police and the fighting-men among the
Etheopian [sic] tribes.” Foster passes fences, “shops for the reception and purchase
of stolen goods,” along Orange Street, “of course kept entirely by Jews” (Foster,
1850/1990, pp. 125–127). As dawn approaches and he sets off from Five Points,
Foster holds forth on the sad lure of prostitution for
young women of the country, who, seduced and in the way of becoming mothers, fly from
home . . . murdering their infants as soon as born, or abandoning them upon a doorstep,
they are thenceforth ready for any course of crime . . . a kind of moral insanity (Foster,
1850/1990, pp. 130–131).
Note the reference to infanticide, an issue that reemerged in the context of

archaeology at Five Points. Foster’s writing provided readers with evidence—
facts witnessed firsthand—of the fundamental moral failings of the urban poor
(1850/1990, p. 121). The rhetoric of authority through direct observation plays a
powerful role in legitimating Foster’s claims.
Foster’s Five-Pointers are diametrically opposed to bourgeois ideals of moral-
ity, industry, and temperance, and to a native-born Euro-American identity. They
do not simply violate middle-class values—they transgress with glee and, in so
doing, are clearly defined as members of what Smith (1869) would call the “danger-
ous classes.” The notion that such a threat, a virtual army of the “morally insane,”
could exist on the margins of bourgeois New York left Foster’s largely middle-class
audience both fearful and perversely curious. In this regard, the dangerous classes
represent a new class-conscious twist on the old trope of “the Mob” (see Gilje,
1987; Marx, 1964; Thompson, 1993).
Authority is similarly constructed in Smith’s popular Sunshine and Shadow
in New York (Smith, 1869). In it, he claimed “to sketch New York as I have seen
it. From original and reliable sources I have drawn my information” (Smith, 1869,
p. 3). Smith paints an almost apocalyptic image of New York’s poor. The threat
of the dangerous classes, their poverty, violence, and disease are seen to lurk just
around the corner from the bourgeois city. His final description of the children of
Five Points paints for its middle-class readers a frightening vision of the future:
Their parents are foreigners. They are too dirty, too ragged, and carry too much vermin about
them . . . their homes are in the dens and stews of the city, where the thieves, vagabonds,
gamblers and murderers dwell . . . They are familiar with every form of wickedness and
crime. As they grow up they swell the ranks of the dangerous classes (Smith, 1869, p. 208).
Brace (1880) would later draw on the final words of Smith’s characterization of
Five Points youth for the title of his monumental volume, The Dangerous Classes
of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them. According to the grim New
York novel, The Destruction of Gotham (Miller, 1886) published only a few years
after Brace’s influential volume, the “very first of the Ten Commandments of New
York [is]: ‘THOU SHALT NOT BE POOR!’”
The publication of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among
the Tenements of New York transformed the Urban Sketches genre through the ap-
plication of photographic technology (Gandal, 1997, pp. 13–15; Riis, 1890/1972).
Riis’s influential study combined the well-established narrative style of the genre
with photographic images of life in New York’s slums. This innovation, drawing
on the powerful, but illusory authority of the photograph, further extended the
rhetoric of direct observation as the basis for knowledge claims regarding the ma-
terial and moral state of the urban poor (Schwartz, 1999). Riis invited his readers
to “see for themselves” through the allegedly objective lens of the camera (see
Hebdige, 1988; Tagg, 1988). In his Preface, Riis (1890/1972) states that
The belief that every man’s experience ought to be worth something to the community . . . so
long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work, made me begin this work.
With the result before him, the reader can judge for himself.
Riis’s vignettes correlate the material aspects of poverty with drinking and smok-
ing, inappropriate sexual behavior, criminality, violence, nonnative ethnicity, racial
mixing, and disease. While Riis’s intention was to expose and ameliorate the bru-
tal material conditions of New York’s poor and he occasionally acknowledged the
exploitative conditions under which the working poor were forced to labor, his
narrative style conformed closely to that of Foster and other, less sympathetic,
observers (see Gandal, 1997, for a close analysis of Riis’s complex discourse on
poverty and the poor). The underlying causes of the conditions Riis documented
continued to be understood by readers as self-explanatory, already well estab-
lished through the narrative—the “reader can judge for himself” (Riis, 1890/1972,
Preface).
In no other volume is the threat of the impoverished urban masses more clearly
articulated than Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the
Underworld (Asbury, 1927). Asbury’s introduction explains that
This book . . . makes no pretense to offering solutions for the social, economic and crimi-
nological problems presented by the gangs . . . On the contrary, it is an attempt to chronicle
the more spectacular exploits of the refractory citizen who was a dangerous nuisance in
New York . . . with sufficient indication of his background of vice, poverty and political
corruption to make him understandable (Asbury, 1927, p. xiii).
Despite his claims to the contrary, Asbury offers not a solution to criminality, but
certainly an explanation in which “vice, poverty, and political corruption” (closely
allied to nonnative ethnicity) are the only context.
The forgoing survey of literature in the Urban Sketches genre is by no means
exhaustive (on Five Points, see also Campbell, 1892; Crane, 1893/1979; Duffy,
1968; Hemstreet, 1899; Ratzel, 1876/1988). Explicitly reformist literature such
as The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points (Ladies of
the Mission, 1854) closely reproduced the Urban Sketches formula, and major
newspapers and magazines regularly ran similar stories (on Five Points, see New
York Transcript, 1833–1834; New York Evening Post, 1834–1835; Frank Leslie’s
102 Reckner
Illustrated Newspaper, 1857; New York: A Collection From Harper’s Magazine,

1991; Pitts, 1996, on Five Points in the nineteenth-century penny press). The
overlap between the Urban Sketches genre and contemporary journalism in both
style and the writers themselves (Foster was an active journalist) was considerable.
The bourgeois vision of the dangerous classes, their origins, and their threat
to urban society were widely disseminated. Deeply invested in an ideology that
constructed industrial capitalism as a system that provided opportunities for all,
the persistence of urban poverty and a vast underclass could be explained as the
product of moral failings on the part of the poor themselves rather than as a
product of the economic system (see Jennings, 1999, on “poverty as pathology”).
By the same token, the wealth and influence of elites was legitimized by na-
ture of the moral integrity believed to be at the heart of economic success. The
question of endemic poverty remained tightly circumscribed in public discourse
by the dominant narrative and its very peculiar linkage of poverty, criminality, and
race. Alternative explanations of poverty under capitalism, such as those of Marx
(1967), Henry George (1992), Robert Owen (1993), Fanny Wright (Taylor, 1983),
W. E. B. DuBois (1968), and Eugene Debs (Salvatore, 1982), to name only a few,
never enjoyed such broad acceptance.
The specific Urban Sketches texts discussed above are no longer widely read,
with the possible exception of Gangs of New York, but the narrative constituted
through them—what I will call the moral causality narrative—continues to influ-
ence the way New Yorkers and others understand the relationship between poverty,
race, and crime.
NEW YORK STORIES: PAST AND PRESENT
Critiques of Urban Sketches literature and the assumptions behind the moral
causality theory of urban poverty appeared well before work on the Five Points
Archaeological Project began (see Blackmar, 1989; Blumin, 1990; Mayne, 1982,
1993; Pernicone, 1973; Stansell, 1986; Yamin and Milne, 1994). However, the
resiliency of the image of Five Points as slum and the power of the moral causality
narrative continue to shape popular (and other) understandings of poverty, race, and
crime. Neither the general public nor Five Points researchers were simply dupes
of the Urban Sketches narrative. Rather, its influence was felt indirectly in that it
shaped what was “thinkable” about Five Points’s past—the questions that could
be asked of the historical and archaeological data and the range of interpretations
that would be acceptable.
Grand Theft Crockery
Major newspaper articles on excavations at Five Points in 1991 described

the neighborhood in the style of the nineteenth-century Urban Sketches literature.
One major piece identified Five Points as “the quintessential center of crime and
filth,” freely quoting Dickens (1842), and referring to “a string of brothels and
saloons” described by Asbury (1927) (The New York Times, 1991b). The article
stated that “Some sections of the [archaeological] site are yielding older proof
that the area was always populated by the poor,” indirectly suggesting a deep
history of criminality among the residents (The New York Times, 1991a,b). As
an opening salvo in the redefinition of the Five Points, this piece did precisely
what the archaeologists hoped to avoid, reiterating the reigning assumptions about
the neighborhood. Fragmentary and confused as the piece was, it did not generate
the response that Lobbia’s Voice article did (Lobbia, 1996), in part because the
narrative conformed to readers’ expectations about poverty and criminality.
The artifacts that emerged from Block 160 included massive amounts of dec-
orated ceramic teawares and tablewares, glassware, etc. Faced with a preponder-
ance of evidence of material wealth far in excess of expectations, one confounded
archaeologist bluntly suggested that the material must have been stolen by thieves
and carried back to their dens in Five Points. The sheer mass of evidence contra-
dicting the impoverished image of the Five Points became, by an inversion, proof
of criminal activity in the area. The ease with which such an interpretation emerged
speaks to the influential nature of existing narratives.
More Gangs of New York
In the midst of researching the infamous Five Points riot of July 4 and 5,
1857, and attempting to understand the complex interplay of Irish and working-
class stereotyping that shaped reports of the neighborhood gangs that took part in
the uprising, a coworker passed on an article from the New York Observer on gangs
in present-day Chinatown (see Brown, 1976, on the 1857 riot). The piece, entitled
“Tongfellas,” detailed the sensational and exotic aspects of organized crime in
what was once part of the Five Points neighborhood (New York Observer, 1996).
Delving briefly into the history of Asian gangs in North America, the article
explains Tongs as an institution established on the West Coast by Asian immigrants
as protection against racism and exploitation. A photo of the area appears in the
center of the page with the caption “Doyers Street, once known as Bloody Angle,” a
street infamous for gang-related killings in the 1930s (New York Observer, 1996).
Foster (1850/1990), Riis (1890/1972), and Asbury (1927/1990) made frequent use
of lurid place names for the local geography of Five Points; Bandits’ Roost, Cow
Bay, Bottle Alley, and Rag Pickers Court. However, in both the Urban Sketches
texts and the “Tongfellas” piece, it remains unclear whether such names actually
had any currency with residents or if they were simply coined (for effect) by the
writer or other “outside” observers.
The text of the Observer article goes on to describe gang leaders as though
they were Dick Tracy villains, and focuses on the brutal and sensational killings
104 Reckner
accompanying power struggles in the neighborhood. Gang members’ Asian iden-

tity is emphasized, and the author plays on the pervasive mystique of Chinatown
(formerly Five Points) to create an ambiance for the piece.
Other echoes of Asbury and Riis abound in reporting on the Tongs (see also
Daily News, 1995; The New York Times, 1994b). Like other articles on gang
activity in present-day New York, the racial and ethnic identity of gang members
serve to explain criminality, especially for most white, middle-class readers—
people with little direct experience of urban street culture (on the Latin Kings,
now the Latin King and Queen Nation, see The New York Times, 1996b). Such
is the power of narratives of poverty, crime, and race to shape perceptions and
expectations of the urban landscape.
Babies in the Bog-House
During the analysis of material from a privy situated on Block 160, faunal an-
alysts identified a handful of very thin, fine cranial fragments with distinctly human
characteristics. Forensic anthropologists examined the material and confirmed that
the fragments were cranial elements from two neonatal or very immature postnatal
human infants. Later, an indictment against an influential political figure of Five
Points, one John Donahue or Donoho, dating to 1843 was discovered (Office of
the District Attorney, 1843). In this document, two neighbors accused Donahue of
operating a “disorderly house, viz.—a rest for prostitutes and others of ill name
and fame” (Office of the District Attorney, 1843).
Other aspects of the assemblage had alerted archaeologists to the unusual
nature of the deposit, but with the additional evidence of the indictment, concerns
over avoiding stereotypical interpretations of this material grew. Yet the presence
of human infant remains played directly into the worst depictions of prostitutes
deployed by nineteenth-century reformers. And despite the suggestive nature of the
context in which they were found (disposal in a privy suggests an effort to conceal),
it was also impossible to establish from an analytical standpoint whether these
children had been stillborn, aborted, or had died of natural causes. Confounding the
problem further, two children’s cups, transfer-printed and bearing the names “John”
and “Mary,” were recovered from the same shaft feature; a startling counterpoint
to the human remains (Brighton, 1996). These cups bear witness to a conception
of childhood quite apart from that implied by infant remains in a privy.
After working for years to uncover the elements of life in Five Points ob-
scured by the biases of Urban Sketches literature, archaeologists found themselves
dragged back into the heart of Foster’s Five Points. Foster’s words loomed large
over the project; “murdering their infants as soon as born . . . a kind of moral insan-
ity” (Foster, 1850/1990, pp. 130–131). A flurry of debates erupted over whether
the situation required a reevaluation of our perspective or perhaps even invali-
dated the project research agenda. Others felt that the brothel privy provided an
opportunity to challenge both the stereotypical depictions of Five Points and the
moral causality argument by examining the political economy of prostitution past
and present (see Gilfoyle, 1992; Stansell, 1986).
Throughout this episode in the project, the contemporary New York press
was ever present . In addition to the usual reports of brothel busts (e.g., Manhattan
Spirit, 1997), a series of reports on infants abandoned in garbage bins and trash
chutes caught researchers’ attention. The first incident involved a 16-year-old
woman who placed her child in a garbage bag shortly after the infant was born
(The New York Times, 1994a). People who knew the mother described her as a
good student and caring person who probably acted out of fear. The second case
also involved a 16-year-old charged with murdering her newborn child and plac-
ing the body in a garbage bag (The New York Times, 1996a). Another child
turned up in the trash in the Bronx on 19 April, another reported on 7 July in
Flatbush, Brooklyn, and on 1 November a lengthy article on the alleged murder
and abandonment of a newborn in Queens appeared ( Daily News, 1996; The New
York Times, 1996c). Finally, a piece in The New York Times (1997a,b) related
the story of a Bronx woman who left her 2-month-old child at home while she
worked as a prostitute. The woman had been arrested and spent 9 days in jail.
Upon release, she returned home and discovered her son dead, after which she al-
legedly placed the body in a trash bag and dropped it down the building’s garbage
chute.
The nature of the act—a mother bearing and then killing a child—defies ex-
planation for the average reader and in many ways defines failed morality. Lacking
a detailed context for these situations, few readers possess the capacity to imagine
the difficult personal histories, fear, and economic disasters that may have driven
these women to act as they did. The fragmentary nature of the archaeological record
at Five Points left us with the same problem; a precious lack of detail regarding the
circumstances that may have led one or two women (do we even know that they
were women?) to dispose of children’s bodies in a privy in the early 1840s. How
were we to bridge these crucial gaps in the data without falling prey to the moral
causality narrative? The historical problem for Five Points researchers became one
of imagining the range of more or less plausible explanations (see Yamin, 1998b).
The brothel and infanticide pieces in the daily press did not impose a particular
interpretation on the archaeological data, but they drew out the explicit intercon-
nections between efforts to understand a past and the complexities of experiences
in the present.
The nineteenth-century narrative of moral causality of poverty and crime is
alive and well in New York’s popular media, and for many readers it retains as
much explanatory power as ever. The effects of this pervasive discourse are multiple
and complex, but the impact on both researchers and their audiences is profound.
The structure of the narrative and its ubiquity create a regime of discourse that
effectively silences alternative explanatory frameworks, delegitimating narratives
106 Reckner
that depart from the existing (expected) regimes of the thinkable (see also Baker,
1992; Leone et al., 1987; Potter, 1994; Stahl et al., 2000).
POPULAR GOTHAM—SLUMLAND REVIVAL
In retellings of earlier historical narratives, in fictional novels that marshal

particular visions of the past and through many other channels of communication,
popular historical memories (not excluding those of scholars) are shaped. Two
recent fiction novels, Winter’s Tale (Helprin, 1991) and The Alienist (Carr, 1994),
resuscitate Gothamesque aspects of the Urban Sketches genre. Readers continue
to encounter the tales of Asbury and Riis in newly packaged forms as well as
in the original. At the extreme end of this spectrum of popular encounters with
images of the past, the growth of heritage tourism and packaged-ambiance dining
has made possible the creation of Five Points: the Restaurant (The New York
Times, 1999). The eatery stands as yet another accretion onto the potent symbol
that is the historical memory of New York’s Five Points.
Luc Sante’s Low Life became an almost instant cult classic for initiated and
neophyte aficionados of New York slum lore (Sante, 1991). Sante mined the classic
Urban Sketches texts and the rich archives of the city to create an eminently
noir and “gangster hip” vision of old New York. In his preface, Sante asserts
that the text was intended to contradict the shallow, nostalgic, and mercantilist
images of New York proffered to the public through “official” channels (Sante,
1991, p. xi). “The myth of the city insists on progress . . . nostalgia of the usual
sort is founded on regret for vanished coziness and civility” (Sante, 1991, p. xv).
Excavating the hidden history of New York’s dangerous classes was, for Sante,
a needed corrective and an oppositional stance against optimistic, progressive
bourgeois representations of past and present. Ironically, this corrective would
sell like hot cakes to middle-class readers looking to reject symbolic aspects of
their own class backgrounds (see Biressi, 2000, for a perspective on working-class
consumption of “true crime” stories).4 The issue Sante fails to confront, however,
is the impact of such representations on the impoverished of his own living city
(Sante, 2001).
Taken as a whole, images of Five Points past, as well as present-day re-
porting of related “urban” issues, combine to reproduce a narrative of poverty,
crime, and race that has surprising continuity with the moral causality argument
found in nineteenth-century Urban Sketches genre literature. The symmetries and
4 Ina high-profile announcement late last year, Luc Sante made it known that he was working as the
historical advisor to Martin Scorsese’s big-budget production of Asbury’s Gangs of New York (New
York Times Magazine, 2000). Unsurprisingly, it is Asbury’s Five Points that will soon be coming to
theatre near you. The production team has been in contact with the Five Points Archaeology Project,
but has found little that they can use. Scorsese’s production assistants seemed most interested in the
archaeological material as a guide to “furnish interiors correctly” rather than as a critique of Asbury’s
representation of the neighborhood (Yamin, personal communication, 2001).
continuities are not complete, nor are present-day discourses entirely even and
internally consistent. However, the evidence from widely distributed media, in-
cluding The New York Times and popular novels, points to powerful resonances
with the moral causality narrative.
The process by which readers draw meaning from narratives is complex and
not entirely structured by the discourse itself, but when social groups isolated from
poverty, gangs, and ethnic/racial groups other than their own encounter the reports
and articles discussed above, they have few resources upon which to draw in order
to construct meanings counter to the moral causality narrative. Researchers and
journalists, often from middle-class backgrounds themselves, are by no means ex-
cluded from the influences of discourses. While they may have additional avenues
of critique open to them, they also share many conceptions and experiences with
the bulk of middle-class readers.
Narrative and Disjuncture: The Village Voice–New York Press

Debate Revisited
Looking back on the Voice–Press debate from this vantage point, a num-
ber of observations become possible regarding public responses to the less-than-
debauched image of Five Points presented in Lobbia’s (1996) article. The strong
personal investment of New York Press editors and readers in the noirish image of
Gotham and Five Points suggests a subgroup of middle-class readers who reject
the sentimentality and “sanitized” qualities of some aspects of bourgeois cultural
and historical production. Through reference to a past that contradicts these values
they define themselves against this class identity. Attempts to reexamine the nature
of the relationship between poverty, race, and criminality constitute whitewashing
and even perhaps “right-wing revisionism” as well as an attack on the oppositional
identity of this group of readers.
The danger in arguing that criminality among poor urban groups is a form
of resistance and agency worthy of emphasizing over and above other social
realities—of reproducing the Urban Sketches narrative—is that it informs present-
day policies towards the urban poor (see O’Connor, 2001, pp. 4–22). The image
of the dangerous classes shapes more than just editorial debate and personal iden-
tities; it also shapes welfare “reform” programs, law enforcement policies, and
pervasive racial segregation.
The debate over the impact of representations arose regularly during work
on the Five Points Archaeological Project. Among project staff, an important goal
was the construction of a corrective to biased representations of the neighborhood,
while avoiding a romanticized image of poverty. The clash over Five Points’s past
can be seen as a struggle over interests; over which “version” of Five Points is
more emancipatory or useful to which classes (or class fractions). The same issues
have arisen in the context of African American Archaeology and in archaeological
108 Reckner
approaches to labor struggles (on plantation research, see Farnsworth, 2000; Potter,
1991; Singleton, 1990; on working-class/labor issues, see Duke and Saitta, 1996;
Leone, 1989).
It is likely that the editors and readers of the New York Press overlooked
Lobbia’s argument in her Voice article because it fell outside the regime of the
dominant narrative. Such a disjuncture with expected narratives left readers with
no basis for evaluating the authority of the new claims, and they turned to the
familiar, popular sources as an established point of reference. The prominence and
frequency with which images of the debauched Five Points and the moral causality
argument appear in journalistic and other popular sources produces a self-verifying
circle of authorization. The ubiquity of a discourse easily becomes proof of its
own veracity, and the legitimacy of “alternative” explanatory frameworks appears
questionable by the very fact that they diverge from the dominant regime of truth.
Discourses are resilient structures channeling what is thinkable about both past and
present, historical realities, and social policy. Five Points may seem an unusual
example in many ways, but all efforts to know the past (be they archaeological
or otherwise) encounter existing narratives of class relations, national identities,
technological progress, etc, that influence our research agendas, how we construct
our arguments, and how our findings are received and given meaning by other
constituencies. If there is a “moral” to be found in this latest tale of Five Points, it
is that dominant narratives transform only incrementally and with great struggle.
POSTSCRIPT
New York City is really a small place in the final analysis. In the months after
this essay was submitted for publication, New York City has suffered tremendously.
The attacks of September 11 have had profoundly far-reaching effects, reminding
us all just how small and fragile our worlds are. The former offices and lab space
of the Five Points Archaeology Project were located in a subbasement of the U.S.
Customs House, Building 6 of the World Trade Center complex. Fortunately, the
space was unoccupied on September 11, but the entire Five Points assemblage
was still housed in the subbasement of Building 6 awaiting a permanent curation
site.
Just a few days before the attacks on the Twin Towers, Julie Lobbia, the
Village Voice reporter who crafted the Five Points article that sparked the public
debate at the heart of this essay, was diagnosed with cancer. She died just 2 months
later on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2001. Among the many books on her
office shelf was an annotated copy of Jacob Riis’s 1902 Battle with the Slum. She
pursued her work and her life with an uncommon sense of history, justice, and
humanity. The city has lost another piece of itself, but she will be remembered by
the many people whose lives she enriched.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks Randy McGuire and LouAnn Wurst, organizers of the
“Struggling Pasts” session at the 2000 Society for Historical Archaeology meet-
ings in Québec City. Thanks especially to LouAnn for her monumental patience
throughout a great struggle. Rebecca Yamin made this paper possible by includ-
ing the author in the adventures of the Five Points Archaeological Project, and
through her ongoing encouragement (not to mention the occasional incisive cri-
tique). Thanks are also due to the many people at SUNY-Binghamton who com-
mented on drafts of this paper, especially Ann Stahl, Reinhard Bernbeck, and Rob
Mann. Much of what is good about the current piece is due to their attention.
Deepest thanks to Claudia Milne, without whom there would have been no letters-
to-the-editor, and without whose editing assistance there most assuredly would
not have been a final draft of this paper. Finally, two anonymous reviewers offered
some encouraging and insightful comments that helped focus a paper that was not
quite sure what it was about.
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International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2002 (°

Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public

The “past” is never truly past, nor are historians/archaeologists privileged

FIVE POINTS MEETS THE PRESS—A PROLOGUE

In 1995, after several years of research on archaeological material recovered

of the impoverished and working-class neighborhood. The project’s research de-

THE PRODUCTION OF HISTORICAL MEMORY: AN OVERVIEW

archaeologists were by no means sequestered from mainstream narratives, and

TALES OF GOTHAM OR THE CRAZED, THE CRIMINAL,

The changing constellation of meanings associated with New York’s other

FIVE POINTS: SLUM AND SYMBOL

Five Points describes, in spatial terms, the intersection of Anthony (later

Note the reference to infanticide, an issue that reemerged in the context of

Remembering Gotham 101

Illustrated Newspaper, 1857; New York: A Collection From Harper’s Magazine,

NEW YORK STORIES: PAST AND PRESENT

Grand Theft Crockery

Major newspaper articles on excavations at Five Points in 1991 described

Remembering Gotham 103

More Gangs of New York

accompanying power struggles in the neighborhood. Gang members’ Asian iden-

Babies in the Bog-House

Remembering Gotham 105

POPULAR GOTHAM—SLUMLAND REVIVAL

In retellings of earlier historical narratives, in fictional novels that marshal

Remembering Gotham 107

Narrative and Disjuncture: The Village Voice–New York Press

Remembering Gotham 109

Remembering Gotham 111

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