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.
