New York Challenged – The City’s Response to Crisis and Change from Colonial Times to Present

Document J - Charles Dickens, American Notes, (1843)

Let us go on again... and plunge into the Five Points. But it is needful, first, that we take as our escort these two heads of the police...We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but of other kinds of strollers, plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice, are rife enough where we are going now.

This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse bloated faces at the doors, have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays.... hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.