How Chinatown was built on NY's Most NOTORIOUS Slum | How it Became Manhattan

I'm standing here at a park in Chinatown and there are people over here playing sports

there are people behind me playing cards and board games, and you can really feel the sense

of community and it's a really relaxing place to be. But right where I'm standing used to look like this

Right here used to be New York's largest impoverished neighborhood. The area was home to many European and African immigrants

It was incredibly densely populated, which led to high crime rates and frequent epidemics

These were problems the city tried but failed to resolve. Why was this area so neglected, and when did this become Chinatown

In this lesson, I'm going to show you how a lake became a mosquito-infested swamp filled with poor housing, a prison, the famous gang-ridden Five Points neighborhood before finally flourishing into beautiful Chinatown

It's hard to imagine what New York was like before all the people and cement were here

But where I'm standing used to be a large lake. Yes, 150 years ago here in Manhattan was a large lake called Collect Pond

Collect Pond was the main source of drinking water for all the residents of Manhattan

But as industry ramped up, over time it became more and more polluted. So in 1811 it was decided that they were going to fill it in and reclaim the land for housing

Initially they started draining the pond into the Hudson River by building a c that followed an existing stream right here

As the pond drained, the water slowed, and this c became full of stagnant water

and was eventually turned into a street, C Street. Many other streets in the area also show evidence of the pond

Right now, I'm walking up Moscow Street, and you can tell that this street actually used to be the shore of Collect Pond

because it runs downhill toward Columbus Park, where I just was. And unfortunately, when they filled in Collect Pond, they did a really imperfect job

And so a lot of the land began to sink into the ground and become really swampy and marshy and mosquito infested

And it was just not an ideal living situation. So anyone with the means to left the area

And this created a vacuum for poor immigrants who could afford the area to move in and build buildings that eventually became known as tenements

A tenement is actually basically just an old-fashioned word for an apartment building

This is Catherine Lloyd, and she works at the Tenement Museum in Lower Manhattan

She's sort of a local expert on stories from this time, and we'll be sharing some of them throughout this lesson

Many of them were built on top of the collect pond, right? And sort of this infill swamp, essentially

that creates a lot of difficulties just for the structural integrity of buildings

So people's homes were sagging into the swamp and kind of falling apart. But really, all kinds of buildings were sinking into the ground, including this one

This is a prison. As if to make matters worse, the city put a prison in this neighborhood right where Collect Pond used to be It instantly began settling into the ground making conditions notoriously bad for the prisoners This prison became colloquially known as the Tombs

At the same time, about two blocks away, was a notorious neighborhood famous for its gang wars

This area used to be under Collect Pond as well and had all of the same poor conditions

And it was a neighborhood that became known as Five Points. Okay, before I get too deep

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And if you don't like the service, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you look at this map from 1834, you can see where several streets intersected to create a rare open space between buildings

This is where the neighborhood Five Points gets its name. This intersection became known as Paradise Square and was the social epicenter of the neighborhood

Five Points holds a lot of history, including rigged elections, riots, the birth of tap dancing

If you've seen the movie Gangs of New York, you'll have some idea of the debauchery and corruption that happened here

The notorious location of gang fights and riots and extreme poverty is now just an unassuming street corner and this little reprieve called Columbus Park

By the 1830s, Manhattan was becoming very developed, but a lot of the wealthy residents moved out of this swampy, sinking area of the city

But again, this was an undesirable place to live thanks to poor infrastructure and dense housing

Since these conditions made it cheap, the area drew in even more poor immigrants

which made it even more unappealing to those that could afford more spacious living

Many immigrants lived here over the years, including Irish, Italians, and a settlement of free black people, as well as many others

Those from Ireland, for example, had just experienced a horrible potato famine

and many of them were arriving to the city on the brink of death, not just showing up in hopes for a better life, but simply to live

Landowners resisted leasing their buildings to these newcomers because of anti-Irish sentiments

so many Irish people began buying the buildings and taking over the area

These photos were taken by Jacob Rees. Rees was an immigrant himself from Denmark

and he knew firsthand just how bad the living conditions could be here. So without any photography experience, he picked up a camera

and started to document the horrible living conditions of this area. This made him essentially one of the first photojournalists

And he also wrote an essay called How the Other Half Lives that explained to people outside of the city how terrible these conditions were to the people who were here Many of these buildings were built without running water were built without amenities that we might expect in urban housing today

And it's because of the lack of housing laws and really the lack of municipal efforts to provide safe and healthy housing for a working class population that we have such negative ideas about tenements

that they were places where disease would spread very quickly. You measure a society by how they take care of their marginalized population

These are the same kinds of ideas that people were asking at the turn of the last century

that how do you, as a city, provide for the people who are living in the margins

immigrants, working class people, African-American, working class individuals. The city finally took action, and their solution was to basically cover all the problematic areas with parks

Paradise Square, in Five Points, was raised and replaced by Columbus Park

The prison was also torn down and replaced by a park, one that was named for the pond that once covered this area, Collect Pond Park

Today, if you go to this park, you can see a replica of what Collect Pond once looked like

Bordering Columbus Park is another street called Mulberry Bend, where the same thing happened

You can see how suffocating the buildings were, but now it looks like this. This park was created in the 1890s, marking the end of the Five Points era

All of this work led to policy changes that slowly began to improve the living conditions in these tenements

And you can see over here to my right is now where the park is, and all the buildings that used to be on this side of the street are gone

So when does the Chinese influence enter the picture? The first Chinese immigrants to enter this area came in the 1850s

Many Chinese people were working to build the Transcontinental Railroad and were traveling to California for the gold rush

When the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, many Americans developed anti-Chinese sentiments, claiming that the Chinese were taking all their jobs

Because of this racism, many Chinese people were pressured to leave California and headed east, settling in New York

The Chinese Exclusion Act suspended immigration and hindered them from ever becoming citizens

So when the Chinese Exclusion Act was first created, Chinese New Yorkers began to form gangs to protect themselves

And just like other gangs at the time, violence began to erupt between different factions

And right now I'm standing on Doyer Street, which is where a lot of this violence happened

Doyer Street bends like this because it used to be a stream flowing from Collect Pond

It was also known as the Bloody Angle because it was very common for one gang

to attack another at this near 90-degree corner because you couldn't see who's on the other side

There was so much bloodshed at this exact spot that many sources at the time say it was stained red

This is really a community that developed in many ways to protect themselves from the racism and anti-Asian discrimination

that they experience coming to the United States. So the Chinatown we see today doesn't really have a chance to flourish and grow

until the 1960s with the Hartzeller Act. The Hartzeller Act was a bill signed in the 1960s

that removed the race-based quota for immigration. The president signed this bill at the base of the Statue of Liberty which as we talked about in a previous lesson had become a symbol for immigration This allowed for many more non immigrants especially those from East Asia who had previously had the most restrictions

This act directly enabled Chinatown to reach its current form. So let's talk about Chinatown today

It's hard to put an exact border on Chinatown, but today the heart of Chinatown includes Mott

Street, Mulberry Street, C Street, and East Broadway. Chinatown is home to the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere

And if you come here today, you'll see the streets lined with Chinese vendors and Chinese

signage everywhere. And it's not just a place for Chinese restaurants and vendors, but it's also a residential hub

for many Chinese Americans. This neighborhood really does have reverberations across the U.S. today, and a very, very deep

sort of cultural meaning for people who live there now. This is a multi-generational community

of people who may have arrived in the U.S. two weeks ago or people who have, you know

their families have been in the area since the middle of the 19th century. This community

developed for a really particular sort of reason and is still really, you know, a thriving

neighborhood of people and businesses and homes and restaurants. Today, C Street is the bustling epicenter for small vendors and is the visual center of Chinatown

Right here on Mott Street, you can visit Wing on Wo & Co. This store opened across the street in 1890 and moved to this location in 1925

making it witness to much of the history I've talked about. And lastly, Columbus Park, where we started this lesson

is a great spot to come rest from all the walking you'll be doing. If you do sit here, keep in mind that once upon a time

you would have been sitting in the middle of a lake. and then later surrounded by buildings that were sinking into the swampy marsh

And you can think about how gang violence has turned into such peace. For a lot more of this history and to learn specific immigrant experiences

you can visit the Museum of Chinese in America right here. Or you can head over to the nearby Tenement Museum where Kat Lloyd works

You can visit to see recreated homes. A skilled tour guide will bring you into the recreated apartments

and really bring to life the time period really to not only bring to life the past

but to connect a through line to the present. Remember that Chinatown is not just a tourist attraction

This is a cultural enclave that has been invaluable to so many immigrants

Looking at the stories of individuals and families and how they navigated life for themselves as newcomers

is just really, really critical for understanding people's experiences today. The stories of people who were erased from history books or who are not present in our history books will give us a better sense of how we're all part of shaping U.S. history today

Being here and considering the history of this area is an incredibly enlightening experience

So if you get the chance, come here, try the food, go to the Tenement Museum, but most importantly, understand where you are

In the next lesson, we're gonna keep heading uptown and take a closer look at the high line