By the 1820s, five Lower East Side streets converge at a busy intersection, which quickly became known as Five Points. This notorious neighborhood was memorialized by Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York. It told of one of the worst slums that ever existed in the United States and the Irish and Nativist gangs that battled for neighborhood dominance in the 1850s and 60s. While highly fictionalized, this story was based on a very real neighborhood that today encompasses Manhattan's Chinatown.

But did you know that the Five Points neighborhood was one of the first Jewish neighborhoods in New York City? Before the great Eastern European migration to the Lower East Side from 1880 to 1920, Jewish immigrants, predominantly from Eastern Europe, settled, suffered, and built their synagogues within the confines of the squalid and unsanitary conditions of the neighborhood.

Join a Museum at Eldridge Street expert guide on Sunday, April 21, 1:30pm as we walk through Five Points, also once known as the Sixth Ward (the government district that claimed the Five Points), and explore how this diverse group of residents dealt with the conditions of their Lower East Side home.

We will meet on 217 Park Row, New York, NY 10038, across the street from Chatham Square Cemetery.

12 Eldridge Street Map
212-219-0888