Five Points (or The Five Points) was a notorious slum centered on the five-cornered intersection of Anthony (now Worth St.), Cross (now Mosco), and Orange (now Baxter) on Manhattan island, New York City, New York, in the United States. Today, only Worth Street and Baxter Street connect because Mosco Street, in Chinatown, has been truncated by the US Court House and Columbus Park. However, the Five Points neighborhood would be located about halfway between Chinatown and the Financial District, at or near the current intersection of Baxter Street and Worth Street. The name Five Points derived from the five corners at this intersection, though over time, the intersection sometimes had four or six corners. The tenement buildings that made up the slum extended from current Mulberry Street to Little Water Street (a no longer extant north-south street that ran through southeast of the current corner of Worth Street and Centre Street, through what is now the New York County Courthouse).
What was Five Points is today covered mostly by large city and state administration buildings known collectively as Foley Square, plus Columbus Park, Collect Pond Park and various facilities of the New York City Department of Corrections clustering around lower Centre Street. The corrections facilities are the most direct link to the neighborhood's past, as the infamous Tombs Prison, which housed many a Five Points marauder from 1838 on, stood near the site of the current City Prison Manhattan at 125 White St. The exact location of the former five points intersection itself is currently the intersection of Worth and Baxter. Mosco no longer extends to that intersection, and the section of Baxter south of it no longer exists.
The assignment in 1978 was simply to illustrate The City Observed: New York, a guidebook to Manhattan by Paul Goldberger, who was then the architecture critic for The New York Times. (He is now the architecture critic for The New Yorker.) Paul instructed me to keep the pictures straightforward, documentary and as free of optical distortion as possible. He handed me a carbon copy of his manuscript as my guide, and off I went, with my Nikons and Plus-X film.
Because I can still remember what the weather was like on the days I took these pictures, what the city sounded and smelled like, I was startled to look through my contact sheets recently and realize how much Manhattan had changed. New York did not just crawl out of its near-collapse in the mid-70s, it had boomed almost without interruption. Towers were inserted. Landmarks were deleted. And even in cityscapes that looked unchanged, I knew that far wealthier occupants -- residential and commercial -- could now be found behind familiar old facades.
