The heart of lower Manhattan`s judicial district, with its stately colonnaded architecture, seems an unlikely site for an archeological dig. Yet 15 eager excavators are swarming over a half-acre slice of it.
With fine brushes and sieves, in a parking lot behind the federal court building on Foley Square, they are digging down through the centuries into the bowels of what once was truly hell on earth.
The dig, launched in May by the General Services Administration under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, has laid bare the bones of New York`s notorious Five Points district, at one time an unparalleled sump of human degradation and misery in a neighborhood now just a few blocks from the wealth and power of Wall Street.
Emerging from the excavation are walls of 19th Century brick atop 18th Century blocks of native stone, and a black smear of tar that marked a 17th Century pond, polluted by a slaughterhouse and tannery 250 years before anyone worried about the environment.
According to historical records, there is not now and never has been a more wretched, depraved slum in America than the one that metastasized at Five Points into a cancer of crime, disease and suffering from the late 1700s through the mid-1800s. The area got its name from a conversion of streets into the ironically named Paradise Square, now the southwest corner of Columbus Park.
Ed Rutsch, chief archeologist for the dig, pored over archival records of the area for a year before turning the first spadeful of earth at the site. He is steeped in its history.
He said thugs, addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and gangs infested the area for decades, grim prototypes of East Los Angeles` ultra-violent Crips and Bloods, gangs that today have spread east from the West Coast. Two of the most vicious of the gangs, the Plug-Uglies and the Dead Rabbits, preyed upon each other and anyone else who walked the mean streets by day or night.
The poorest of the poor, newly immigrated peasants evicted by the Industrial Revolution from European lands occupied by their families for generations, lived literally in holes in the ground: dank basements or dark rooms subdivided by greed for paltry rental fees into claustrophobic dimensions, steeped in sewage from hundreds of leaching outhouses.
”To give you an idea of what life was like, in 1849, the doctor who reported the first deaths in what became a very extensive cholera epidemic discovered three people dead in a cellar room that seven people were living in,” Rutsch said. ”There were no windows; there was no furniture. It was a dirt floor and they had two barrels and a door for a table. In the next building, on the first floor, the doctor discovered they were raising over 100 pigs.
”At one point, Charles Dickens, who certainly knew something about slums, came to New York and wanted to see Five Points,” Rutsch said. ”He came here with two armed guards and later wrote (in ”American Notes,” 1842), `All that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.` This from the guy who wrote `Oliver Twist!` ”
Rutsch said Abraham Lincoln also was fascinated by the urban jungle, asking to see only it and the Brooklyn abolitionist church that was a focal point of the Civil War when he toured the city late in his presidency.
New York police were less intrigued. ”They refused to enter Five Points unless they came in 10 at a time,” Rutsch said. ”They had a tacit agreement with the gangs that they would leave them alone if the gangs would leave the bodies out on Paradise Square in the morning so police wouldn`t have to venture into the bowels of the slum. The police finally insisted on getting sidearms, so the reason our `Bobbies` now fire pistols comes from that-not from the old West.”
Privy to history
Across the deepening dig, rapidly bottoming out at 12 1/2 feet, just above ground water and peeking into the 1600s, Rutsch`s team was excavating evidence backing the historical records.
”See that circular pit?” Rutsch said, pointing at a crew working at the base of a brick wall perforated only by a tiny window with rusty iron bars.
”That seems to have been a cesspool. The privies that fed it were on the other side of the wall.”
Nearby, Celia Beogoffen, a field archeologist on Rutsch`s staff, was poring over just such an artifact.
”We`re now digging in what may be a privy, but it`s wood-lined, and that`s unusual,” she said, gesturing at the square hole in which she and her fellow diggers were sifting soil purified by a century-and-a-half of burial.
”It gives you a good sense of what living conditions were at that time. There`s a lot of literature, but it makes it seem so much more graphic when you see the remains of the crowding and how the buildings were reused with walls added and rooms made smaller with partitions. It`s fascinating.”
And what treasures has she found, digging in the outhouses and cesspools of yore?
”We`re finding quite a few pieces of ceramic from the late 18th and 19th Centuries, some glass and a lot of rusty nails,” she said.
Every shard, nail and fragment unearthed is cataloged, photographed and filed away as a piece in the emerging jigsaw puzzle, but privies certainly were the dominant construction in a slum with nowhere else to put its sewage. ”We have several kinds of privies,” Rutsch said. ”Some of the earliest ones were like the ones in the country; they just moved them around in the back yard as they got full. Then the privies got to be stone-lined and were cleaned occasionally. Just before 1900, they put in some laws which didn`t allow people to use privies any more, though I understand there are still some in Manhattan, so we have some primitive plumbing.”
That ”plumbing” included what Rutsch called ”a school sink”-five drains leading to a sewer pipe into which residents could ”empty their nightjars in the morning.”
The infamous Old Brewery
Digging in a 160-year-old cesspool, once the prime source of lethal plague to the unfortunates of Five Points, might not be the average citizen`s idea of summer fun, but Rutsch, a specialist in industrial archeology, was in his element.
A bear of a man with a wild silver beard and mane to match, he left the halls of academe 18 years ago to run his own New Jersey-based contract field archeological business, Historic Conservation and Interpretation Inc.
Under terms of the National Historic Preservation Act, whenever heavy construction is planned over ground that may contain significant artifacts of cultural heritage, the site first must be excavated. Rutsch and his crew of archeologists were called in when the federal government announced, in March, construction of a new courthouse on the Five Points site and a federal office building on a parcel a few blocks away.
Rutsch is excavating both, but it is the probe of notorious Five Points that most fascinates and frustrates him.
”There was one most infamous building,” Rutsch said. ”It was called
`the Old Brewery,` and it got to be a big flophouse. It must have had 1,100 to 2,000 people in it.” When the building was pulled down in a flurry of reform just before 1900, when Five Points was turned into a parking lot,
”people who were really looking for swag dug into it, and what they came up with were human bones. We haven`t found anything like that.
”I kind of want to dig up a doorway that says `Dead Rabbits.` I want to dig up the Dead Rabbits clubroom because I think that`s a neat name.”
Surprisingly, in view of the violence that characterized Five Points, its exhumation has turned up no weapons and no trace of human remains, though bone fragments have been unearthed at the other site, where a Revolutionary War potters field for black slaves reportedly was established. But Rutsch said the finds at Five Points so far, while not spectacular, are invaluable clues backing up the records.
”We`ve found some opium pipes, so there were opium dens here,” he said. ”Then we`ve found some Irish pipes: clay pipes that say `Home Rule` on them, and `Finians,` which was the American-Irish organization that backed the Irish independence movement.”
Chinese-Irish connection
The poor came to Five Points in ethnic waves: first the Chinese, then the Irish, then the Italians and Jews. The Irish presence reminded Rutsch of another historical tale, evidence of which he has not been able to unearth.
”There were two kinds of people here without spouses,” he said. ”There were Irish women, whose husbands had died building things like the Brooklyn Bridge or who had run away because they couldn`t support their families, and there were the Chinese, who were not allowed to bring any women. There apparently were a not-insignificant number of Chinese-Irish liaisons.
”If there is a Chinese-Irish population anywhere, I`d like them to stand up. At best, it must have made for a very interesting cuisine.
”We`ve found a lot of cultural material,” he said. ”The value of the situation in a case like this is that we do get one last look at it. We`re looking at some parts of it that really never saw the light of day.”
Rutsch`s cultural material includes brickwork on older stonework, showing how already-dilapidated buildings were subdivided and resubdivided into hovels to be rented to the poor, cisterns used to collect rainwater, and, in the middle of it all, industry.
Two massive stone fireplaces, deep enough to place them in the mid-19th Century, loom against one wall of the dig. Rutsch said they are too big to have been built as a heat source and, because they include ovens, apparently were part of a commercial bakery operated right at the nadir of slum life.
Government officials hope the dig will be completed by September so they can proceed with construction. But the archeologists are less willing to set a target date, preferring to say the dig will be finished ”when it`s finished.”
Rutsch`s dream, in fact, is to uncover an aboriginal Indian site he suspects might rest below Five Points. If that happens, completion of the dig might be dramatically delayed while those historically significant remains are excavated.
Rutsch`s only regret is that as an archeologist, he must destroy history to preserve it.
”As you can see, archaeology is quite destructive in and of itself,” he said. ”We`ve actually taken a lot of these walls out ourselves. By the time we get done, we`ll pretty much have ruined everthing that`s up here to get to the things below.”
”Archeology is like reading a history book, but you read it backwards, and as you read it, the pages disappear,” he said. ”So it`s your
responsibility to record them for the rest of us. It`s a book you get to read one time. The tricky part is, then you have to reverse it and tell it the other way.”
