Collect Pond and Five Points: The Lake That Became a Slum

New York · USA · Urban site · Grusel 3/5

Where Collect Pond Park lies today there was once Manhattan's most important source of fresh water, a deep pond that supplied the young city.

Where Collect Pond Park lies today there was once Manhattan's most important source of fresh water, a deep pond that supplied the young city. By the end of the eighteenth century it had been polluted by tanneries and slaughterhouses until it became a health hazard, and around 1811 it was filled in. The new ground was unstable and foul smelling. Those who could afford to left, the neighbourhood decayed, and by the early nineteenth century the area around Paradise Square had become Five Points, perhaps the most notorious slum in all of America: overcrowding, disease, gang violence and poverty. Today it is all covered by courthouses and offices.

The darkness of Five Points is social rather than ghostly, but local lore speaks of ground that never quite rests, of an underworld where a filled in lake and the hard lives of thousands of poor people still weigh the earth down. Throughout the nineteenth century, stories recurred of houses that sank and cracked and of a peculiar damp in the neighbourhood. What is genuinely unsettling here is not a single ghost, but the thought of how many lived and died unseen in a district that those in power preferred to pretend did not exist.

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Collect Pond and Five Points: The Lake That Became a Slum liegt in New York, USA.

Image: Archibald Robertson · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons