Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum. By Tyler Anbinder. (New York: Free Press, 2001. xii, 532 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-68485995-5.)

Today, New York City's Five Points district, once called "the world's most notorious slum," no longer exists, but its story is an important one that is made fuller and richer by Tyler Anbinder's impressive research. His book sets Five Points at the core of the city's histories of immigration, politics, crime, and entertainment. Anbinder stretches his focus outward from the district itself into those broader themes and in doing so creates a readable narrative enhanced by vignettes of colorful, mostly unheralded people that precede each topical chapter.

Five Points evolved from its origin in the eighteenth century as a pint-size lake called...