Take in the park for a second. Old men bent over chessboards, a ring of onlookers giving unsolicited advice on every move. The clack of mahjong tiles. Somebody playing a two-stringed fiddle. Card games, tai chi in the morning, a singer working through an old Cantonese opera to whoever's on the benches. It is the calmest, most contented place in the neighborhood.
You are standing in what was once, by fairly wide agreement, the worst slum in the world.
This was the heart of Five Points — the real ground under the movie, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America. And it ended up that way because of what's underneath it. There was once a large freshwater pond just north of here, until the city ringed it with tanneries and slaughterhouses and turned it into a poisoned swamp, then drained it and filled it in. This is the filled-in part. The ground never properly settled, the buildings sank and rotted, the rents collapsed, and the desperate poured into the cheapest, wette
st housing in the city.
Right around where those chess players are sitting stood a building called the Old Brewery. It had actually brewed beer once, then got carved up into a tenement that reportedly packed in around a thousand people. The legend says there was a murder there every single night — which is almost certainly tabloid nonsense, the kind of number sold to horrified tourists. But the r
