Mulberry Bend Slum
One of the five "Points" is now formed by a pleasant park which a few years ago took the place of the last remnant of the old-time locality. In no single block of the city was there ever such a record for crime as in this old "Mulberry Bend" block. Set low in a hollow, it was a refuge for the outcasts of the city and of half a dozen countries. The slum took its name, as the park does now, from Mulberry Street, which on one side of it makes a deep and sudden bend. In this slum block the houses were three deep in places, with scarcely the suggestion of a courtyard between them. Narrow alleys, hardly wide enough to permit the passage of a man, led between houses to beer cellars, stables and time-blackened, tumbledown tenements. Obscure ways honeycombed the entire block—ways that led beneath houses, over low sheds, through fragments of wall—ways that were known only to the thief and the tramp. There "Bottle Alley," "Bandit's Roost" and "Rag-picker's Row" were the scenes of many wild fights, and many a time the ready stiletto ended the lives of men, or the heavy club dashed out brains.
The Five Points House of Industry's work was begun in 1850, and has been successful in ameliorating the moral and physical condition of the people of the vicinity. The institution devoted to this work stands on the site of the "Old Brewery," the most notorious criminal resort of the locality.
An Ancient Church
At Mott and Park Streets is now the Church of the Transfiguration (Catholic). On a hill, the suggestion of which is still to be seen in steep Park Street, the Zion Lutheran Church was erected in 1797. In 1810 it was changed to Zion Episcopal Church. It was burned in 1815; rebuilt 1819, and sold in 1853 to the Church of the Transfiguration, which has occupied it since. This last church had previously been in Chambers Street, and before that it had occupied several quarters. It was founded in 1827, and is the fourth oldest church in the diocese. Zion Episcopal Church moved in 1853 to Thirty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue, and in 1891 consolidated with St. Timothy's Church at No. 332 West Fifty-seventh Street. The Madison Avenue building was sold to the South (Reformed) Dutch Church.
Chatham Square
Chatham Square has been the open space it is now ever since the time when a few houses clustered about Fort Amsterdam. The road that stretched the length of the island in 1647 formed the only connecting link between the fort and six large bouweries or farms on the east side.
The bouwerie settlers in the early days were harassed by Indians, and spent as much time defending themselves and skurrying off to the protection of the Fort as they did in improving the land. The earliest settlement in the direction of these bouweries, which had even a suggestion of permanency, was on a hill which had once been an Indian outlook, close by the present Chatham Square. Emanuel de Groot, a giant negro, with ten superannuated slaves, were permitted to settle here upon agreeing to pay each a fat hog and 22½ bushels of grain a year, their children to remain slaves.