Wanderlust World Wanderlust World Five Points occupied what is now the Civic Center neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, roughly bounded by modern-day Worth Street (north), Baxter Street (east), and Chatham Square (south), extending into present-day Chinatown and Little Italy.
Named for the five-pointed intersection of Anthony (now Worth), Cross (now Mosco), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water Streets, the neighborhood formed atop the filled-in Collect Pond. Poor drainage created marshy, disease-ridden conditions.
By the 1830s–1850s, Five Points became synonymous with urban poverty, crime, and overcrowding—home to Irish immigrants, free Black communities, and later Chinese immigrants. Charles Dickens visited in 1842, describing "poverty, wretchedness, and vice." Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York dramatized its turbulence.
Courthouses (Thurgood Marshall, Foley Square), Columbus Park, and municipal buildings replaced the tenements. Archaeological excavations (1990s) uncovered artifacts now displayed at the African Burial Ground National Monument nearby. The intersection geometry survives only in street alignments.