All but forgotten today, the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan was once renowned the world over. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. While it comprised only a handful of streets, many of America's most impoverished African Americans and Irish, Jewish, German, and Italian immigrants sweated out their existence there. Located in today's Chinatown, Five Points witnessed more riots, scams, prostitution, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in America. But at the same time it was a font...

"Told brilliantly, even unforgettably ... An American story, one that belongs to all of us." -- Boston Globe

"A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation's pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness." -- New York Times Book Review

New York has been America's city of immigrants for nearly four centuries. Growing from Peter Minuit's tiny settlement of 1626 to a clamorous metropolis with more than three million...