Afterword: Becoming New York: The five points neighborhood

Abstract

Ever since its inception in the 1960s, one of the great promises of historical archaeology has been its power to supply voices to people who either have been ignored in the historical record or who can be seen there only through the eyes of biased contemporary observers. Throughout history the working poor have constituted the most prominent cultural group in this category, and historical archaeologists both in the United States and abroad have begun to make important contributions to our understanding of working class life (Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987-1989; Cheek and Friedlander 1990; Seifert 1991; Schackel and Winter 1994; Kelly et al. 1996; Seifert et al. 1998; McCarthy 1999; Murray 1999; Van Heyningen and Malan 1999). Unfor tunately, until the excavation of Block 160 in the old Five Points neighborhood, archaeologists studying New York City had not for the most part been able to investigate the ways of life of the working poor. For studies based on excava tions that are exceptions to this statement, see Levin (1985), Howson (1994), and Baugher and Lenik (1997) and for more recent excavations, see Grossman (1995) and Blakey (1997). This early neglect on the part of the city's urban archaeologists stems from two quite different factors. One has to do with the organization of production in urban America from colonial times through the early 19th century and bears on the archaeological study of the ways of life of those without property during that period of the city's history, while the other is related to the organization of the modern-day archaeologi cal study of the city. Throughout New York's early history, many members of the working poor, whether enslaved or free, lived in the combined homes and work places of their masters (Blackmar 1989:57-62). Servants, apprentices, journeymen, and the enslaved all lived under the same roofs as their employers or "owners" and the latter's families, and together with them formed the spatially integrated urban colonial household. Naturally, this settlement system has ramifications for those who attempt to look to the archaeological record to interpret the ways of life of the working poor (as well as their employers or "owners") in the past. It means that even in those cases where archaeologists have an assemblage from a household that written records show included the poor and the enslaved, we cannot with any confidence ascribe particular parts of the assemblage from that household to any specific sub-group that we know lived and labored in these combined homes and workplaces. Instead, we must consider the entire assemblage as a whole and use it to interpret the lifeways of the household as a unit. The reorganization of the work process and the transformation of the social relations of production were integral parts of the develop ment of capitalism in the early 19th-century city. Employers separated their homes from their workplaces and established households that consisted of only their own family members and their female domestic servants. The enslaved finally achieved their freedom, and both they and shop workers became "detached" from the households of their masters and found their own living quarters in the newly developing poorer neighborhoods of the city, including the Five Points. It was these neighborhoods that were the locus of the formation of the city's working class. During the early part of the 19th century, the working class consisted primarily of native born people of European and African descent. In the decades before the mid-19th century, their ranks began to be flooded by the waves of immigrants who would continue, off and on, to form the bulk of the working class down to the present day (Gutman 1987). Naturally archaeologists have been eager to explore the sites where members of the poor lived in the 19th century as well as where the "unattached" poor had lived during the earlier colonial period. However-and this is the other reason that archaeologists have learned so little about the ways of life of the laboring poor in the city-the logistics of doing urban archaeology