EXPERT BIO
WILBUR MILLER
Wilbur Miller is an emeritus professor at Stony Brook University, New York. He is the editor of the fivevolume encyclopaedia The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America (2012) and the author of Cops and Bobbies (1977), Revenuers and Moonshiners (1991) and A History of Private Policing in the United States (2019).
New York. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, the great city is a hive of culture and considered by many to be the very heart of America itself. However, in the 19th century it was a different world to the bustling metropolis we know today. In that century, one area in particular known as the Five Points in Lower Manhattan had a reputation as a poverty-stricken nightmare of vice and criminality. European immigrants who had fled to America seeking a better life ended up living in squalor within its streets. Yet, for all the tales of destitution and corruption, it is for the fearsome gangs that stalked its alleys and saloons that the Five Points remains notorious. With names such as Bowery Boys and the Whyos, they were said to have flamboyant dress senses and a taste for violence. Much about them remains unknown, with historians disagreeing about events and in some cases whether specific gangs even existed at all. So just who were the real gangs of New York?
The Five Points earned its name due to the fact it centred. “Columbus Park, built in the early 20th century, was constructed over Mulberry Bend, a particularly notorious part of the points.”
