She came to the old Common. It was still a large triangle of open ground, but some while ago a huge new City Hall had been built there. Like some gaudy French or Italian palace faced with marble, it stared proudly southward down the broad avenue. If one looked across the back of City Hall, however, one noticed a curious thing. The north facade was not faced with marble like the front, but with plain brownstone. At the time it was built, most of the city, and all the best quarters, had lain to the south. There had been no need to spend money on the northern facade therefore, which would only be seen by poor folk. And behind the gaudy palace, in the big, central sink of the city, there were poor folk in abundance.

In Five Points.

Once upon a time, there had been a big old pond there, and the village of freed slaves, with swampy land beyond. The pond and the swamp had still been there in Washington’s day, as the city started to extend northward around it. But then the city authorities had drained them, and lain a canal to draw away the water. And after that, they had built over the canal with streets of brick houses.

Five Points. It was a swamp now, all right. A moral swamp: an infected warren of streets and alleys, tenements and whorehouses. In the middle of it all, the old hulk of a former brewery, like a cathedral of vice, opened its doors to welcome all that was unholy. If you wanted to watch cocks fight, or dogs kill rats, or have your pocket picked, or find a whore and catch the pox, you went to Five Points, where someone would be sure to oblige you. If you wanted to see gangs of Protestant Bowery Boys fight gangs of Catholics, you could often see that too. Travelers said it was the most absolute slum in the world.

And who lived there? That was easy to tell. Immigrants.

There were plenty of them. George Washington had known a city of thirty or forty thousand souls. By the time the Erie Canal was completed, one could add another hundred thousand, a population which far surpassed any other city in America, even Philadelphia. During Mary’s childhood, the increase had accelerated even faster. She’d heard the population was well past half a million now.

They were all sorts. Many were escaping from the Old World to take their chance in the New. Her own family had come from Ireland twenty years earlier. Others came from the upstate farmlands, from Connecticut, New Jersey or further off, looking for whatever the city might offer. In the last two years, however, a new and sudden tide had washed against America’s shores, larger than any before, and sent there by the tragedy of the Irish Famine.