The Old Brewery

The most notorious building in Five Points stood on the south side of Cross Street, facing the little triangle called Paradise Square, where the New York County Courthouse now rises on Centre Street. It was built in 1792 as Coulter's Brewery and turned into a tenement in 1837, and by the 1850s its passages were known as Murderer's Alley and the Den of Thieves. The Methodist women who bought it counted at least three hundred people living inside. A newspaper they quoted claimed that boards sawn up in an upper room had revealed human bones. In 1852 the Ladies' Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church agreed to buy the building for sixteen thousand dollars, on a motion seconded by the Wall Street speculator Daniel Drew.

Demolition began in the middle of December 1852, and within a week nothing was left standing. By June 1853 a five-storey brick mission house, with a chapel for five hundred and a school, stood on the site; the city contributed a thousand dollars. The familiar claim that the Old Brewery averaged a murder a night for fifteen years comes from Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York of 1928, which named no source, and the historian Joshua Brown, drawing on Tyler Anbinder's research, has put the murder rate for the whole city at around thirty a year in that era. The mission was later rebuilt larger, and its successor was demolished in 1915 to make way for the courthouse, finished in 1927.