What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread? – a miserable room, lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it, sits a man: his elbows on his knees: his forehead hidden in his hands. “What ails that man?” asks the foremost officer. “Fever,” he sullenly replies, without looking up. Conceive the fancies of a feverish brain, in such a place as this! Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come. A negro lad, startled from his sleep by the officer’s voice – he knows it well – but comforted by his assurance that he has not come on business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle. The match flickers for a moment, and shows great mounds of dusty rags upon the ground; then dies away and leaves a denser darkness than before, if there can be degrees in such extremes. He stumbles down the stairs and presently comes back, shading a flaring taper with his hand. Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep: their white teeth chattering, and their bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished African face in some strange mirror.

from American Notes by Charles Dickens

Five Points: in the 19th century New York’s most notorious slum. It is now in the center of Chinatown, somewhere underneath Columbus Park (built in 1897 it is one of Chinatown’s few areas of recreation, and is much used), which abuts the criminal courts (and their holding cells, still known as ‘the tombs’). The points were created by the intersection of Park, Worth and Baxter streets. For his film of Gangs of New York, Francis Ford Coppola recreated the neighborhood in Rome, using local extras. The original inhabitants were mostly Irish and African-American (and their proximity to each other was probably one of the things that shocked Dickens).