Saturday 24 September 2022

I Thought That This Was Good Fun,

all you have to do is type in where you want to start from and go to,


and your route is mapped out with all of the sights and places to visit on the way, above I typed in Beckenham to Brighton, and there it is, just zoom in to see the places of interest, 

and for a bit of fun, New York to Boston, so now I know where Harry Jenning's Rat Pit is! and why do I mention that? because I made a post about Five Points where the Rat Pit was, here it is,

in Gangs of New Yorkhere are my comments from when we watched the film:

 'surprisingly enough based almost more on fact than fiction, there really was a place called the Five Points, the names of the legendary Five Points gangs—the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails, the Slaughter Houses, the Swamp Angels were all gangs that were there at the time that the film depicts',

Charles Dickens called the Five Points "a world of vice and misery." in 1842, the neighborhood was on the edge of an explosion, spurred on by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, waves of threadbare immigrants arrived in New York City with the wherewithal for only the most miserable lodgings—the drooping tenements of Five Points, for the next two decades, the Irish ruled Five Points, overcrowding a roughly five-square-block area centered on the intersection of Cross Street (today's Park Street), Anthony Street (today's Worth), and Orange Street (today's Baxter),

moving on in to the 1890s crusading photographer Jacob Riis's unprecedented images of crowded tenements, child laborers, and places like Bandit's Roost (below), incited a public outcry that led the city to raze Mulberry Bend, Five Points' most notorious block,

'it's heart cut out, the slum was overtaken by neighbourhoods to the north—Little Italy and Chinatown, courthouses and factories replaced its southern tenements, today the Five Points intersection is buried largely beneath Chinatown's Columbus Park and a federal courthouse, I think it is great when a film that I thought was pure fiction has a base in fact, a violent but watchable movie set in troubled times long gone', and now I know thanks to Make My Drive Fun, where I can visit the Five Points and Rat Pit!


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