Rhapsody On The Sidewalk Bleeding Chapter Summaries

A must read for any New Yorker or for those with a taste for the deeper and darker parts of urban history. Anbinder does a spectacular job in vividly portraying the Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan, now the heart of Chinatown. The story is told by individual accounts of the residents and their experiences in the filthy, back alley slum filled with wretchedly poor European immigrants, as well as Chinese, who lived in densely packed tenements sandwiched among dance halls, gambling joints, saloons, and brothels, like sardines in a can. A somewhat forgotten or seldom mentioned point in history, Anbinder felt Five Points embodied the immigrant story of enduring great hardship on the way to a better life which can make one really appreciate
Contrary to typical historical accounts, Anbinders in-depth research, comprised of information gathered from newspapers, police files, bank records, census returns, and numerous other sources from the time, gives the reader an epic visual of what this time was like. Anbinder's style of prefixing each chapter with a story of an individual's raw experience brings a great variety to this experience giving the reader a feel of the realities of the era from many perspectives. The organization of the book is interesting as well being that it is not done in a linear fashion. Anbinder uses key questions to subhead the chapters, such as “How they worked“ or “ How they lived” which gives answers key questions about these peoples’ daily lives. Anbinder also uses short prologues that describe key historical persons that are featured in the next chapter which is quite interesting when thinking about key figures in history being involved in this story. Throughout the book, Anbinder paints a portrait of a rough slum where immigrants from all over Europe, and later from Asia, created their lives. Five points was a place of opportunity. It was a place where cultures clashed and political