William Henry Lane, a famous tap dancer at Almack’s dance hall, located at 67 Orange St. (Drawing: 1850, courtesy of New York Public Library)

Charles Dickens toured Five Points for a day and found only two things he liked about it. One was the pigs. Dickens described the city swine in better terms than he described many of the local slum dwellers. The pigs were gentlemanly, self-reliant and confident, while the people had “coarse and bloated faces” and lived in houses of debauchery. Dickens surmised that the pigs, who lived in those houses too, smugly wondered why their masters walked on two legs instead of four.  More →