After reading chapter three of Tyler Anbinder’s Five Points, I couldn’t help but feel just as disgusted as the immigrants living in the tenement houses must have felt. Every part of the neighborhood was piled with garbage, apartments were crowded, stenches were terrible, and living was expensive. The irony of the “American Dream” immigrants   expected, compared to the one they discovered, (especially in Five Points) is astounding. One question I wondered while reading this selection was how much community played a role in the happiness of the immigrants living there. Given that humans are social creatures, it seems only natural that in such dreadful situations the tenement-ers would come together to survive. A way in which they did this was by having a block of buildings all dedicated to a certain ethnicity, which probably created a sense of familiarity, and perhaps a slight sense of security as they lived in places that were worse off than even the poverty-filled towns they traveled from. I also wonder to myself, what kept them persevering each day in such disgusting conditions? Perhaps it was the aspect of hope, which they did not have in their hometowns of Europe. In America, even though conditions were terrible, there was the slight (even if virtually nonexistent and impossible) hope of upward social mobility which kept the people living each day. Maybe one day, they thought, things will be better. Still however, there was much insecurity, and I believe that is partly one of the reasons why the immigrants grouped together. Essentially, they formed smaller versions of areas like Little Italy (on Mulberry Street). With a common language and background, it made the dreadful conditions of Five Points a tiny bit less dreadful.