A park built over a demolished slum

A filled pond bred the city's worst slum

Columbus Park is a public park in Manhattan's Chinatown, built over what was once the most dangerous slum in New York City. Before 1808, this ground was swampy land next to Collect Pond, where tanneries dumped waste from processing leather. When the city filled in the pond that year to make way for Pearl Street, the buried muck kept sinking and rotting underneath the new streets. The smell drove out anyone who could afford to leave, and the cheapest, worst housing in the city rose in their place. This became Five Points, a slum of packed tenements, named for the five-cornered intersection of Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets.

The curve in Mulberry Street at the heart of Five Points was called Mulberry Bend. By the 1870s, its back alleys carried names like Bandit's Roost and Bottle Alley. Street gangs ran the neighborhood. The Dead Rabbits Gang, an Irish-American gang, formed at this exact intersection in the 1830s and fought, robbed, and rioted here for three decades.

The photographer Jacob Riis walked Mulberry Bend in 1888 and called it the "foul core of New York's slums." Riis's photograph from that alley, Bandits' Roost, became one of the most famous images of the American slum. Riis spent years campaigning to tear the Bend down, and in 1890 he devoted a chapter to it in his book How the Other Half Lives, counting 5,650 people crammed onto the block.

In 1895, the city finally bought up the Bend and began demolition. Workers found 130 buildings packed onto the site: six-story tenements, one-story shanties, dance halls, and horse sheds, all crowded together with no order at all.

A park replaced 130 demolished tenements

Mulberry Bend Park opened on June 15, 1897. Calvert Vaux, who had helped design Central Park, laid it out with curved paths and open lawns. It was his last work. Jacob Riis came to the opening not as a guest speaker but as a spectator. He reportedly got struck with a policeman's club for walking on the new grass.

The park came out of a state law. In 1887, New York passed the Small Parks Act, letting the city seize private land to build parks in crowded neighborhoods. It gave the working poor a patch of fresh air and sunlight where the law said they had a right to it. Mulberry Bend was one of the first places that law reached.

Charles Dickens had walked these same blocks decades earlier, in 1842, and wrote about Five Points in his American Notes. Dickens called it a place "reeking everywhere with dirt and filth." By the time the park opened, that reputation was the whole reason it existed.

The park was renamed for Columbus as Chinatown grew

In 1911, the city renamed the park for Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer credited with reaching the Americas in 1492. By then, Italian immigrants had settled thickly around Mulberry Street, and the new name reflected the neighborhood changing around it.

Chinese immigrants had been arriving in the area since the 1870s, and their numbers grew through the early 1900s. Starting in 1936, the park hosted an annual Chinatown Community Play Day, with baseball, foot races, and performances by a Chinese Boy Scout troop. There were baby contests too, judging infants on categories like healthiest and loudest cry. In 1939, the New York Times praised the event as a sign of Chinese assimilation into American life.

Thousands gathered as the park expanded and was renamed again

On Columbus Day in 1934, the park reopened after construction added trees and expanded the playground. An estimated 15,000 people showed up. The Bronx Homing Pigeon Club released 442 birds, one for every year since Columbus's voyage.

In 1970, the city renamed the park's northern plaza for Sun Yat-sen, founder of the first Republic of China, who had once lived in Chinatown.

A statue and a mural now mark the plaza

In 2019, a statue of Sun Yat-sen by Lu Chun-Hsiung and Michael Kang went up in that same plaza, permanently marking the connection. Two years later, in October 2021, volunteers from the Chinatown Yarn Circle and Think! Chinatown hung a crochet mural of more than 1,500 flowers on the park's fences, honoring Asian American community builders.

Today the park is one of Chinatown's few open gathering spaces. Elderly men play xiangqi and mahjong at stone tables. People practice tai chi in the early morning. Street musicians play erhu and other traditional instruments, many of them retirees from Guangdong who keep the music of home alive on a block that was once the most feared address in New York.

One address inside the park's footprint, Mulberry Street, tells its own small chapter of that change. The lot there holds a building put up in 1935, nearly three acres of city land folded into the park's development as Mulberry Bend gave way, block by block, to green space and civic buildings.