By SHERRYL CONNELLY
Daily News Book Editor

It was once New York's bit of hell on Earth, the nation's first urban ghetto — a famously wretched yet mostly forgotten slum.

But Tyler Anbinder has so thoroughly re-created "Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum" (Free Press) that the stench of life there all but rises from its pages.

On a brilliant autumn day, Anbinder strolls along the edge of Columbus Park in lower Manhattan — created when Danish-born social reformer Jacob Riis convinced the city to tear out the belly of Five Points in 1895. He focuses not on the depravity that was so much of the neighborhood's illicit aura but rather the humanity that permeated its tenement halls.

Social Contract

"If there was a woman in a neighboring apartment, and that widow dies, you took those orphans in," says Anbinder, an associate professor of history at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. "And you had nothing to begin with. It's hard to imagine New York that way…but you watched out for each other."

With the entire city on watch in the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy, we can now grasp the concept.

Anbinder, though, is describing what was a small universe so characterized by its degradation that it was shunned by the rest of New York, except for police-escorted day trips to view the squalor. In fact, it's possible that the concept of "slumming" came into being as Charles Dickens, Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln made their way there.

The author notes that while Five Points became a primary destination for the Irish escaping the potato famine of the 1840s and '50s (the neighborhood played its own fraught role in Tammany politics), it was also a catch basin for a diverse European emigration. What the Italians, Germans, Poles and other Five Pointers had in common was their extreme poverty, as well as a desire to rescue relatives from even worse conditions back home.

The penny press of the time was shrill, but it was a religious journal that most aptly expressed the world-view of the internationally notorious Five Points, describing it as "a hell-mouth of infamy and woe."

"Books like Herbert Asbury's 'The Gangs of New York,' which Martin Scorsese uses for much of his movie [set for release next year], present Five Points as all bad, everyone as a criminal, a prostitute or a drunk," says Anbinder. "But when you look close, you also see such hard work and such compassion."

The original Five Points refers to an odd intersection of three streets, Anthony (now Worth), Orange (now Baxter) and Cross (no longer extant), created after a 5-acre lake known as "the Collect" was filled in 1813. Now mostly consumed by Chinatown, as well as the neighboring congregation of federal buildings, both the intersection and the spread of streets that once defined misery have completely changed character.

For example, the site of Pete Williams' famous dance hall, where Irish immigrants jigged with blacks from ghetto-within-a-ghetto Cow Bay (Five Points gained extra infamy for its mixing of the races), is now a basketball court in Columbus Park. It was there that Master Juba incorporated the moves in the 1840s that came to be known as tap dancing.

An Instant Slum

But 65 Mott St., the first designated tenement erected in New York, stands yet. Anbinder calls it "a living monument to the evils of the tenement system." Built of brick in 1827, seven stories tall, it towered over the two-story wooden houses immigrants previously had crowded into. There, poverty had a permanent address. Worse, the landlord squeezed in a rear tenement, separated by only 14 feet.

Today, it houses a pharmacy. Anbinder can readily conjure the past, though. "You see the standard two-room apartment. The front room, 12 [feet] by 12 [feet], was your kitchen, your living room, your den. The back room, 8 by 10, was a sleeping closet with no windows. But people worried about the lack of ventilation — they believed vapors carried disease — so they would crowd into the front room to sleep, spreading out straw and hay. On average, there would be about six people in two rooms, but that ranged up to as many as 12."

While Five Points has been touched on in contemporary popular histories, including Luc Sante's "Low Life," and novels, such as Caleb Carr's "The Alienist," the seminal document was Jacob Riis' 1890 "How the Other Half Lives." Riis' most famous photograph, "Bandit's Roost," shows a back-alley scene in Mulberry Bend, a subsection of Five Points ridden with stale-beer joints and infant mortality.

The book became a sensation, and Riis successfully campaigned to have the Bend demolished.

So ended Five Points. Its physical passing is documented, but what's almost inexplicable is how thoroughly the hellhole was expunged from modern memory.

Anbinder, who spent nine years researching the book, says he doesn't entirely understand how that happened. Except…"People did not have fond memories of Five Points," he says. "It was always a place to get out of."