I edit travel guides for a living, and one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of towns in the South have a district or neighborhood called Five Points. Why?
Now, I realize that some placenames are repeated out of geographical necessity (“Midtown” is an obvious example) but why would Atlanta, Huntsville, Athens, and several other cities all have a district called “Five Points”?
Denver has a five points, which incendentally used to be tha badest part of town, but now has been mostly taken over by computer nerds needing to park to work downtown.
It was named because its where groups of street that have different orientations meet, so you can go anyone of five directions. So it’s probably something to do with ‘five points of the compass’ or something. I’d assume most of the others probably meet at an intersection of 5 streets.
“Five points” is a popular name to give to a place where five streets or roads intersect. New York City has a Five Points area I believe.
Thanks, BobT. That never occurred to me, and it makes perfect sense.
Since you actualy mentioned Huntsville by name, I just wanted to point out that the “five points” here are Pratt, Andrew Jackson, and Holmes.
We’ve got a Five Points here in Columbia (SC) and it indeed is the junction of five streets: Harden, Greene, Saluda, Blossom and Devine.
Columbia native giving backup to D Marie.
Columbia is the only Five Points I’ve had personal experience with that is actually 5 streets though. Winston-Salem has a Five Points, too, but it’s not really a neighborhood, just a place where two roads cross and a third ends, creating the necessary “go one of 5 ways” situation.
So what’t the temp today, D Marie?
By my count, there are 163 places in the US named Five Points, making it the 5th most common placename. My count is based on the GNIS database.
Only made it to the upper 80s today. Not too bad, but I hope we’ll have a little more cool weather before the heat settles in for the summer! 
Jackson has a Five points too. Woodrow Wilson Ave intersects with Hwy 49 N, Bailey Ave, and some dinky street I forgot.
The grandaddy of all Five Points is in NYC. And yes it was named because of the an asterisk-like intersection of Park, Baxter and Worth Streets.
I have no doubt that many, many non-Gotham Five Pointses were named for the same phenomenon, but do not discount the possibility that the term was literally “lifted” from NYC to describe an unsavory neighborhood elsewhere. NYC’s Five Points was infamous worldwide as the absolutely roughest, toughest neighborhood in America. (And it was in fact a tourist attraction as such; tour guides with the right connections ferried brave, gawking out-of-towners through flophouses, dives and opium dens.) So, just like NYC had the original “Tenderloin” – a term that was soon applied to rough districts in towns all over the USA – I would not be surprised if the name “Five Points” was imported as well.
Atlanta has not only a Five Points…the main downtown business district, which is home to such titans of industry as Georgia-Pacific…but also Little Five Points several miles away. It’s a colony of refugees from Greenwich Village.
Athens, GA also has a Five Points, as noted. And Lilburn, GA has “Five Forks Trickum;” same phenomenon, but it occurs to me (for the first time, even though I grew up there) that since it’s five streets coming together, it would actually be only four forks. Hmm.
That said, I think this is far from a Southern phenomenon. Any place where five streets cross is bound to be busy. Any busy intersection will attract lots of commerce. Any part of a city with lots of commerce will become a prominent part of the city, and thus a prominent place name. QED.
The USGS Geographic Names Server
http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/web_query.gnis_web_query_form
lists 156 “populated places” throughout the U.S. with “Five Points” as part of the name.
They break down this way by state:
AL: 19
CA: 6
CT: 2
DE: 1
FL: 2
GA: 21
IA: 1
IL: 2
IN: 10
KS: 1
KY: 1
MD: 1
ME: 1
MI: 3
MN: 1
NC: 11
NE: 1
NJ: 3
NM: 1
NY: 5
OH: 15
PA: 31 (!!!)
SC: 2
SD: 1
TN: 4
TX: 2
UT: 1
WA: 1
WI: 3
WV: 1
I hope that adds up. Some of these places may be little more than forks in the road that some mapmaker thought needed a name.
The neighborhood in NYC is no longer listed on maps by the USGS.
You may wonder why my count of 163 (above) differs from Bob’s. After all, we used the same database.
It’s because we counted differently. I won’t go into details, but mine involved variant names which you have to request specifically when making a query.
Note: I’m not in competition with Bob to get the highest count. I made my counts several months ago as research for an article for Word Ways. The rules I imposed on myself for that article are different than Bob’s.
Six of which are in Mercer County PA!!
BTW, that count is 32 with variant names. It’s the most of any placename within a single state. The next is a tie between Fairview and Oak Grove; there’s 29 of each in Tennessee.
Dang, Fiver you beat me. I saw the thread and was going to pop in with a Little Five Points and Five Forks Trickum comment.
There goes my chance to look smart today.
I had never noted an area called Five Points until I moved to Atlanta. Since coming here I’ve been to several towns where I’ve seen areas called Five Points. Eh, guess it’s just perception-I work fairly close to Five Points here, so it sticks out at me.
I should hasten to add that New York’s Five Points has long been urban-renewed out of existence. Much of it was flattened early in the 20th C. to make room for state and federal courthouses in what is now known as Foley Square. A recent federal courthouse project resulted in an archeological dig that seems to have been pretty fruitful.
For the record, I performed the simplest search on “Five Points” as a populated place and I deliberately left out variants to make the list more manageable.
So what is the deal with Mercer County, PA and “Five Points”?
The “Five Points” in Los Angeles County (where I reside) is not an area I have ever heard of, but my map identifies it as a neighborhood in the city of El Monte (where James Ellroy grew up). There is an intersection with five points in it, the intersection of Peck Road, Mountain View Road, and Klingerman Street.
I shall have to pay it a visit sometime.
BobT, that list may be incomplete. As wolfman pointed out, Colorado does have a Five Points, in Denver; & it’s definitely popluated!
::nitpick::
While I was doing my counting, I was often sorry I hadn’t chosen to do something similar. Making sure those variant names were indeed just “Five Points” and not say “Five Points Junction” was very tedious (that database is not the fastest in the world).
Since each of them is on a different USGS 7.5’ map, I suspected that maybe some of them were duplicates of others. (Those maps overlap.) But none of their lat-longs are especially close so that idea may be wrong.