 Reports of Billy McGlory's early life differ.Popular legend has it that he was born in the slums of the Five Points and grew up in an atmosphere of vice and crime, prior to the reform efforts of Reverend Lewis Pease and the Five Points House of Industry during the mid-1850s, however in his day he was reported to have been born and raised in the Sixteenth Ward (bounded by West 14th Street, the Hudson River, West 26th Street and Sixth Avenue), specifically on 16th Street between 6th and Seventh Avenues, by respectable Irish parents.Billy's half-brother by his mother's first marriage, Johnny Thompson, was a well-known Bowery actor.