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Gangs of New York

  • Time Period: 1847 (beginning) jumps to 1863
  • Location: New York, Five Points District
  • Released 2002

What Was Right:

  1. The visual imagery was very well done. The movie was pretty dirty, the clothes of the poor were sufficiently raggedy (Though they could have been even more tattered). The past was unbelievably dirty and gross. They did a decent job of making it dirty, but it should have been even dirtier. Horse shit, open sewers, sooty everything, clothes hanging from lines, etc.
  2. The complex relationship of Tweed with the immigrants was well represented. Tweed was no friend to the immigrants, but he knew they were "the future" in the sense that the increase in numbers brought an increase of votes to Tammany Hall.
  3. P. T. Barnum was represented well also.
  4. The epic struggle of the Irish immigrants to be accepted into mainstream America was addressed well in an overall sense. I would have liked to have seen more attention to the fact that the Irish primarily defined themselves in opposition to the blacks and began (during this time period) to make their case for inclusion based on the whiteness of their skin. The Protestants did define themselves against the Papists, but during the Civil War era there was more class and race warfare than religious warfare.

What Was Wrong:

  1. The movie begins with a large street fight, set in the winter of 1847. The actual brawl didn't take place in winter, took place 4th of July 1857. It didn't begin on the street, it began in a pub/saloon controlled by the Bowery boys. It was more of a riot than a street fight in that it lasted 2 days long. The police didn't quell the fighting because the two police forces disagreed about which one was responsible for the area. Federal troops eventually put down the violence with bayonets.
  2. A few scenes of the movie show labyrinthine cave-like structures. Nice idea, but historically inaccurate. The Five Points area was swamp and fill land. Dig down too far and you hit water in several parts of Manhattan. That's why the subway system was an engineering marvel. There were some basements in the tenements, and some people were said to have been buried there after the 1847 riot. Still, it's historically shaky to go down this path. An easy way to get the same effect AND be spot-on historically accurate would have been to show fake walls and hidden rooms - above ground.
  3. There weren't enough working women in the movie. In the movie, the women are grifters, pickpockets, showgirls, and/or whores. But the majority of Irish immigrant women in the five points were actively working as seamstresses. This could have easily been corrected by showing some extras in the background engaged in needle working and piece work at home.
  4. By my count, there were less than a half-dozen blacks in the movie. This outrageously small number doesn't give any context for the hatred and bigotry of the era. Several more blacks needed to be hired as extras to properly contextualize the racial tensions of the era. Show some blacks as maids uptown, show more blacks on the streets doing menial tasks; and definitely show more blacks on the docks. After all, it was the dock workers who felt the most threatened by the blacks. Additionally, a black man shouldn't have been running with the Dead Rabbit gang. It makes no sense historically speaking and it is used as an all-too-obvious ploy to show the moral superiority of the DiCaprio hero character. It's nonsense. Take the black guy out of the Dead Rabbits and give him his own group to hang around; then give him some lines!
  5. In the theater scene, the crowd was shown heaving fresh vegetables such as tomatoes and cabbage. These people were poor and survivors of an actual famine (the Irish potato famine), they wouldn't have thrown fresh food. Besides, without modern refrigeration, they'd have plenty of rotten food and very little fresh food.
  6. Chinese immigration to New York in particular was very small during this time period. There were virtually no Chinese women during this period. So the scenes of Chinese women whores and dancers in Sparrow's Chinese Pagoda was historically anachronistic. Chinese immigration to California began primarily after 1848, when gold was discovered. Even then it was almost exclusively men who emigrated. By 1882, Chinese immigration had reached sufficient numbers to sufficiently scare the nativists and they garnered enough votes to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
  7. The Butcher character is an amalgam. I have nothing against this in principle, but I'm just pointing out that this is a historical hodgepodge, based mostly on Bill (the Butcher) Pool who didn't live in the Five Points and didn't live to see the Draft Riots. Moreover, the Nativists didn't really reside in the Five Points area proper during this time period. So to show a figure such as Bill the Butcher as the undisputed boss of the area is historically inaccurate. The Nativists gangs of this time period (True Blue Americans, Bowery Boys, etc) lived a few blocks away.
  8. The candle poll was not used for the draft riot, it was used in the anti-black riot around 1830.
  9. In general, the draft riot was depicted as too bloody and was over-the-top when compared with the historical details. Unfortunately, the amount of bloodshed depicted in the movie was historically inaccurate.
    • There was a maximum of maybe 500 deaths in the riot. That number was blown out of proportion in the papers printed just after the riots, but historians have found that was inconsistent with historical records. So there couldn't have been a stream of candle-lit corpses as far as the eye could see. Many of these deaths were either the result of gunshot wounds or as a result of being bludgeoned. Most people were just injured (not killed) with bricks, fists, and bats.
    • There was not cannon fire from gun ships firing on the city. This depiction is more than a little bizarre, since there is no precedent. Even if it were true, the spectre of cannonballs causing explosions is inaccurate, since the way that cannonballs work is more about the force of the rolling iron; they were not bombs. Furthermore, there was not much violence in the Five Points during the riots. Not because they were persuing gang warfare, but because the Democratic leaders of the time worked hard to contain and subdue the population of the five points.