It’s easy to suppose that gang warfare in New York City is a recent development.  But history teaches us otherwise.  In fact, the phenomenon had sharply dropped off by the mid-twentieth century.  New York was a cauldron; a landing place for millions of immigrants, most of whom came from homogenous countries where they had not been exposed to other races or religious groups, and the collision between these ethnic cultures was often epic. 

Martin Scorcese directed the 2002 movie Gangs of New York.  It is largely fictitious, but it revolves around real-life incidents and people from the middle 1800s.  It condenses a part of New York’s violent gang history into a grisly but compelling tapestry of a time and place.  More exactly, it deals with an aspect of that time and place.  The poor parts of New York were filled with death from sources other than gang warfare.  Sanitation didn’t exist.  People defecated in alleys and between houses, and disease was rampant.  Typhoid and cholera claimed those who didn’t die from syphilis, childbirth, food poisoning, or garden variety infection of wounds.  The film captures the filth, but  the reality of ever-present disease and plague is largely overlooked in a film that focuses mostly on a compelling plot of men with knives and clubs who fought for a foothold in one of the most virulent ghettos of that time

Caveat:  This movie is violent.  If that doesn’t bother you, you might enjoy it very much.  But it is unabashedly violent and bloody.  It’s also long.  It requires two DVDs.  It is not a light film.  It did win 10 academy awards.  Although multiple academy awards do imply technical quality in a film, they generally guarantee that a movie is not light, happy or cheerful.  The exciting and inspiring film Star Wars won some academy awards for sets, costumes, music, etc., but didn’t win any of the core awards such as best picture, best director, best actor.  Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo and their indomitable friends changed our culture.  But the academy handed out the plum awards to Woody Allen and Annie Hall.  This was a good film, but history will remember the effect of Star Wars for centuries beyond the time when Annie Hall becomes a footnote period-piece.  So winning a lot of academy awards is not necessarily the highest recommendation for a film as an inspiring and spiritually uplifting story.  It is a technical award, and usually goes to bittersweet films at best.  This film would be in that category.

Historical fact is bent to create an effect.  Many of the characters are based on people that really existed, including Bill “The Butcher” Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, the evil warlord of the streets, and Boss Tweed, the infamous leader of the corrupt New York political system that existed in those days, called “Tammany Hall”.  The film treats many true historical events and phenomena in a relatively accurate manner, while illustrating them with side stories based on fictional characters – much in the way French author Alexandre Dumas did in most of his tales.

During the early part of the 1800s, part of New York was a swamp.  As the land on Manhattan became precious, this swamp area was reclaimed for housing, albeit rather badly; the area stank and the buildings settled into the muddy ground as the years went by.  This slum was identified by an intersection of five streets called “Five Points”.  This is where our story takes place. 

It is about the collision between Irish immigrants and the “natives” – New Yorkers who considered themselves to be above the Irish and whose Protestant English past put them at odds with the Irish Catholics who were landing at the rate of thousands per week. 

It is ironic that by a half century later, the Irish were in charge of the place and ran the same intolerance on incoming Italians.  There are multiple instances of this turnaround where he who is on the bottom gets to the top of the heap and begins to suppress the new “bottom” dwellers.  Later president Theodore Roosevelt took over the New York Police force in the 1890s, and introduced some reform into a force that was almost entirely Irish and their cultural view was to ignore crimes in Italian neighborhoods and suppress Italians generally.  It was Italians banding together for their own defense and the control of their own areas that contributed to the formation of the mafia. 

But if there was no mafia as such in the early 1800s, the Irish and “Native” gangs would definitely serve. 

Many of these gangs grew up around firehouses and companies of firemen.  The early fire companies in New York were all volunteers, but there was fire insurance for property.  Most of these fire companies were unofficial – just a bunch of guys that decided to get together and have a fire company.  The insurance companies customarily paid their fee to the first fire company on the scene.  This was a welcome source of income in a destitute area.  Fire companies would race to the scene, and if two of them arrived at the same time, it was not uncommon for them to fight it out in the streets with knives and clubs for the right to put out the fire, while buildings burned.  So these fire companies were de facto gangs.  The gangs had colorful names, like the Shirt Tails, the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys.  One of the most colorful gang names has become a part of our language.  It was based on tough guys, or “uglies” who would commandeer a fireplug and hold it for their own fire company to arrive, defending it at knifepoint.  This firehouse-based gang was called the Plug Uglies. 

Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall boys would hire these gangs to get in votes for Tammany candidates.  Gangs would break into peoples’ houses and escort all who dwelt within, as roughly as necessary, to the polling place, and make them vote for Tammany.  Then they would escort the same men to another voting place and have them vote there.  Tweed once said, “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?” in response to a charge of ballot-box stuffing.

The police were just as corrupt as City Hall.  In the early part of the century there were no police in New York.  When they finally outfitted their first police force, the uniforms were such an object of derision for the slum dwellers that the police went back to wearing civilian clothes.  But they still wore their copper badge – which introduced another word into our language, “copper” meaning policeman, later shortened to “cop”. 

Yet another language product of the time was from the political cartoonist Thomas Nast who mercilessly attacked Boss Tweed and Tammany in Harper’s Weekly.  Many give his relentless cartoon attack credit for bringing Boss Tweed down.  He eventually went to prison and died there.  Tweed once said, “I didn’t used to mind what they said about me in the papers.  Most of my constituents couldn’t read anyway.  But they sure could understand those pictures.” 

Nast also created the symbols for the Republican and Democratic parties – the elephant and the donkey.  His acidic cartoons coined a word we still use, based on his name – “nasty”. 

The draft riots of 1863 were epic, not only in the film but in life.  Irish immigrants coming off the boat were being drafted immediately to serve in the Union Army, and they couldn’t see the point.  The riots began on July 13^th 1863.  Blacks were murdered (seen by the Irish as the reason for the war) and buildings were burned.  “Upper class” homes were looted and families killed.  An orphanage for black children was sacked and burned.  The police were helpless against the riots, and they didn’t end until days later when a combination of Naval gunnery from offshore ships shelling the parts of town where the rioting was going on and the arrival of a large force of regular army soldiers, returning from the Battle of Gettysburg, quelled the disturbance. 

Such is the unsavory past of what is now one of the world’s great and graceful cities.  And the stories of the lives of some of the fictitious and semi-fictitious people who lived during those times, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, John C. Reilly, and a tour-de-force by Daniel Day-Lewis, are as unsavory as any film experience I’ve ever had.  But despite the bloody filth and the twisted facts, the story smacks of “the truth”, and is a wonderful window, if somewhat distorted, on a remarkable time and place.