Gangs of New York - Historical Accuracy

Historical Accuracy

Scorsese received both praise and criticism for historical depictions in the film. In a PBS interview for the History News Network, George Washington University professor Tyler Anbinder discussed the historical aspects of the film.

Asbury's book described the Bowery Boys, Plug Uglies, Shirt Tails, and the Dead Rabbits. The last were so named after their battle standard, a dead rabbit on a pike. The book described William Poole, the inspiration for William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, a member of the Bowery Boys, a bare-knuckle boxer, and a leader of the Know Nothing political movement. Poole did not come from the Five Points and was murdered nearly a decade before the Draft Riots. Both the fictional Bill and the real one had butcher shops, but Poole is not known to have killed anyone. The book described other famous gangsters from the era such as Red Rocks Farrell, Slobbery Jim and Hell-Cat Maggie, who filed her front teeth to points and wore artificial brass fingernails and was played by Cara Seymour in the film.

Anbinder opined that Scorsese's recreation of the visual environment of mid-19th century New York City and the Five Points "couldn't have been much better". All the sets were built completely on the exterior stages of Cinecittà Studios in Rome. By 1860, New York City had 200,000 Irish, in a population of 800,000. The riot which opens the film, though fictional, was "reasonably true to history" for fights of this type, except for the amount of carnage depicted in the gang fights and city riots.

According to author and journalist Pete Hamill:

"...The Irish hoodlums established the nexus between New York crime and New York politics that would last more than a century. A path was established among the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Bowery Boys that continues all the way to today’s Latin Kings, Crips and Bloods."

According to Paul S. Boyer, a U.S. cultural and intellectual historian:

"The period from the 1830s to the 1850s was a time of almost continuous disorder and turbulence among the urban poor. The 1834–44 decade saw more than 200 major gang wars in New York City alone, and in other cities the pattern was similar."

As early as 1839, Mayor Philip Hone said:

"This city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches ... patrol the streets making night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves."

The large gang fight depicted in the film as occurring in 1846 is fictional, though one between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits in the Five Points on July 4, 1857, is not included in the film. Vincent DiGirolamo concludes:

"Gangs of New York becomes a historical epic with no change over time. The effect is to freeze ethnocultural rivalries over the course of three decades and portray them as irrational ancestral hatreds unaltered by demographic shifts, economic cycles, and political realignments."

The Draft Riots are depicted mostly as acts of property destruction; however, mobs physically attacked blacks, lynching several, and there were more than one hundred deaths, most of which were African-Americans. Irish gangs targeted blacks because of competition for work. In the film, Chinese Americans were portrayed as having their own community and public venues, but significant Chinese emigration to New York City did not begin until 1869 (although the Chinese emigrated to America as early as the 1840s), the time when the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed. The Chinese theater on Pell Street was not completed until the 1890s. The Old Brewery, the overcrowded tenement shown in the movie in both 1846 and 1862–63, was demolished in 1852.