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The "Real" Gangs of New York
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Martin Scorsese's dynamic The Gangs of New York brings to life one of the more fascinating aspects of New York's history. With street names like the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Molly Maguire Boys, the Forty Thieves and the Chichesters, the local gangs of the Lower East Side became a colourful fixture of city life.

Congregating in local saloons and groggeries that became their quasi-headquarters, neighborhood gangs grouped together for various reasons, protection, common-interests and financial gain being the most popular. Some of the gangs were brotherly groups whose members had similar ethnic, religious and political affiliations, but some were downright dedicated to open brawls with warring tribal interests in protecting their home turf.

The Dead Rabbits, which meant 'really bad guys' in the local vernacular, were easily recognizable by their red stripes. The Plug Uglies took their name from their tall plug hats stuffed with wool and leather, and worn deep on their ears in battle. The Roach Guards had blue stripes on their pantaloons, and the Bowery Boys' style developed from the Bowery B'hoys of old, well-dressed and dandy - but ready to battle at a moment's notice.

The Five Points' gangs (Dead Rabbit, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, the Chichesters, and the Shirt Tales) often battled those gangs from the Bowery (Bowery Boys, the True Blue Americans, the Atlantic Guards, the O'Connell Guards and the American Guards). In fact, according to Herbert Asbury, 'for many years…a week seldom passed in which they did not come to blows.' These bloody battles would see the use of bats, bricks, bludgeons, clubs and, rarely, pistols and knives - and pretty much anything they could get their hands on that could inflict a good blow.

The reality of social conditions of life in the Lower East Side led to the creation of a gang culture. Working-class men whose lives revolved around finding and keeping employment could find a sense of belonging and power within a local gang. The camaraderie of the local gangs encouraged their boys to have 'muscular prowess, masculine honour, swaggering bravado and colourful display,' qualities, as Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace state were the antithesis of those pious, reverent and restrained traits relished by the emerging bourgeoisie classes uptown.

As the gangs themselves became better organized, local politicians like Boss Tweed (Tammany Hall) recognized the inherent power of the groups, and began hiring them for protection, "influence" at the ballot boxes, and various other 'strong-arm' duties. In addition to their political associations, many members belonged to local volunteer fire departments that were essentially, as Luc Sante points out, 'gangs with fire trucks.'

The gangs who rioted in the streets of neighborhoods like the Bowery and the Five Points did little to discourage the already violent reputations of both neighborhoods. Yet, the exciting, virulent and utterly fascinating gangs of New York would eventually influence the social and political structure of New York City.

The Five Points

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All that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.
— Charles Dickens

On a visit to New York City in January 1842, noted author and social chronicler Charles Dickens landed in the Five Points. Escorted by two policemen, he found himself in the middle of the country's most infamous slum. From the decaying stench of the tenements to the dance halls where sexes and races mixed with equal parts of drinking and gambling, Dickens was both shocked and appalled at the living conditions of the city's lower classes. He described the neighbourhood as a 'world of vice and misery,' where poverty, crime and destitution were the way of life.

While exaggerated, Dickens' observations about the Five Points poignantly echoed the harsh realities of life in the neighborhood. Over the course of the ten years following Dickens' visit, the Points would become the most infamous slum in the world, even more riotous, raunchy and derelict than equally depressed areas like London's Whitechapel.

The five-pointed intersection of Orange, Anthony and Cross Streets, flanked on the east by Mulberry Street, and on the west by Paradise Square and Little Water Street, was home to an ever-increasing class of dirt-poor immigrants, prostitutes, thieves and working class labourers. The entire festering area was about one-mile square, whose boundaries were the Bowery to one side, and then Chatham, Centre and Pearl Streets on the others.

The Five Points seemed doomed from its inception. The lower Mahattan neighborhood had once been the site of the city's slaughterhouses. By the mid-eighteenth century, the local lake, the Collect Pond, had become so rancid and contaminated that city officials simply filled it in, which then encouraged local industries to relocate to other neighborhoods.

By 1825, many of the local artisans who had made their homes and businesses in two-and-a-half story wooden buildings had also started to move out of the Five Points, and as their own businesses were challenged by the mass industrial revolution, the interest in home-run shops almost disappeared. The landlords turned their houses into 'tenant' houses, and then later erected the brick tenements, which would become the stable architectural landscape of the Five Points.

In this part of the century, the population of the Five Points was largely African American, freed slaves who simply could not afford to live elsewhere in the city. As the immigrant population increased throughout the century, more and more people settled into the area. By 1845, the potato famine in Ireland and parts of Germany meant the population of New York City over the next ten years would increase exponentially. This massive immigration ensured that the Five Points became the most densely packed neighborhood in all of New York.

By 1830, the emergence of the Five Points as the prostitution centre of New York ensured the transformation from artisan neighborhood to utter slum - at one point, every single building in the Five Points area was reputed to house a brothel.

Local groceries generally contained groggeries, selling cheap liquor to the working-class men and women who lived in the neighborhood. Rat-fights, cockfights, bare-knuckle brawls, petty crime, muggings, beatings, and, in rare cases, even murder seemed commonplace in the heyday of the Points' infamy. In the popular penny dailies, the Five Points became known as the "Bloody" Sixth Ward, and as early as 1829, editorials cried out for the city to take responsibility and clean up the area.

Charity groups flooded into the neighborhood starting in the 1850s, and the Protestant reformers were dedicated to helping the hoards of homeless children abandoned by alcoholic parents and those adults willing to give up their incendiary lifestyles. By the end of the Civil War, the neighborhood had redeemed itself somewhat, that is, until the next wave of immigration, the Italian and Chinese, swung the Five Points back into its roots - and places like Mulberry Bend ensured the neighborhood evolved into yet once again, the city's greatest slum.

So what you are saying is that New York has a history of being a ****-hole. :)

Bill the Butcher in the movie was William Cutting. The real Bill The Butcher was William Poole. he didn't have a glass eye and he didn't die like that either. He died at home from a gunshot wound 14 days after he was shot. He lived in 1834 Not the 1860S He was a flagwaving racist nationalist.

Monk Eastman Lived in the 1890S was a jew who pretended to be Irish as did gangsters from Sicily at that tiume. You know the steriotyped gang style of ripped sleaves? Monk Eastman started that Look as well as the small derby hat seen in Clockwork Orange. He served in the first world war. His Arch nemisis was John Kelly, an Itallian who pretended to be Irish.

Originally posted by GHOST 13
So what you are saying is that New York has a history of being a ****-hole. :)
Somethings never change do they?

New York was the prototype of the Modern American City. It had vice, crime, gangsters, corruption on all levels. It was no different then as now.

Oddly enought, during the anti Conscription riots, the federal politicians did exactly what many people are calling on today, calling in Federal Troops.