Don't make the mistake of viewing it as a documentary of living conditions in the Five Points. Besides the sewer-clogging gore, the naval bombardment and the entire milieu wasn't quite as infernal as Scorcese suggests. And the Dead Rabbits didn't even exist as a formal "gang."
"The perception of Five Points as an unrelievedly dangerous place is exaggerated, Anbinder says. "I looked at the statistics, and other than public drunkenness and prostitution, there was no more crime in Five Points than in any other part of the city."
"The book The Gangs of New York says there was one tenement where there was a murder a day. At the period of time he was writing about, there was barely a murder a month in all of New York City," Anbinder says."
"Even here meat was often on the table three times a day, animal remains and historical accounts show.
In the Scorsese movie you have these scenes in a basement where there are skulls in the corners and people are draped in rags," Yamin says. "We didn't see anything to suggest that people were living like that. There were certainly no skulls rolling around in people's rooms." And few pewter cups, for that matter.
Watching the movie, Yamin says, "the thing I really noticed was those pewter mugs everyone was drinking out of. Well, they stopped drinking out of those in the 18th century."
" Anbinder also faults the movie for its emphasis on Catholic-Protestant conflict. Most fighting was among gangs of Irish-Catholic Five Pointers. And it was rarely as bloody or deadly as in the movie. "Rioters did not go about with swords and broadaxes. Every once in a while one person would have one, but never whole mobs armed like that."
"But again, in terms of the specifics, you don't want to rely on the movie. There were no gunships in the harbor firing artillery upon the city. And again, the amount of bloodshed was less than shown in the movie."
These are two good links:
http://www.vny.cuny.edu/gangs.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0320_030320_oscars_gangs.html