You said the poverty wasn’t real, as if to suggest there were no poor people in New York in the 1850’s.
Natioal Geographic:
“They were doing what they could do for their families to live respectably,” Yamin says. “They had ornaments on their mantels and pictures on their walls and teapots and teacups, and they were eating very well.”
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.”
Yamin recalls showing movie researchers, who visited her team to research period furnishings, the little glass tumblers Five Pointers drank from. Laughing, she says, “In other words, they didn’t learn anything from us.”
Historian Anbinder agrees with Yamin’s appraisal of Five Pointers: “Most of them had real, legal jobs.” Many were shoemakers, tailors, masons, grocers, cigarmakers, liquor dealers, and laborers.
Scorsese based his movie on Herbert Asbury’s 1927 book The Gangs of New York. But the names of the legendary Five Points gangs—the Bowery Boys (see photo), the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails, the Slaughter Houses, the Swamp Angels—may be among the few things that Asbury, who did little original research, got right, according to historians.
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.
Writing in the Al Capone era, Asbury interpreted the Five Points gangs as the precursors of 1920s organized-crime mobs, Anbinder says. Scorsese, the director of Mafia classics such as Goodfellas and Mean Streets, seizes on this idea in Gangs. “That’s one of the big problems with the movie,” Anbinder says.
In fact, gangs like the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys were political clubs that met at nights and on weekends to promote their candidates. “They would fight at the polls and sometimes beat up their opponents, but not just for fun or plunder,” Anbinder says.
So why fight? Nearly every scuffle was designed to help a gang’s chosen candidate into public office. Once there, the candidate would reciprocate, bestowing good, steady-paying patronage jobs and municipal funds on his constituency.
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.”