LONG before the Crips and the Bloods were the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys.When Leonardo DiCaprio plays a 19th-century street thug in “Gangs of New York,” he’s not just playing Hollywood fantasy – he’s re-creating history.
In Martin Scorsese’s film, opening Friday, that history of our city is told through the filthy, bloody prism of the notorious Five Points neighborhood.
Where a new federal courthouse now stands was once a district whose name was synonymous with violence, squalor and debauchery.
It was the worst slum in America.
After an 1842 visit to New York, a deeply moved Charles Dickens wrote of Five Points in his “American Notes.”
It was “. . . a kind of square of leprous houses . . . hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder . . . All that is loathsome, drooping and decaying is here.
“From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment hour were near at hand, and every obscure grave were giving up its dead.
“Where dogs would howl to lie, women and men and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in their quest for better lodgings.”
ORIGINALLY a well-kept neighborhood built upon a drained swamp in 1808, the prosperous and middle-class residents fled for Manhattan’s northern reaches – 14th or 23rd streets at that time – when the buildings began to decay and sink into the still fetid ground in the 1820s.
That left the poor, the immigrants and the swearing, drinking sailors, transients – those on the lowest rung of society – unable to afford better housing and better lives.
Towering over the poverty-stricken enclave was the Old Brewery, a behemoth of a brick building – seen in the movie as a dark, filthy warren of tiny rooms, open areas and subterranean quarters – a five-story, hulking home to a thousand newcomers to America: drunkards, gang members, prostitutes and hardworking parents with their ragamuffin kids.
It, too, really existed.
The Brewery, which made beer until 1837, was sectioned into areas with names like “Murderers’ Alley” and “Den of Thieves.”
As more and more people crammed into the decrepit ghetto, conditions worsened.
By 1855, 10,000 Irish immigrants packed into Five Points, living side by side with freed blacks, German immigrants and others in the polyglot mix of young New York. It was “. . . a race of beings of all colours, ages, sexes and nations,” as The Post (then known as The Evening Post) described it.
Despite the heralding of a gleaming new city water system in 1842, landlords in Five Points refused to connect tenants, denying indoor plumbing, clean water and sanitation to the poorest New Yorkers.
‘CRAZY old buildings – crowded rear tenements in filthy yards: dark, damp basements; leaky garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables converted to dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes – are the habitations of thousands of fellow citizens in this wealthy city,” wrote philanthropist Robert M. Hartley in his 1853 Tenement House Report.
Like the poor, cacophonous urban sprawl that was Five Points, the incredibly brutal gang warfare in the lower Manhattan neighborhood Scorsese re-enacts on screen was all too real.
The nativists – those who were born here – were bigoted against the Catholic Irish immigrants, fearing they would take away what few jobs and little power they had.
Anti-Irish sentiment was at the heart of the constant violence.
The Bowery Boys, an American-born gang led for years by the charismatic Bill the Butcher (played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the film) battled the immigrants arriving from Ireland in increasing numbers every day.
These nativists, who counted the Bowery as their home turf, wanted to keep the newcomers out, while the Irish gang the Dead Rabbits (led in the film by DiCaprio’s fictional Amsterdam Vallon) and their supporters wanted their own piece of the American dream.
And in the chaotic, swarming and growing Gotham of the mid-19th century, there was no one to enforce the peace: The police and firefighters consisted of several rival groups, and the city government, led by the notorious Boss Tweed (the Tweed Courthouse that Mayor Bloomberg recently handed over the Board of Education lies on the outskirts of Five Points), was completely corrupt.
Those corrupt officials used the muscle of the gangs to ensure their power. Stolen and extorted goods and money kept the wheels greased.
IN his book, “Gangs of New York,” Scorsese’s inspiration, Herbert Asbury called the gang fights of July 1857 – the likes of which are re-created with cringing realism in Scorsese’s film – “the most ferocious free-for-all in the history of the city.”
Indeed, pitched battles in the streets were so bad during the Fourth of July weekend that year, a Post headline declared it “Civil War.”
“Our city has just been disgraced by a terrible riot . . . ,” began a news story reporting that 10 people were killed and 80 wounded on that bloody weekend.
The fighting came out of a power struggle between then-Mayor Fernando Wood and New York Gov. John King, when Albany abolished Wood’s Municipal Police and replaced that force with a state-controlled Metropolitan Police.
While the Dead Rabbits supported the mayor’s force, the Bowery Boys cast their lot with the governor and his new police.
Those 1857 riots began at 1 a.m. on a Saturday, when three police officers were attacked near the Bowery Theatre by a group of about 30 Dead Rabbits.
The officers fled into a saloon at 40 Bowery, said to be headquarters for the rival Bowery Boys.
“The doors of the house were immediately closed and the ‘Dead Rabbits’ commenced an assault on the premises, by means of stones, bricks and clubs,” The Post reported.
“The windows were quickly smashed to fragments, the doors broken in, and the saloon completely gutted.”
Some three hours later, a “strong force” of Dead Rabbits came up Bayard Street, “armed with stones, clubs and pistols, and shouting ‘Three cheers for [Mayor] Fernando Wood!’ “
But the Bowery Boys drove them back.
THAT evening, The Post reported, “The Dead Rabbits again concentrated and, with a yell, several hundreds ran toward the Bowery Boys, and beat them back to a large pile of bricks standing in front of a building in the process of erection on the south side of Bayard Street, midway between Mott and Elizabeth. Here the Bowery Boys stopped, the brick pile furnishing them with the weapons of war, and the fight renewed.”
Eventually, it took three National Guard regiments to restore order.
In addition to the dead and injured, including many innocents, dozens were arrested.
IN the 1880s, reformer Jacob Riis, a writer and photographer, took up the cause of the people of Five Points, illuminating the squalid conditions and baring the horrors and inhumanity that lay behind the doors of the depressed neighborhood.
The city, in an early instance of urban renewal, between 1887 and 1894, condemned many of the tenements and dilapidated buildings in Five Points and built Mulberry Bend Park, now Columbus Park in Chinatown.
In an April 1914 story on Five Points, The Post reported: “It was the construction of Mulberry Bend park by the city, at a cost of $1,500,000, authorized in 1887, which accomplished the final abolition of the plague-spot.”
Ironically, the federal courthouse and other courts cover much of the area where the thieving and murderous gangs of New York once ruled.
