We Asked an Anthropologist About the Gangs of 19th-Century New York

Five Points in 1827

Beginning in the 1830s, a combination of poverty, rapid industrialization, and immigration contributed to the rise of notorious street gangs throughout New York City. For the next several decades, these groups ran rampant until being largely replaced by organized crime syndicates toward the end of the 19th century. But during their heyday, gangs such as the Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits ruled the streets of New York, particularly a neighborhood in southern Manhattan known as the Five Points. This turbulent period in New York City was marked by violence and corruption, events that were brought to the silver screen in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 historical drama Gangs of New York.

While that film is based on realities of the time, it also furthered several misconceptions about this crime-ridden era. We reached out to anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, a professor at Rutgers University-Newark and author of the 2023 book Chimpanzees, War, and History, to learn more about this volatile period in NYC history. Ferguson has spent decades studying and teaching how conflict permeates throughout society, and was interviewed for the 2002 documentary Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York, a special feature included on DVD copies of the Scorsese film.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

HISTORY FACTS: What was life like in New York City’s Five Points neighborhood?

FERGUSON: Well, the Five Points was from the intersection of different streets, and it began as a residential neighborhood but it was built on landfill from filling in a big lake. So it was wet, and it was sinking, which meant that it was full of diseases in the summer. By 1827, it was already disreputable. Mainly poor people who had no choice about where to live were there — it was the bottom for New York society.

For decades it became — not just in New York, but internationally — famous for incredible squalor and crime and drunkenness and prostitution. It became a symbol for all of that. It was also a highly political environment, and the politics of the time were more contentious in New York than what we’re seeing today in our own lives. It was really a tough time politically.

HISTORY FACTS: Speaking of politics, I know Tammany Hall was a big player in New York City. What was Tammany Hall and how did it play a role in local politics?

FERGUSON: Tammany Hall was the Democratic political machine. It won elections, gave out patronage; it was famous for corruption and vote fraud. But besides that, it was the only kind of government that did anything for the poorest of the poor. In the 1840s, it had found its base in immigrants who were pouring into New York, many of whom were Catholic, which Protestant America generally hated.

Tammany Hall was controlled by political ward politicians from the street up, using force. It wasn’t a top-down organization as it once was, but it was really responding to what was happening on the streets, like in the Five Points. The Five Points was its central power base because it was so densely populated. It was known as the “Bloody Ould Sixth Ward,” and the votes from there could control mayors, city government, even tip state and presidential elections.

FERGUSON: Gangs were always changing; they rarely lasted more than a few years. They came and went by time and place and by politics. The movie by Scorsese is based on a book by Herbert Asbury, both called Gangs of New York, and both of those introduced a lot of inaccuracies. In the movie, the big gangs were the Dead Rabbits and the followers of Bill “the Butcher” Poole. The riot that did occur was between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys. The Dead Rabbits were a gang; whether the Bowery Boys were a gang or not — they were also kind of a social type — is not as clear.

The movie was inspired by the Bowery Boy-Dead Rabbit riot of 1857. That was a real thing that went on for hours with maybe 11 people dead, and it involved fighting — bricks, up to guns. It was the biggest gang clash that ever occurred in New York City. Not the biggest violence on the street, but the biggest gang clash. And that was the inspiration for Scorsese’s film adaptation.

HISTORY FACTS: You mentioned immigration — how did the gangs reflect the ethnic makeup of New York City at this time?

FERGUSON: The gangs were organized — the nucleus of the power structure were saloons and volunteer fire companies, which were omnipresent and very political. Leadership in a gang came by association with one of those, and leadership was based mainly on fists. Fighting in the street was extremely common. All neighborhoods had their ethnic character, but it was never pure; it was always a mix.

So the Five Points was mostly Irish-inhabited at this point, but not exclusively. Gangs were mostly Irish but wouldn’t turn away anybody who lived in the neighborhood who could fight. But they were also shaped from the top down. Politicians built their organizations based on the compositions of neighborhoods. It was both a cause and effect of the political organization that gave life to the gangs. And it wasn’t just mostly Irish, but you could say particular areas of Ireland. A whole building might be from one area.

But [in terms of the city’s general ethnic makeup] German immigration was big; [New York City] also had people who were native born and were seen as “true” Americans. Italians hadn’t come in yet; the Eastern European Jews hadn’t come in yet. But New York always had lots of different people in it, like Syrians were a big immigrant population.

HISTORY FACTS: How did immigration contribute to the rise of these gangs?

FERGUSON: The immigration was a big part of, to use a contemporary word, the intersectionality of street organizations back then. Most immigrants were also extremely poor. But it wasn’t just the immigrants — this is when industrialism was on the rise, unemployment was exploding for all, and the time around the 1850s was seen as mainly just rich and poor. [There was] little in between. And poverty was mapped onto the ethnic divisions.

Also, politicians would scare the immigrants with the specter of competition from freed slaves, and really conjured up racism to a hot degree. So, there were mixes in terms of how people were organized. The racist, and anti-abolitionist groups, were mostly poor and could include any of the poor. But nativism, which was anti-immigrant, excluded the Catholics, and the Catholics were a lot of the poor. So there were these different combinations possible, and the local ward politicians worked all of these permutations.

HISTORY FACTS: Is the Irish vs. “native” conflict as depicted in Scorsese’s film accurate?

FERGUSON: The Irish versus the “native” thing, it’s a yes and no. It’s not false, but it’s not really true either. The Bowery Boy-Dead Rabbit riot of 1857 was part of crises all across the United States in the time leading up to the Civil War. In New York state, this played out largely as a conflict between the state government and the city government. The state government in Albany was Protestant, Republican, and anti-immigrant, and the city government by this time was more immigrant- and Catholic-oriented and Democrat. So this was the polarization.

The state of New York then put through, in 1857, a kind of a coup, restructuring the city, which took over many of the city functions — like control of the Port of New York. But most important of all, they disbanded the police force at the time — the Tammany police force known as the Municipal Police — and created a new police force called the Metropolitan Police that were controlled from Albany. Tammany itself, besides the state and city thing, was extremely divided into two warring factions. So there was like a three-way struggle going on.

Nativism was a part of all of that, but who had political power, and who got the benefits of controlling corruption were at least as big or bigger issues. When I did research on the gangs that fought in 1857, they all had clear local political alignments, and one thing that was left out entirely of the film, and Asbury’s book, was that the fights that became riots began with attacks on the Metropolitan Police — that’s the state police force. That was clearly one of the biggest issues here.

HISTORY FACTS: What led to the rise of these gangs and their eventual downfall?

FERGUSON: Well, poor neighborhoods like the Five Points — but there were many — provided kind of the raw material: people who could fight and were looking for something to do, and were looking for a leg up. These could be shaped into adult gangs. But as an anthropologist, what I like to look at is the local organizations of the street that organized and raised up gangs into kind of political actors. Back at that time, there were two organizations: There was the saloon, which was the neighborhood center, and the volunteer fire companies, which were all over the city and connected to large political factions. And [all of these groups] were always fighting; they would fight each other all the time. So, the conflicts in 1857 went through these things, like volunteer fire companies and saloons, to raise these local street people up into named gangs and to pit them against each other.

If you look at the gangs around then, they’re very big in newspapers of the times. After that, they’re not so much. In later years, and I’ll just pick 1885 as an example, there were still street gangs all around the town, but they were less important politically. The reason was the then-boss of Tammany Hall, a guy named Dick Croker, had iron control and didn’t need [the gangs] as much.

Also, that was the Gilded Age of extreme capitalist fortunes, and the capitalists who had great control over the city supported the police, which by that point was the NYPD, to keep control of what they saw as dangerous classes — the people who lived in the slums. Otherwise, cops — if [the cops] kept [the people in the slums] from being a problem — could do whatever they wanted, which led over a couple of decades to police brutality and corruption.

And then there was a big scandal that came along in 1895. It was called the Lexow Investigation and it revealed that the New York Police Department was what they called “organized criminality” in New York City. It wasn’t allowing it, it was it. So, reform and another era of political turmoil in Tammany Hall led to new named gangs coming up. People might recognize the Monk Eastman gang or the Paul Kelly gang. And by about 1900, these were changing from what they used to be and taking over what the police had been pushed out of and had controlled, including gambling and prostitution and rackets and extortion.

That was a new era that led to the gangster era, and the gangsters in their peak generally led to less street crime because they were organized to make money. You didn’t want people to get mugged when they came out of a speakeasy. So, the area got less violent, less uncontrolled, as that developed. And as it went on, New York City went through the whole process of development, which is a much bigger topic about changing industrial structure and job structure and development of a middle class.

Photo credit: AJ Pics/ Alamy Stock Photo

HISTORY FACTS: Going back to Scorsese’s movie, what did the film get right and what did it get wrong?

FERGUSON: It’s imaginary, like any movie; I don’t hold that against it. The plot, of course, is fiction. The film was loosely based on Herbert Asbury’s book, and Herbert Asbury really tried, but he had bad information. I’ve tracked down most of his sources in my own research. The movie did get the look right. Many details of the time are very real. They exaggerated certain things, like they made the Dead Rabbits look like they wore a particular kind of uniform, which, not really. No naval ships fired cannons on crowds, although soldiers did. The film left out the stench and the insects and the sewers in the street and all of that stuff. So you don’t get quite that depth of it, but it’s a movie. (Editor’s note: Ferguson recommended a book by Tyler Anbinder called Five Points for those interested in learning more about these details.)

Other big inaccuracies are due to the fact that the filmmakers had to compress time. And so Bill “the Butcher” [Poole] — the guy played by Daniel Day-Lewis — was dead a few years before the big Bowery Boy-Dead Rabbits riot. And Scorsese, consistent with his own film background, made Bill Poole a crime boss, getting a cut of everything. No, that came later. There’s nothing indicating that this was organized crime in that sense. Another thing is that Bill Poole worked for the politicians. He wouldn’t kill one of them, as he does in the film. There was a political hierarchy and he was a step down.

There were, in reality, lots of little turf fights all the time, but there wasn’t anything like Daniel Day-Lewis says to decide once and for all who’s going to be the lords of the Five Points. It wasn’t that kind of territorial control. And one big inaccuracy of the movie is the excessive violence, especially in the opening riot. Now, there was violence all the time, but with fists and bricks and sometimes up to guns. Most people in the poor neighborhoods didn’t own guns; they were too expensive. But there were chimneys all over the place and you could topple a chimney over and you’ve got a supply of bricks, which is what they did.

I think the thing that I have the biggest issue with in the film is that it leaves out how important was politics and everything that was going on, and how important was the role of the new state Metropolitan Police. But I’ll add, on a positive note, I think it was great that Scorsese brought in the Draft Riots [violent citywide protests against the Civil War draft and fueled by racial tension] — although, this was not a gang event, other than gang members participating in rioting mobs, individually. But I teach about the Draft Riots, and what I can tell you is that no one has heard about this incredible event in American national history. The Draft Riots tell you an awful lot about what was becoming America.

HISTORY FACTS: What gang-related sites from this time period are still standing?

FERGUSON: There are a lot of gang locations if you know where to look, walking on 2nd Avenue from 14th Street to Houston Street. And there’s more than a dozen significant locations, mainly shootings, that took place on that stretch, although that was mostly the later gangsters up to the beginning of Prohibition.

From the [Gangs of New York] film era, and for the Five Points, there’s really only one thing that remains. On the northwest corner of Baxter and Worth Street — this is between the courthouse district and Columbus Park — is the only remaining point. That point, I can’t go by that area without going by and standing on that point. I’ve seen lots of illustrations of the Five Points and I just imagine all those illustrations while I’m there and standing on that point. But that’s the only physical remnant that you can see.

As time went on, the Five Points kind of got toned down by mission and other reform efforts in the Five Points itself. The most squalid and dangerous part of New York moved just one block east to Mulberry Street. When they tore down the block known as Mulberry Bend, they didn’t cart the stuff away; they just tumbled everything into the basements. So when they were redoing Columbus Park, they cleaned away the surface and I could see all of these basements that were the Five Points, that were Mulberry Bend — they’re still there. But they’re underground.

If I can expand the scope a little bit for gangster sites, my favorite is many blocks north on Great Jones Street, which is in the East Village. Right on the south side of Great Jones Street, west of the Bowery, there are two buildings. One has a window on the second floor that has an arch to it. This window became famous because Andy Warhol bought it some years ago, and the artist [Jean-Michel] Basquiat had a studio there, and in fact died in that room. But that building was the headquarters of Paul Kelly’s gang. Paul Kelly, whose birth name was Paul Vaccarelli, is what my [current] research centers on, and I think he was the most successful gangster in New York City history. For one thing, he died in bed, which most gangsters didn’t.

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R. Brian Ferguson is a New York City-based anthropologist. To learn more about his work, visit his website. His most recent work, Chimpanzees, War and History, is also available for purchase here.