Like its sister book Gangs of Chicago, Gangs of New York is an anecdotal history of the New York underworld in the 19th century from its nascence in the 1820's and 30's up until the the end of Tammany Hall and the corruption that sustained gang life as a New York institution. It's a history populated by colorful characters like Sadie the Goat, a female river pirate, so-called because of her signature move of lowering her head and butting her adversary in the chest; Monk Eastman, former pet store owner and perhaps the most feared gang leader of all time, wherever he went, he carried a large bludgeoning club and was followed by an entourage of cats and birds, some of which would be perched on his shoulder or cradled in his massive arms; and Bill the Butcher, the anti-immigrant fanatic immortalized in Martin Scorsese's film adaptation. Indeed, many of the characters in the film are taken directly (if not exactly) from the book. The Brendan Gleeson character, the club-wielding sheriff Walter "Monk" McGinn, is an obvious reference to Monk Eastman, who also carried a club and was known as the "Sheriff of Irvington." Hellcat Maggie, played by Cara Seymour in the film, was a composite of a very real Hellcat Maggie who lived in the Five Points and a bar owner in the bowery known as Gallus Meg. A brief excerpt from the book:"Gallus Meg was one of the notorious characters of the Fourth Ward, a giant Englishwoman well over six feet tall, who was so called because she kept her skirt up with suspenders, or galluses. She was bouncer and general factotum of the Hole-In-The-Wall, and stalked fiercely about the dive with a pistol stuck in her belt and a huge bludgeon strapped to her wrist. She was an expert in the use of both weapons, and like the celebrated Hell-Cat Maggie of the Five Points, was an extraordinary virtuoso in the art of mayham. It was her custom, after she had felled an obstreperous customers with her club, to clutch his ear between her teeth and so drag him to the door, amid the frenzied cheers of the onlookers. If her victim protested and struggled, she bit off his ear, and having cast the fellow into the street she carefully deposited the detached member in a jar of alcohol behind the bar, in which she kept her trophies in pickle."Much of the book is characterized by the clash between gangs of the Five Points and the Bowery. Many of the smaller street gangs, like the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, the Roach Guards and the True-Blue Americans which functioned as civic auxiliaries in parts of the city where the legitimate government had no sway or interest, joined forces with the political machine Tammany Hall, or its rivals in the anti-immigration Know-Nothing Party, for whom they rounded up voters, defended polls in sympathetic precincts and attacked the polls in hostile districts. As a reward for their service, Tammany Hall and their other political patrons saw to it that they were able to practice their vice, theft and mayhem with little or no interference from the law. When Monk Eastman, leader of the Eastman gang, clobbered someone with his club, they rarely even bothered reporting the beating (at one point, there were so many "accidents" coming into Bellevue Hospital, that it's accident ward was informally renamed Eastman Pavillion), and on the off-chance that someone actually did press charges against him, his Tammany bosses could invariably provide a bevy of witnesses claiming that Eastman was with them at the time of the attack and that the charges were based on a horrible case of mistaken identity. The same set of rules generally applied to his gangland rival, Paul Kelley. Unfortunately for the great political machines of the day, they couldn't stop the gangsters from being gangsters. Constant warfare between the Eastman gang and the Five Pointers over turf and vice profit resulted in scores of innocent bystanders getting injured or killed in the crossfire. And as public outrage mounted, their willingness to bail the gangleaders out of their legal troubles waned. The gang wars climaxed into a pitched battle outside a stuss game on Rivington Street. So many police and civilians were killed or wounded during the protracted battle that Tammany Hall was forced to withdraw their support from Eastman and Kelley. Eastman was later sentenced to ten years in prison, but when World War I broke out he was released early to join the army, where he became a war hero and was decorated numerous times for his bravery. Incidentally, it was there that he briefly met a young lieutenant named Herbert Asbury, with whom he shared a box of stolen cigars.As for his former patrons at Tammany Hall, they would soon discover that their relationship with the gangs was too symbiotic to be outlived. Without street gangs to police the polls, stuff the ballot boxes and intimidate rivals, they were soon swept aside by reform movements and the larger, mainstream political forces at work in the nation. In many ways, Gangs of New York is less a work of serious history than a gutter's-eye view of the informal events, people and institutions that are otherwise ignored by history, but that made 19th century New York tick in a way in which the official and legitimate political and social institutions did only tangentially, if at all.
t The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, written in 1928, is a great read for those who love to read stories about crime and criminals that took place in New York City, dating back to the early 1800's. The book starts with the chapter entitled “The Cradle of the Gangs,” which was the Five Points Area in 1829. Roughly, the Five Points area was the territory bounded by Broadway, Canal Street, the Bowery and Park Row, which was formerly Chatham Street. Now this area is the home to the city prison called the Tombs, the Criminal Courts Building and the County Court House. In the early 1700's, the area was mostly a swap area, surrounding a lake called Fresh Water Pond by the English and Shellpoint by the Dutch. tThe lake was eventually filled in and homes built on the landfill. This landfill became the region know as the Five Points. The Five Points area was named after the intersection of the five blocks of Cross, which became Park Street and is now Mosco Street, Anthony, which became Worth, Orange which became Baxter, Mulberry Street and Little Water, which now does not even exist. It was originally a respectable area where the rich lived, but then houses began sinking into the imperfectly drained swamp, and the rich abandoned the area for better parts of Manhattan Island. Their places were taken mostly by freed Negro slaves and the low-class Irish, who began flooding into the area from Ireland, starting around 1790. tThe Five Points area became a breeding ground for crooks and criminal, and people from other parts of the city dared not venture into its boundaries. The great Charles Dickens once visited the area and he wrote about the Five Points, “This is the place: these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Debauchery has made the houses very prematurely old. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and the whole world over. Many pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?”tIt was in these rotted streets that Dickens described, that the first street gang was formed in 1825. It was aptly named the Forty Thieves, and was started in the back room of a produce shop on Center Street. It was owned by Roseanna Peers, and past the rotted vegetables outside, she sold illegal hootch in the inside back room, and allowed a dastardly chap named Edward Coleman to rule a motley crew of criminals. Being Irish, they all hated the Englishmen, but they robbed and pillaged from mostly their own. tSoon other gangs cropped up with names like the Chichesters, the Plug Uglies, Roach Guards, Shirt Tails and Dead Rabbits. The fought amongst each other over who would have the right to control the crime on certain streets. Soon more gangs arrived on the Five Points boundaries, like the Bowery Boys, the True Blue Americans, the American Guards, the O'Connell Guards and the Atlantic Guards. The streets, in and around the Five Points area, became so dangerous the brave Davey Crockett, known for his heroism out west, said the Five Points area of New York City was the most dangerous place he had ever visited in his entire life.tAs the years went by, gangs came and went in the Five Points area. The Civil War was the biggest destroyer of the original Five Points gangs, since many of the hooligans were drafted into the war down south. Some came back maimed. Some came back not at all. tThe rest of Asbury's book details every gang and crook that prowled New York City, until 1928. We meet such unlikable chaps as Monk Eastman and his Jewish Gang, Owney Madden and his Irish Hudson Dusters, and Paul Kelly (Paulo Vaccarelli ) and his Italian Five Pointers.tIf you want to get down and dirty, reading about the lives of men so despicable they were hung weekly in the courtyard of the city prison called Tombs, The Gangs of New York is the book for you.
What do You think about The Gangs Of New York (2001)?
There isn't any narrative to this book - it's just a rough collection of anecdotes, loosely organized by chronology. The anecdotes are definitely interesting, but it was hard to enjoy a book packed full of them. I found myself reading until bored, putting it down for almost a week, and forcing myself to pick it back up. It's not bad, honestly, it just gets... well, tedious. I think part of the problem is just how detailed some of the colorful characters get. I'm not sure how, exactly, Asbury can claim to know as much as he does about the lives of illiterate thugs from a 100 years ago. I won't say that any of it is made up, but the bibliography is conspicuously sparse.
—Robert Jones
When I first saw the cover of this book, I thought it would be talking about the organized crime of the 1920s and 1930s--I was astonished to be reading about gangs from as far back as the 1820s. Originally written in 1928, the book is written in a mishmash of retelling of legend, "shocker" paragraphs about gang brutality, and limited commentary about the administrative corruption and poverty that allowed and encouraged the growth of gangs. I learned a few things from this book: for example, I had no idea that life in the city was as brutal as it is portrayed, at the time it was portrayed. That said, the book is not overly-scholarly in its approach. Because Asbury is not clear on when he is retelling stories and legends and when he is reporting verifiable facts, the reader is left wondering which pieces are actually true and which are hyperbole. Also troubling is Asbury's ambivalent attitude towards the gangs and their activities: he vacillates between writing as though he were disgusted by them, tolerant of them, or even a little bit in awe of them. He reports on their "wickedness", but then refers to main players as "heroes". Overall, this might be a starting point for understanding the atmosphere that gave a foothold to the Mafia and will underscore one's understanding of history for this period, but should only be a starting point.
—Katherine Rowland
A good book with a lot of information, but I probably need to read this again somewhere down the line. I felt it read like more like a history book and there wasn't so much a main story throughout the book. I also want to read this slower next time with an old map of New York close to my side, or possibly while I'm visiting New York. If you think this book is like the movie, it's not. In fact the movie is VERY loosely based off the book. There was a Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day Lewis character) but how he dies is much different and much earlier than around 1965 like in the movie. If you like Asbury's Barbarey Coast about San Francisco around the same time period then you will probably like this book as well.
—Tom Gase
