Get Your Copy The Gangs Of New York Illustrated By Herbert Asbury Published As Visual Format

book has its ups and it's downs but overall a book that I would recommend to one of my friends, This book grabbed my eyes because just the title itself could tellstories, This book tells the stories ofth century gangs or crews in New York City, My favorite part about the book is when they tel you about secret gambling houses, Gambling houses were getting shut down so people were creating these very quiet places where people could gamble, There was many of them but at the same time the police was finding out about them and shutting them down! I think what worked was how they collaborated everything that happend like the riots, gambling houses and the head of a militia gang being arrested into one book.
I didn't really find anything bad in this book to say about it, And lastly it was a great boo to learn about what happened in theth century New York City and how it was a horrible place to live.

The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, written in, 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's.
The book starts with the chapter entitled “The Cradle of the Gangs,” which was the Five Points Area in, 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's, the area was mostly a swap area, surrounding a lake called Fresh Water Pond by the English and Shellpoint by the Dutch.


The 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 lowclass Irish, who began flooding into the area from Ireland, starting around.


The 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”

It was in these rotted streets that Dickens described, that the first street gang was formed in.
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,

Soon 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.


As 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,

The rest of Asbury's book details every gang and crook that prowled New York City, until, 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.


If 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.
I really liked it. Read it several times. VERY DETAILED look at the underworld of NYC from the's to the's, with a focus mainly on the Five Points amp Bowery area.
The political corruption of the Tammany Hall era contributed greatly to the growth amp power of the gangs, leaving the police mostly powerless to bring justice to these downtrodden slums.
The Civil War Draft Riots the focus of the recent movie of the same name, I believe are discussed on a daybyday basis small sketches of many of the colorful individuals of thisyear period are presented as well.


This book was published inso a good amount of the material occurred within the memories of those still living, The writing is a little more formal than what I'm generally used to and the massive amount of material was overwhelming at times.
Definitely a scholarly work vs, something written for the masses, at least for the current popular culture, Still worth the work in reading, though,
Fun but not totally accurate of that era, Written in, the book is enlightening about the condition of the City of New York in its developing years, and it is NOT about the wealthy families.
I can't even imagine what living in the density of people in a constricted area would have been like, The Five Points drew the people who were used to a hard life, and they had it in New York just like they did back in Europe.


The author describes the colorful gangs, criminals, politicians, and others who populated the area from the's on, The chapters depicting the treatment of the Black population are hard to read, but then so are the chapters about the Irish, Oh, my. I have never read about the Draft Riots, and I learned more than I wanted to know,

Not for the squeamish, The nonfiction text from which the screenplay came, Bill the Butcher, The Dead Rabbits and the Civil War draft riots are mentioned, but they really flushed out a story for the fictional film.

Wow, how horrid and seedy NYC was from the midth century to the first World War! The tenements sound like absolute hell on earth.
Apparently muggers and "gangsters" got a crack at anyone who wandered into their neighborhoods, and knew politicians would most likely bail them out.
The reading might have been a bit dry for some, but I'm a sucker for this stuff, The bizarre glossary alone is worth a browse, I'm surprised there isn't more "romantic" underground fictionalizing from this era, where the police were barely organized, the politicians were blatantly corrupt and The City was one big crime college of cons, beatings and debauchery.

Now if anyone needs me I'll be over there at the Faro table, . . its ok, pretty detailed history, sometimes overly detailed. An engrossing historical chronicle about gang activity in New York starting in the earlys through to, This book was published that same year, so it sits much closer to the events and feels more contemporary,

Gangs of New York is controversial, Although it's clearly the product of deep research, many of the tales are anecdotal, The information is densely packed, but varies from broad strokes to specific accounts of events or timelines, It devotes two very detailed chapters to the Draft Riots of the mids and gives a lot of time to some personalities.


You can't really make this kind of thing up, But tiny pinches of salt might be needed now and then, Events appear to be presented pretty evenhandedly, but the theme is clearly around the depravity and audacity of the gangsters chronicled, It occasionally veers into salacious, almost tabloid, descriptions, but overall this is a reasonably balanced book,

Still, historians have challenged some of its contexts and descriptions, so don't treat it as gospel,

A side note: the introduction of the book is very interesting, completely missing the rise of organised crime through bootlegging alcohol.
The last part of the book, despite touching on the years since the Volstead act aka, Prohibition became active, hardly mentions bootleggers! The introduction goes as far as to explain why gangs wouldn't reappear in New York this is in, four years before Al Capone was sent to prison and the Mafia's five families were created.
Talk about hindsight being/!

Second side note: Martin Scorcese's movie uses material mostly found in the first third, though it employs numerous references from across the book.
For example, the character notching a club with successful attacks mimicked a tradition by Monk Eastman, a gangster active from thes tos.
Only a few background characters in the movie were based on actual people, None of the main characters were real, though there were a couple of Bill the Butchers in the period, The gangs all did exist, but weren't bound by any particular laws or rituals, They just fought a lot, and drank and engaged in crime in between, Few of the events in the movie are in the book and in the case of the Draft Riots they present very different interpretations.
But many of the locations did exist, DNF

I just couldn't continue with this book, You'd think for a book about the history of gangs in NY, it would be really interesting, but it was so dull and dragging and there were so many commas.
One moment you're in precivil war next your in the lates and you're to keep guessing which ear you're in until the author bothers to tell you.
Also the cycle of each chapter is the same, A little background on why a riot happened, followed by a way to indepth account of the fight, followed by a quick conclusion.
This pattern was repeated over and over with the chapter that I got tired of reading it, So tired that I've fallen asleep many times reading it, I don't need to torture myself over this book, School does that job already, There's a long tradition in New York of looking back on bygone periods of mindbogglingly dangerous violent crime with a sort of wistful, carefree nostalgia.
Oh, will no one bring back the heroinsoaked early's, when you could ride a brokeass graffiti covered subway car to the East Village, step over halfadozen junkies on your way up the Bowery to see a real live punk band ! and then get blackjacked by a mugger trying to stumble home at:

This one's the granddaddy of them all, freely mixing American talltale hokeyness with lurid tabloid journalism to craft an outsized picture of the city's criminal element in the latter half of the's, a time when various police forces, fire brigades, and gangsters almost blurred together as one ultra violent warring mob on Tammany Hall's payroll.


With more than a few winks, Asbury blends legendary accounts that can't possibly be realfeet hoodlums who, Hulklike, swing trees and lamp posts as clubs in with countless, probably true stories of big city slum crime.
Occasionally the text degenerates into lists of gang names, ridiculous underworld sobriquets, and catalogs of weaponry that start out fun and then glaze your eyes over, and there's plenty of casual's bigotry sprinkled throughout those sneaky, sneaky Chinamen, but, you know, all in good fun.
I learned about this book from Borges' short essay "Monk Eastman, purveyor of iniquities," and have been meaning to check it out for some time, but only when I stumbled across this edition which was published to coincide with the Scorsese film did I pick it up.
The foreword to this edition, fittingly enough, is actually the Borges essay,
Asbury wrote several books collecting sensational crime stories the others focus on Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco, This one, on New York, is the most famous, I haven't read the others but I assume the fact that New York is the oldest and most populous of the cities covered accounts for a lot.

Asbury attempts to give some historical background, but tends to dwell on the most sensational events and does not shed much light on the "why"s of the gangs.
Instead he tells interesting, even shocking, stories of the gangs and their most infamous members, We meet the real HellCat Maggie who filed her teeth to points and wore brass claws into brawls and other unlikely gang leaders, including the entirely legendary Mose the Bowery Boy, who stood overfeet tall.
We learn about the original "Hole in the Wall" bar run by Gallus Meg, a massive woman who was both the owner and the bouncer, and who collected ears from unruly customers.
I was most impressed to learn of the pirates of the Hudson River, who raided docked ships and sold their booty to pawn shops, and numbered in the hundreds.
There are ton of interesting tidbits, interspersed with some repetitive accounts of feuds and assassinations,
The reader can pick up a few bits of socioeconomic and political information to help give the astonishing level of gang activity some context, but about halfway through it becomes a little repetitive.
Things pick up a bit near then end of the book when the Tongs are introduced, but eventually the book just runs out of steam.

Still, it is pretty absorbing, especially in the first half, If I read more of his gang histories, I will probably give myself permission to skim more and skip sections, .