Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York is a film that shows the squalor of the worst slum in New York City in the mid 1800's, Five Points. With ten Oscar nominations, it is arguably one of the greatest historical movies to date (Koban). But just how historically accurate is it? While some people think the movie does a great job of depicting the time period, historians say it lacks authenticity. This paper will discuss Scorsese's historical inaccuracies in the cinema.
             Two of the major settings in the movie were historically inaccurate. The opening scene contains a setting that is a massive catacomb like structure that has hundreds of people draped in rags with skulls and bones lying on the floor and other horrible conditions. But this structure couldn't have existed during the time period because Five Points was built on the site of the filled in Collect Pond (Snyder).The ground wouldn't have been stable enough to have such a structure exist. The other setting that adds to the historical inaccuracy is the building named The Old Brewery. The Old Brewery is depicted as a tenement house with wide open spaces to house immigrants. It is also used as the headquarters for Amsterdam Vallon's Dead Rabbits, the protagonist's gang. Even the screenwriter for the movie, Jay Cocks says the setting in the movie is merely what they imagined it would have looked like rather than being based on historical accuracy (Andbinder and Cocks). The catacombs and their thousands of inhabitants in the movie were used by Scorsese to show how overcrowded the slums were during the time period. They were also used to depict the living conditions of the new immigrants, even if they were more dramatized in the movie than in real life (Chamberlin).
             The most interesting and inaccurately depicted character of the movie was the antagonist Bill the Butcher played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Bill the Butcher is based on an actual butcher from the period named Bill Poole (Wu). Bil...