Gangs of new York: how it was

Probably, everyone in new York is associated with Manhattan, Central Park, statue of Liberty, Brooklyn bridge, skyscrapers... But what was happening in the "big Apple" before?

Many of us (perhaps few) watched the Martin Scorsese film "gangs of new York" and assumed that is all just fiction. But not so :). The film actually has a real historical background. A brilliant Director actually showed the gang that was rampant at the time and kept at Bay the entire city. And order prevailed in the city, where the center of life for many was not Manhattan, and the angle of the five streets...

The end of the 19th century, new York: poverty, racism, immigration, corruption in government, constant riots caused by the call to war those who are not able to pay off or immigrants who do not understand what they were fighting...In such circumstances, the local population was doomed: either fight or die. They chose the former and began to join in the gang of gangsters.

It was a time when society was divided into "tribes", are constantly fighting with each other. The first gang was organized by the Irish who came to new York every week, and this cradle "robber bands" became the "Corner five streets" — the area formed by the streets of Cross, Anthony, little water,orange and mulberry.

Every week there was a new gang of gangsters with very unusual names: "untucked Shirt" (got the name for a style of shirt), "Chichester", "roach Guards", "Ugly cylinders", "Dead rabbits" and other.

The center of the gangs was the Old brewery that once really was such. Now the most famous apartment building in the history of the city turned into a brothel whose inhabitants almost never left the building and got his food a blasphemous way. Hiding in a dark corridor, they were waiting for their neighbors carrying something edible, beat them with something heavy on the head and taking their food.

Street, passing by the old brewery, stretched from North to South. The southern part has received a speaking name "Avenue of the assassins" North — a "Cave of thieves".

One of the popular entertainment of that time in the district, five streets were dog fighting. How much money they earned to the gang...

The ingenuity of the gangs of that time was not to occupy. For example, in some gangs took only committing a crime, and one of the gangs was a price list for crime: a fistfight (2$) to murder (100$).

There were other areas, as they say now, with a high level of crime. It was the Bowery (inhabited by gangs such as "the Bowery Boys", "Real Americans", "American guard", "Guard O'connell" and others) and the once elite Fifth district (in him dwelt the so-called river pirates). However, cruelty, in contrast to their "colleagues" from the corner of five streets, they did not differ.

However in his time in the ranks of the "Bowery Boys" fight bill "the Butcher" — a prototype of a Butcher Cutting from the movie "gangs of new York". He is actively "bend" by themselves all the known ways. He quickly established the "protection" of local pubs, turning did not want to pay into a bloody mess.

Oddly enough, but there was even gangsters-firefighters who extinguished the fires in the city, and was not satisfied with them. But they did it, of course, not altruistic reasons — gang, to extinguish a burning house, looked much more noble in the eyes of the locals. And to the locals in any case not mistake the gang, they gave them a special name — "the White spirit", "Black joke", "Stomach herring", "Dry bones", "Red pirate", "Sunny car", "Big six", "Alska girl", "Bean soup", "Old stuff"... and even "Old maid". However, it has also happened that the house was burned to the ground from the struggle of wanting bands to put out the building.

The gangsters first began to be used for criminal purposes and medicines. The scheme was simple — one distracts (usually the woman), another pour horse share sleeping pills. Well, then is simple enough.

Was widely known and cemetery thieves who dug up the corpses, and then sold them to medical students.

But everything comes to an end. The civil war descended on new York in 1863, a series of riots, which were the worst in the history of America. They lasted 4 days and 4 nights. The rebels destroyed and burned everything that came in their way. On the second day, when the city was under siege, the first troops came into new York to quell the rebels.

From this moment the activity of gangs began to decline: some of them fled to other cities, someone went into politics, and some of them degenerated into the so-called organized crime. In our days, "a Corner Five corners" is a tastefully-dressed people, living and working in the famous American skyscrapers, no swamps, mud and "gang" violence. Of course, with gangs living in new York , but that's another story....