The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld by
Herbert Asbury
pbk out January 03
(Arrow)
at £6.99
The book is referred to as 'long out of print and a cult classic'. This usually
means a work is dull, obscure and of interest only to a specialist clique. In part this book
conforms to this stereotype.
If you didn't know already, and were expecting a shiny new novel from which the
film was made, 'The Gangs of New York' comes as a surprise. The book was published
first in 1928 by a journalist, and was cobbled together from contemporary newspaper and
court reports, and personal interviews. Asbury himself lays no claim to it being a
sociological treatise, nor a look into the mind of the gangsters it portrays. It is simply a
chronicle of an era that had ended a bare decade or so before Asbury was writing.
It tells the story of the gangs and gangsters of the toughest parts of New York
from around 1840 to the end of their existence early in the twentieth century. The names
reverberate even to English ears – Five Points, the Bowery, Hell's Kitchen – and the
faces that stare malevolently out of the mugshots in the book cause a shiver down the
spine. Men you would not wish to meet on a dark night in a dingy alley – Googy
Corcoran, Baboon Connolly, Louie the Lump and Humpty Jackson.
The early gangs seem to have arisen out of the grinding poverty and appalling
conditions in the worst parts of the city. They established their territories, robbed
whoever incautiously strayed into them, and fought other gangs in a form of tribal
warfare. The Bowery Boys, the True Blue Americans, and the Plug Uglies ruled their
own slum roosts. The level of lawlessness seems horrific today, but then this was a time
when the Wild West was burgeoning, and the rough justice of frontier towns became the
stuff of legends. This was all happening in New York, however, and often just round the
corner from the mansions of the rich and famous.
Martin Scorsese is reported to have been so taken by the book that he went
through it in one day. I found that impossible – it is surely a book a book to dip in and
out of. Some sections become merely a litany of names and places, almost biblical in its
monotony. It is at its most absorbing and informative when Asbury embroiders a specific
tale. There are the key chapters of the Civil War Draft Riots, where, in an echo of more
recent riots in America, a political protest becomes an excuse for looting and vengeance.
And fascinating tales of the killing of Bill the Butcher, and the career of Monk Eastman,
whose means of disciplining a fractious female was to blacken her eye, or 'put a shanty
on her glimmer'. Reassuringly he reminds us he 'always took my knucks off first'.
This book is a chronicle of the grinding poverty experienced by many in New
York in the nineteenth century, the corruption of others, and the inevitable violence that
resulted. The inferences are there to be drawn, but Asbury does not draw them. It is
down to the reader to make up his or her own mind. Don't be deterred by some of the
more impenetrable passages. Put it down, because you will be drawn back to it time and
time again.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
