In my Storyssentials post on Research, I talked about how a storyteller must assign himself homework. Mine involves a decent amount of gilded age reading (and viewing). Some might assume I want to write steampunk. Though this coming series employs some steamy elements, I wouldn’t classify it that way. For one, few use steam. For another, I focus more on that period in American history and the issues that arose for us as a people, issues we still wrestle through today. Some of the things I’ve shared in the past were homework like the Houdini biography. Recently, I finished the film The Gangs of New York and the book A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York.

Gangs brutalized and soiled what few glimmering pictures I had left of Nineteenth-Century New York City. Had I not just finished Tale, I would have thought the violence and prostitution a bit overdone—the thing of Hollywood sensationalism where we glorify violence and devalue sex. Unfortunately, the movie treated Five Points mercy, glimpsing the crest of the iceberg of gilded age government corruption. Boss Tweed, as Gangs hints, ushered in the peak of corruption in New York City, brutalizing the poor with his police forces and gangs. I guess it’s really not that different from today’s brutality, only with shootings and stabbings and lynchings poured over the top like tar.

Timothy Gilfoyle in Tale follows around historic George Appo–the son of an Irishwoman and a Chinaman–as he works his way from Donovan’s Lane onto a juvenile delinquent work-ship called “The Mercury.” From that floating death trap (or “floating Sodom” as the people called it back then), Appo hopped in and out of prisons like Sing-Sing, Clinton, Eastern, an insane asylum and less serious places like Blackwell’s Island—DiCaprio’s prison at the start of Gangs. In reality, Blackwell’s was a joke. Prisoners checked themselves in for better living conditions than what slums like Five Points offered and checked themselves out with nothing but a couple of chums and a rowboat.

Through all of that, Appo graduated from lifts to “sure thing graft” cons like bunco, flimflam, fake jewelry and the infamous green goods game. For green goods, printers sent hundreds of thousands of circulars to citizens nationwide—the first nationalized crime syndicate. Circulars offered an exchange of $100,000 in counterfeit cash for $10,000 real green. Financiers would back the scam with a bankroll of real money and they’d swap the cash for a sackful of sand at the last second. This Appo, at the end of his sorry life, found himself in the Twenty-third Street Baptist Church reading a leaflet of songs. “There is a fountain filled with blood,” spoke a verse, “The dying thief rejoiced to see.” George Appo swelled with tears and whispered to a man beside him, “That’s me. That’s me.”

As for gangs themselves, though Scorsese focused on the one riot that could have razed New York City to the ground, Gilfoyle says “gangs” varied from groups of twelve-year-olds who snagged pocket watches to the full-fledged armed forces we see at the beginning of Gangs. The closer New York inched toward the Twentieth Century, the closer she came to seeing something of a decline in corruption and thievery. Deep as she was in what some called “the very pit of Hell,” she had a long way to go to see the light of day.

Gangs was not a date night movie and I might have checked the rating were I doing something other than research. I spent a good chunk of the movie covering the screen with a pillow, but coupled with Tale, I glimpsed into the dark heart of the city that one man claims has now triumphed. Though I love the benefits of New York, though she stands second only to Chicago in my mind, I have my doubts about that word “triumph.” A friend of mine stumbled across a brothel right on Times Square where slaves—young ladies from Europe—had been smuggled in. When he confronted the bouncer about these poor girls, the bouncer responded, “So?”

May we do better than to let our city fall into that pit.  (The FBI’s investigating the brothel).

May we never respond, “So?”

PS> Need a writer? I work for free on May Day!