America Was Born On The Streets

America is known as a nation of immigrants. From Plymouth Rock in the seventeenth century to Ellis Island in the twentieth, people born elsewhere came to this destination. There have been frequent conflicts between the cultures they have brought with them from the "old countries" and those already found in America. It is through these bloody series of history that they gradually adjusted to each other and formed "the land of immigrants" as it is right now. As the most notorious slum in New York history, Five Points best illustrated the life of immigrants and the way they contributed to the formation of American society. Gangs of New York by Martin Scorsese is a movie set in Five Points. It offers a significant visual idea of how the nation of United States was formed in the mid-19^th century. This paper shows a real low life in New York by introducing the episodes and indications in the movie. From movie to history, subjects like living, working, profession, and political structure and tensions are illustrated. They were living in miserably poor houses, plagued by weather and diseases; they were working in insecure, sometimes dangerous, and lowest-paid trades; children were hanging out in the street, selling newspapers or hot corns, or sweeping the mud to support the family. Home-abuse, political corruption, moral degeneration were beyond imagination. Tensions in every aspect finally led to the damaging Draft Riots of 1863, which also awakened people's consciousness to deal with its hell-like situation. Though the Five Points neighborhood is gone now, since would-be Americans are arriving in tens and thousands every day, its significance to American studies is far-reaching.