June 2024

Gangs of New York: Native Sons

This article originally ran in AC Jan. 2003 Unit photography by Mario Tursi.Additional photos by J. Patrick Daily By the time Martin Scorsese teamed with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, ASC, BVK for the first time, on the 1985 film After Hours, Scorsese had been thinking about a very different New York story for a number of years. It was set during an especially tumultuous period of the city’s history, and much of the action took place in the area surrounding Scorsese’s boyhood home in Lower Manhattan. The story was Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book The Gangs of New York, a hair-raising account of the criminal activity that shaped life in New York in the 19th century. Subtitled "An Informal History of the Underworld," the book details a city...more