There’s a graveyard shown at the end of the movie. I was curious as to if it’s real and who’s buried there?
I always assumed (okay, this is a WAG) that it was either Ward’s Island.
While Martin Scorsese may have taken dramatic liberty with the plot he did try to reproduce the 5 points area properly according to old wood cuts. If you have the DVD click the tour he takes you on through the sets.
It is because of his attempt at geographical accuracy that I made the Ward’s Island assumption.
Ward’s Island was used by the city of New York as a potter’s field – a cemetary for the poor and destitute that might otherwise not have a final resting place. I choose Ward’s Island because the immediate setting was the draft riot of 1864 when Ward’s was still in play.
A few years later (I think 1868) the city of New York would designate Hart Island as the new potter’s field.
When I saw it only a month or so ago it appeared (to me) to be near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge on the north side. You see Wall Street/Lower Manhattan Spring up from an Easterly perspective (not a northeasterly one as in from Ward’s Island which is around 105th St.). But I have no idea if it was supposed to be a real place or more of a metaphorical one.
Point taken. It could have been metaphorical.
I came back to make a correction. Make it the New York draft riot of 18 63.
Ward’s would really be in play, but you know the geography and I don’t.
In any case if it was near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge (I hadn’t even thought of that) then it was after 1883.
No, the sequence of time passing includes the Brooklyn Bridge being constructed, IIRC.
I signed up for an account and posted here just to answer this question.
The cemetery at the end of the movie is probably fictional. If that patch of ground was ever used as a graveyard, it isn’t any longer.
The end scene is a lovely bit of cgi. But we can still make a decent guess about where that fictional cemetery might have been if had existed and where that final scene was shot. This is just using Google Maps, search, and good old Wikipedia.
Based on the angle of the Brooklyn Bridge and the big brick building on the left labeled “Carson’s” (in reverse) in the last segment of the time lapse, I think the location of the fictional cemetery is in the Fulton Ferry District of Brooklyn, just a little east or southeast of the present day St. Ann’s Warehouse, an open air theatre in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The building on the left could be the “historic Tobacco Warehouse” - a roofless pre-Civil war brick structure St. Ann’s has adapted for its shows (I would love to see this in person). I’m sure that ancient brick building, the Brooklyn bridge, and the Manhattan skyline was a great inspiration to Scorsese and his location scouts.
This perspective lines up pretty well, too, if we draw a line from Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park to Columbus Square, which part of the present-day location of Five-Points and Paradise Square ( Five Points, Manhattan - Wikipedia ) and the Bowery.
In addition to geographically “looking” like the right location, it also makes sense historically. The Wikipedia entry for Brooklyn Bridge Park (which contains Empire Fulton Ferry State Park - Brooklyn Bridge Park - Wikipedia ) explains that the area was right off the old Manhattan ferry, which was easiest way to get carts, horses, local goods across before the bridges. You could rent a small boat for the day, but the ferry was probably cheaper and more far consistent. The poor were often buried in potters’ fields outside of Manhattan (on Ward’s Island, on Hart’s Island, etc.) It makes sense, to me at least, that the characters, hoping for a peaceful and respectful burial of their friends and rivals in the aftermath of the Draft Riots of 1863 would have carried their dead out of Manhattan on ferry and buried them fairly close to where it docked.
I was spurred to write this to counter the nearly ubiquitous answer of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. It CAN’T be Green-Wood, despite many red herrings and many voices online saying it is. Green-Wood Cemetery IS supposedly one of Scorsese’s inspiration for the film. It HAS been in operation since 1838. The real William “Bill the Butcher” Poole IS buried there, BUT he, too, was only an inspiration, having died eight years before the Draft Riot of 1863. BUT geographically, the perspective is completely wrong. Green-Wood Cemetery is a couple miles further south of the Brooklyn Bridge while the angle of the Gangs of New York final scene is from the north side of the bridge in Brooklyn. Also, an imagined CGI vantage from Green-Wood Cemetery would first overlook a mile of Brooklyn itself then water then finally the pre-built-up coast-line of now Battery Park. This is nothing like the longer swath of coastline, the Bowery in the distance, and the docks NORTH of the Brooklyn Bridge that we see in the closing scene of the movie.
So, TL;DR: The final scene of Gangs of New York is not a real cemetery, but it was probably shot from modern day Empire Fulton Ferry State Park just a touch east or southeast of St. Ann’s Warehouse/old Tobacco Warehouse.
Good stuff. I’d add that the elevation of that location in the movie doesn’t look like the real topography either. It seems to be a small hill over looking the East River but even if you back up along that line, where the ‘Pier 17’ sign is just to the left of the Manhattan-side pier of the Brooklyn Bridge, it’s pretty flat. You don’t go up in elevation much until you get the ridge line of the terminal moraine of the last ice age, around Crown Heights along that line where you’d see a lot of low rise Brooklyn in the foreground. Green-Hill Cemetery is also on that ridge, to the southwest. The movie cemetery is an imaginary location, along with lots of other imaginary or anachronistic stuff in that movie of which you mentioned a couple of examples but there are many (there was no identifiable Chinese area of lower Manhattan till post Civil War, etc).
Hi Ivy. I, for one, welcome our new member to SD.
William Poole (in the movie, William Cutting), is buried in Greenwood Cemetery and it is known for its hills.
Its on the west side of Brooklyn and so the hill closest to the water would have a view of Staten Island. Its three miles away from Fulton St ferry area, all around to where the shore is north south…
William 's grave
There is no background as you look up the slope to the sky.
Even it was at the very west end of the cemetery and at the top of a slope down to the west, the view to the west is three blocks of downtown Brooklyn… warehouse after warehouse.
The three blocks were laid out in the original development. Greenwood cemetery was left rather large as the road designers didnt want to try to put a grid over the hills…
The small hills of Greenwood Cemetery are the mountains of Brooklyn. No such at Fulton St.
Another way to estimate the location would be to trace a line southeast from the former World Trade Center buildings, through the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, and see where that ends up. There’s also a low(ish - like 15 stories maybe?) light colored building with a plume of steam coming out of it in the final scene that lines up nicely with the WTC as well. That line looks like it would go through the base of the Manhattan Bridge somewhere around Main Street Park.
It’s clearly a CGI location; now I’m just curious as to how much artistic tweaking of the actual Brooklyn Bridge/Manhattan skyline was done in order to get a pretty shot for the movie. I would bet that any real-world shot that reproduced the Brooklyn Bridge as seen in the film would have a very different Manhattan background.
Another possible fun project would be to try to identify ‘when’ that last shot could have been taken.
Thanks to Google now taking pictures in parks, you can get a pretty good comparison shot. As said, the location is the Empire-Fulton Ferry Park on Water St.
But if you compare with a screencap from the movie, you can see the elevation is actually quite a bit higher. From what little I know about the history of NY, the city was plowed flat early in the 1800s so I’d imagine by 1863 that little park would be about the same elevation as it is now.
The graveyard likely never did exist, otherwise I’m sure someone would have found a reference somewhere. But as others have said, the real Bill Poole is buried about 3 miles south in Green-Wood Cemetery.
Whether drawn from real history or completely fabricated, it seems to be the same graveyard next to the Brewster house in Arsenic and Old Lace.