Paris, London and New York: cities of the past

Martin Scorsese's new film, Gangs of New York, is set in the most important decades for New York, London and Paris – the 1840s to 1860s – and it brilliantly portrays the period. In all three places, tidal waves of immigrants overwhelmed municipal structures, engendering teeming, intimidating chaos.

How this was overcome is the decisive event in their modern histories. London and Paris drew surplus labour out of the countryside. In New York, as the film reminds us, migrants arrived by the boatload. The urban middle classes were at once terrified and fascinated by the slums created in their midst. Five Points on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the subject of the film, was matched in London by what were called "rookeries".

In Oliver Twist, for instance, Dickens put Fagin and the Artful Dodger into the Saffron Hill rookery between Clerkenwell Green and Smithfield. The most notorious example, however, was St Giles, lying between Great Russell Street and Long Acre with Drury Lane as its eastern boundary. In Paris, rookeries were situated next to the Louvre, close by the Hôtel de Ville and adjacent to Notre Dame. Like Dickens, Balzac used them as settings for some of his novels. He wrote of the "intimate alliance of poverty and magnificence that characterises the queen of capitals". When Dickens visited New York in 1842 he saw Five Points – "lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep; underground chambers where they dance and game".

But whereas the novelists were trying to evoke disgust, Scorsese, with his equally effective descriptive powers, has a different message. He has Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) describe the New York of the mid-19th century as "a cauldron in which a great city might be forged" and the posters for the film proclaim that "America was born in the streets".

That may be true, but what contemporaries thought was being born in the new slums was not a glorious future but disease, crime and mob violence. Some of the improvements that the authorities of the time were forced to make can still be glimpsed today. Below ground, the sewerage systems are essentially Victorian constructions. And virtually the last new roads built in central London and Paris date from the 1840s to 1860s.

Of the three cities, Paris made the most sweeping improvements in the mid-19th century and, so far as the buildings which lined the new roads are concerned, has preserved them best. Walk from the Place de la Concorde, remodelled in 1855, across the bridge over the Seine and turn left into the Boulevard St Germain and walk steadily eastwards for 30 minutes until you reach the rue St Jacques crossing, turn left, go back across the Seine by way of the Île de la Cité, and then turn left again onto the rue de Rivoli. Many of the buildings and all the streets you have traversed were constructed between 1850 and 1870. New York had the misfortune to have a corrupt city administration, as again the film makes clear. Boss Tweed (played by Jim Broadbent), the moving force in every new venture, whether street railroads, Central Park or Brooklyn Bridge, was a real scoundrel. He defrauded the city on a massive, Enron-type scale until he was finally arrested in 1871. He died in prison.

London had a different problem. The metropolis was powerless. At the beginning of the period, its unit of administration was the parish, not the borough or the city. Such cohesion as could be achieved was in the hands of 300 different bodies set up by 250 separate acts of parliament. The Strand was subject to nine different paving boards. It was not well paved. It was only in July 1858, the year of the "Great Stink", when the foul odours of the Thames reached MP's nostrils, that Parliament gave the recently formed Metropolitan Board of Works sufficient borrowing powers to finance new sewers.

The political situation in Paris was utterly different. Napoleon's nephew, Louis, had reached the throne by coup d'état and as Emperor Napoleon III, ruled by plebiscite. He was determined to remodel Paris and was as interested in town planning as – if the comparison may be allowed – Hitler was in architecture. He appointed the ruthless, gifted and totally loyal Georges Eugène Haussmann as Préfet of Paris. The municipal council, which contained such exceptional people as the painter Delacroix, was nominated by the Emperor. Napoleon III and Haussmann together remade the capital city. Nobody has ever had such control over New York or London.

What happened to the rookeries? Quite simple. New roads were driven right through them and their inhabitants dispersed. Thus in New York, Foley Square – north of City Hall – was built on the site of Five Points but not before its inhabitants had enthusiastically participated in the ferocious Draft Riots of 1863. This event, too, is reconstructed in Gangs of New York.

In London, New Oxford Street was pushed through the St Giles rookery and Farringdon Road through Saffron Hill. The city remained relatively quiet. Napoleon III and Haussmann did the same, though with less success. The 1871 Commune showed that the Paris mob was as unconstrained as ever. Perhaps that should be the subject of Scorsese's next film, starring Gérard Depardieu.