Gangs of New York

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• Movie Goof (incorrectly regarded as a mistake): The movie refers to Anthony, Orange and Cross Streets as being at the Five Points. By the time the events in the movie take place, they had been renamed Worth, Baxter and Park streets, respectively. The city of New York renamed these streets in an effort to change the overall reputation of what was already called Five Points. This strategy failed as the entire area was still as infamous as ever. Most Five Points residents would have still known and referred to the streets by their original names.
• Movie Goof (anachronisms): Johnny tells Amsterdam that Bendrick the Cockroach "carries a germ" and "if you try to leave the gang, they say, he hacks up blood on you." The link between germs and disease wasn't known until after Robert Koch's 1876 publication. Louis Pasteur's work, also published in the 1870s, completed the proof to the medical community, though it was called "the germ theory of disease" as late as 1914. In the 1860s, no ragamuffin street kid would have made the connection. He wouldn't have used the word that way, either; the first recorded use outside medical literature is John Tyndall's 1879 Fragments of Science for Unscientific People. Until then, "germ" was the part of a seed from which the plant sprouts.
• Movie Goof (anachronisms): Prior to the street battle in 1846, Priest Vallon recites a portion of the Prayer to St. Michael: "St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle! Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil." The prayer was written by Pope Leo XIII in 1888.
• Movie Goof (errors made by characters, possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): SPOILER: During Monk McGinn's funeral procession, the priest is wearing a vestment called a maniple over his right wrist. The maniple is worn over the left arm only.