Gangsterland

Finian: America's full of gangsters, you know. Sharon: I thought you said it was full of millionaires. Finian: That depends on which newspaper you read. —Finian's Rainbow

This might be considered the urban counterpart of Eagle Land, the perception (more so in other countries) of America as crime ridden. This has much to do with the export of American films. Supposedly, you will find French people, for instance, believing that Chicago is still as it was when Al Capone was alive.

While they all derive from the movies, most versions of Gangsterland do reflect violent periods in the history of various cities — at least if you turn your head and squint a little. New York City stand-ins will have violence courtesy of The Italian American mafias, Chicago from the Mayor's office and Prohibition-era bootleggers, and Los Angeles from ethnic street gangs or racist bullies. Note that the first is organized crime, the second is corruption (and organized crime), and the third is street anarchy (though the more successful street gangsters move up into organized crime, or die trying).

Examples of Gangsterland include:

Anime

• Baccano fits in so far as its milieu is a gangster-ridden 1930s New York. However, it also involves alchemy and the mobster characters tend not to fit stereotype.
• Referenced in Azumanga Daioh when Chiyo announces that she will be going to America. Osaka puts on her Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant hat and suggests that Chiyo will be kidnapped and killed there.
• Soul Eater basically combines old and new versions of this as well as Eagle Land with the Thompson twins who were formerly muggers in America until they tried to mug Death the Kidd

Comic Books

• Tintin in America pits Tintin against Chicago gangsters, including an undisguised Al Capone. Partially justified as it is set, and was written, in the 1930s.
• Sin City, as the name implies, is a crime-filled cesspool where even the heroes aren't the most law-abiding.

Film

• Gangs of New York portrays the 1860s equivalent, appearing to be a Wretched Hive.
• NYC's Brighton Beach in Little Odessa: The Mafiya is everywhere, all young men are wannabe hitmen, and nobody bats an eye when a murder occurs in broad daylight.
• In Hoodlum, in Harlem everybody is affliated with either the black Mafia, or the Jewish mafia, or the Italian mafia...you get the idea.
• The unnamed city that Angels with Dirty Faces takes place in.
• Any "coming of age hood movie" from the early 90s, especially Juice, Boyz N the Hood, Menace 2 Society, and of course Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Also pretty most anything involving Mexican Americans, such as Blood In Blood Out, Colors, American Me.
• The unnamed city in Streets of Fire is this.
• Kung Fu Hustle features a Chinese equivalent, though its laws of physics overlap with typical kung fu movies and Looney Tunes.
• The Warriors: Nearly every character is a gangbanger.
• The Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing, where just about everybody (including the non-speaking bit characters) seems to be a gangster or an associate of gangsters.

Literature

• Visible in the James Bond series (novels and early movies) in that while non-American villains were more of the megalomaniacal type, when American villains appeared, they were zoot-suited members of organized crime families.
• For a British Gentleman Adventurer, The Saint seems to bump into a lot of gangsters when he goes to America. Of course, since this is the Saint we're talking about...
• In Maximum Ride, Fang, Iggy, and Gazzy visit California. They meet a street gang there called "The Ghosts" who offer them a safehouse. Said gang also helps them out by scaring a hot dog vendor into giving free hot dogs to the mini-Flock and helps them fight the Flyboys.
• Discussed in The Dresden Files novel Death Masks, where a Catholic priest from Italy says that he is hiring Harry Dresden because he does not trust the police in Chicago, thanks to Chicago's reputation as a Mafia hotbed. While Harry is quick to point out that there is a lot of Mafia activity in Chicago, the level of corruption that said priest suspects is mostly fictional since the Capone days ended.

Live Action TV

• Remington Steele seems to invoke this trope in having Steele obsessed with hard-boiled detective stories. He seemingly believed that they presented as accurate a picture of contemporary America and its slang as they did in the 1920s-1940s, when most of them were written.

Theater

• Bertolt Brecht's play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui uses organized crime in Chicago and its environs as a metaphor for the rise of Hitler.
• Happy End, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Spiritual Successor to The Threepenny Opera, was also set in Gangsterland Chicago.

Video Games

• The Grand Theft Auto series, given that it is produced by a Scottish company, is a perfect illustration of the trope.
• Earthbound Zero has the gang-ruled city of... Ellay. Subtle.

Western Animation

• The French animated film The Triplets of Belleville has American gangsters as villains. It also invokes Eagle Land in depicting the Statue of Liberty and Americans as obese in contrast to the svelte (if equally unattractively drawn) French characters. Well, according to a newspaper the gangsters are apparently the (nonexistent?) French Mafia, and insofar as Belleville was a parody of America, the actual geography of the city, besides the statue, seems to be inspired by Montreal.

Real Life

• A Brooklyn newspaper back during the era gave us this poem (parodying part of "The Star-Spangled Banner"):

And the pistols' red glare Bombs bursting in air Gave proof through the night That Chicago's still there.

• Mexico is often viewed as this from time to time. Particularly by people caught up in the the current hostilities, which blur the line between a gang war and a civil war!
• New Jersey has some Gangsterland inner cities. Newark and Camden are the most notable examples. You do not want to walk around there at night (except maybe the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark).
  • In particular Jersey City has historically had a big crime problem. Although the downtown/waterfront area has been gentrified into a yuppie wonderland, the rest of the city has a lot of ghetto areas. The "Greenville" neighborhood is desolate during the day and extremely scary at night. The most frustrating part is that City Hall refuses to acknowledge these realities, and instead claims that crime is "at a 30-year low" despite the fact that virtually everyone in the city knows otherwise.
    • City Hall may well be right. "30-year low" just means that there is less crime now than there was at any one point in the last thirty years, not that there is little crime.
• Philadelphia has a long history of crime, especially in terms of murder rate, gang violence, and its reputation as being a mafia stronghold. The city of Camden, New Jersey, located directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has frequently been rated as the most dangerous city in the United States.
• The Dying Towns in the Midwestern US are among the best known current examples, with Detroit and Cleveland being the most notorious. It speaks volumes that Chicago, the original Gangsterland, is arguably the most well-off city in the region right now.
  • Murray Hill is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods that's actually in Cleveland, rather than a suburb. It's also home to the local mafia.
• California has parts of Los Angeles, and further north, Oakland and Richmond.
  • Stockton is also starting to turn into one thanks to an almost non-existent police force.
• Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, Ohio has been consistently in the top 25 most dangerous U.S. neighborhoods, actually reaching the top of the chart for some time.