On the Heels of the Irish

by Kelly Monaghan

My father liked to tell the tale of a tour of Dublin he took in the 1950s. Channeling my father’s no doubt exaggerated report, the tour guide’s spiel went something like this: “There’s Nelson’s Column. And over there, on yer left, in that wee alleyway, on July 14, 1916, Biddy O’Reilly single-handedly held off 24 Black ’n Tans, allowing Paddy Murphy’s sapper platoon to escape and blow up the railway bridge in Kilpierce three days later. There’s the National Gallery. And on yer right, in that very doorway, the turncoat informer Jimmy Dugan was assassinated by IRA gunmen as he was about to relay information to that British whoor…” And so it went.

St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Vesey in 1840. The Chapel honors Thomas Emmitt, a champion of Irish statehood.
Irish Walking Tours

 March 16, 1 p.m.: “Irish New York” Meet in front of St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway bet. Vesey and Fulton. $12 adults; $10 students, seniors (63+). Big Onion Walking Tours (212) 439-1090 www.bigonion.com

March 15, 16, 17, 1:30 p.m.: “The Irish and the Gangs of New York” Meet at 38 Park Row, bet. Spruce and Beekman. $15; 20% discount with AAA card. New York Talks and Walks 888-377-4455 www.newyorktalksandwalks.com.


Since Irish history involves the struggles of common people in humble circumstances, its greatest monuments are often invisible, built of memory rather than of marble and masonry. New York City, where the haunts of the city’s immigrant Irish have mostly crumbled into oblivion or been sacrificed on the altar of civic improvement, is no exception.

But the memories linger and, around St. Patrick’s Day, two walking tours will attempt to conjure the ghosts of long-departed Paddys and limn the not inconsiderable effect they had on the city’s political and social life. “We are all historians,” notes Seth Kamil of Big Onion Walking Tours, speaking of his cadre of tour guides. “We have the ability to take a vacant piece of land and recreate what was once there.”

One of the more palpable traces of early Irish immigration can be found in St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Vesey Street. This may be the only Episcopal church in the city to display an Irish flag. It honors Thomas Emmitt, an early champion of Irish statehood, who went from being “the most dangerous man in Ireland” to New York State’s attorney general. If memory serves, Irish Catholics no longer need a Papal dispensation to visit an Episcopal church, but since Emmitt was Anglo-Irish, many of my relatives would maintain that he doesn’t really count as being an Irishman.


You can’t miss Tweed Courthouse from which the Tweed Ring ran its corrupt government. While Boss Tweed was not Irish (he was American-born of Scots Protestant stock) he was a significant figure in New York Irish history. Dr. Phil Schoenberg, of New York Talks and Walks, offers a somewhat revisionist view of the infamous pol: “He was a crook, yes, but a progressive one.” Tweed helped improve education in the city, benefiting the illiterate Irish who in gratitude gave him their votes, often in quantities that belied the one-man-one-vote concept.

Nearby is the Emigrant Savings Bank building, now turned to other uses. Founded by Irish immigrants, the bank became something of a model for ethnic self-help groups and functioned as a job bank for newly arrived Irish.

Many surviving monuments with Irish connections are churches. The Ancient Order of Hibernians was founded in 1836 at St. James Church, just east of Chatham Square. Near the old Five Points is the Church
Thomas Nast’s 1871 cartoon shows Tammany Ring’s Irish-American politicians blaming each other for stealing.

“Old” St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 1859

of the Transfiguration, where the Cuban patriot Fr. Felix Varela ministered to an Irish flock. Farther north, at Prince and Mulberry, you’ll find “old” St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Founded in 1807, it was the first major signal of the arriviste status of New York’s Irish.

Other familiar Downtown landmarks, while not specifically Irish, played supporting roles in the Irish diaspora. Both the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction and the New York City Police Department offered jobs and status to new immigrants. Other touchstones of the Irish experience are harder to visit.

Five Points, made newly infamous by the film “Gangs of New York,” is a case in point. The area was largely obliterated when Mulberry Bend Park (now Columbus Park) was created in the 1890s at the urging of reformer Jacob Riis. The only Five Points street that

still bears its original name is Mulberry Street. Up Mott Street, you can still see tenements that date to the period of the film. Otherwise, the notorious slum exists only in the vivid reconstructions of tour guides.

Even harder to envision is the city’s first Irish slum, sardonically named Paradise Square, now Foley Square. When the Collect Pond, which once graced the site, became too polluted by effluent from local tanneries, the pond was filled in. Substandard housing was quickly erected and almost as quickly sank. According to Schoenberg, the ground continues to settle in spots.

Misconceptions about the immigrant Irish seem to have survived better than the buildings in which they lived.

“The Irish didn’t think of themselves as Irish,” Kamil points out. “Irish was a name given them by Americans. They came as Kerrymen or natives of Donegal and they settled in enclaves based on their home counties.” Schoenberg points out that “the Irish changed from being underdogs to become role models for future immigrants.”

So, does “Gangs of New York” accurately portray the immigrant Irish?

“It’s an entertaining film based loosely on a work of fiction,” Kamil says, diplomatically suggesting that the portrayal is several times removed from reality.

“The old Brewery really existed,” says Schoenberg, “and it was converted into housing, but nothing like what’s in the film. Of course, there would have been no tunnels. If you dug down in that area, you’d drown.”