The New Year 1890 brought a harsh March Winter to New York City. The hoar frost on the tree limbs and branches made it look like a silver brush had painted over it all.
The Irish had arrived to its tenements.
There was little fresh air, or water. Cinders and dust covered everything in each tenement. Rats would run over the children as they slept. Dark cellars held garbage. The Rock of Ages saloon was a low saloon where the Irish and the Chinese and the Italians drank bonded together by their shared misery.
Hallways had been made into shops. Snails and sausages, tobacco, and decaying vegetables, moldy breads and cheeses were sold. The rag-pickers spilled out of the alleys and looked for a spot to settle for the night at five cents a spot. Tenement life at Mott and Pell Streets, Bayard Street and Bottle Alley, and Mulberry Bend was sorrowful, raucous, disease-infested and intolerable.
The Children’s Aid Society had sheltered 300,000 outcast, homeless and orphaned children in its lodging houses in New York City. The children came in rags. Sometimes a newspaper was their only clothing.
The American Irish had been willing to emigrate as indentured servants or redemptioners. In exchange for passage to America, they bound themselves for a period of three to five years. Between 1841 and 1851 Ireland lost a population of at least two-and-one-half million. Famine had killed one million Irish. The great hunger was caused by the potato blight.
At Grosse Island, Quebec, 84 ships were detained in a single year and thousands perished trying to arrive healthy. An inscription in a Grosse Island Cemetery read “In this secluded spot lie the mortal remains of 5,294 persons, who, flying from pestilence and famine in Ireland in the year 1847, found in America, but a grave.”
Wanting the companionship of his fellow Irish, the immigrant stayed in the cities. The cities offered the Irish opportunities of jobs and later political power. The Irish ghettos were full of sheds and shanties.
Whiskey helped give temporary relief from the bleakness of his living conditions where 20 family members shared a single squalid room. The cellar saloon served as a center of ghetto life and provided the sociability craved by the immigrant Irish. It enslaved many Irish to liquor.
The Irish men tried to find work and it often was the menial kind. They worked as a hog carrier, street cleaner, day laborer or longshoreman. They could earn 75 cents a day and six to eight drinks of whiskey while working on America’s transportation systems. The Irish railroad shantytowns grew up in Ohio and Indiana, Illinois and across the Mississippi into Iowa. Cities such as Albany and Peoria, Buffalo and Omaha soon had their Paddy’s Quarter or Irishtown. Those seeking better jobs would read with loathing the familiar notice of “No Irish Need Apply.”
Estimates of native sons of Erin serving in the Union armies range from 150,000 to 200,000 with New York furnishing the largest number of regiments among the Irish Brigade. A tradition of Irish gallantry, elan, and love of battle, endured into later wars. The fighting Irishman became a famous stereotype. The honors and promotions the Irish garnered on the battlefields of the Civil War were a testament to the Irish character and resolve. They had risked all to arrive in America and they wanted to succeed.
Erin go Braugh.