8

Irish Metropolis

THE FAMINE IRISH were the most impoverished immigrants ever to arrive in the United States and the least prepared for life in New York. Only 12 percent had a trade; only 2 percent had been merchants or professionals. The rest would have to start life in America in the lowest-paying, most menial, least secure jobs. Many of the famine Irish, especially those from west Cork, Kerry, and Galway, would not have known much more English than a German or French immigrant.¹

Before the famine, New York’s Irish immigrants lived primarily in a smattering of neighborhoods in lower Manhattan. But by the end of the famine immigration, there was virtually no part of the city that did not have a large Irish presence. Irish-born adults outnumbered native-born adults in fifteen of the city’s twenty-two wards in 1860. Furthermore, the wards in which the Irish had merely congregated in 1845 were dominated by them ten years later. Irish immigrants constituted an overwhelming majority of the adult population in the First Ward at the southern tip of Manhattan (which the Herald called “the thirty-third county of Ireland”), the Fourth Ward (the heart of the East River waterfront), and the Sixth Ward (home to Five Points), and made up almost as large a proportion of the population in the Seventh.²

They did not settle haphazardly. Those from counties Kerry and Sligo, for example, concentrated in Five Points in the pre–Civil War years. Another Kerry enclave existed in the First Ward along Washington Street. Natives of Limerick, in contrast, congregated along the East River in the Fourth Ward. Immigrants from Cavan and Tyrone, in Ireland’s north Midlands, frowned on all of those lower Manhattan Irish enclaves and instead tended to live in the Seventh, Thirteenth, and Eighteenth wards. Emigrants from Cork were especially numerous near Corlears Hook in the Seventh Ward, but Cork was so large and populous and emigration from that county was so huge that “Corkies” outnumbered the contingents from other Irish counties in almost every ward.³

 

THE NATIVITY OF ADULT NEW YORKERS BY WARD, 1860

Source: Manuscript population returns, New York County, 1860 census.

 

Like the generation that arrived before them, many of the famine Irish lived in two-and-a-half-story wooden tenements. These “tenant houses”—“so old and rotten that they seem ready to tumble together into a vast rubbish-heap”—were considered the city’s worst. Many apartments in these buildings consisted of a single room, which often had to provide cooking, eating, bathing, and sleeping quarters for an entire family. If the apartment had a bedroom, it was typically windowless, and the resulting lack of air circulation created an “atmosphere productive of the most offensive and malignant diseases.”⁴

New York’s wooden tenements were especially miserable in winter. Wind often whistled through gaping holes in the buildings’ walls, while windows did not close properly and were frequently missing whole panes of glass. These structures were “open to the wind and the storm” and “exposed to all the rigors of inclement weather, and to every possible cause of wretchedness and suffering,” complained the Courier and Enquirer in 1847. Visitors commonly found snow drifting in the entranceways, halls, and sometimes even in the apartments themselves. These buildings—“worn out, . . . disgustingly filthy, and unhealthy beyond description”—were the most notorious tenements in the famine era.⁵

By the end of the famine migration, brick tenements outnumbered those made of wood by a ratio of about three to two in lower Manhattan neighborhoods such as Five Points and by an even wider margin in the more recently developed wards farther uptown. These brick tenements tended to be fairly uniform on Manhattan’s identical twenty-five-by-one-hundred-foot lots. The dwelling typically measured twenty-five feet wide by fifty feet deep and generally stood three, four, or (especially after 1845) five stories high. Each floor above the entrance level contained four two-room apartments, while the front half of the ground floor was devoted to retail space. Each apartment’s main room, which at various points in the day had to serve as the kitchen, living room, dining room, and a bedroom, usually measured about twelve feet square and typically had two windows on one wall, facing either the street or the backyard. The apartment’s other room—the “sleeping closet”—was aptly named. It was windowless and, at eight by ten feet, hardly bigger than a modern walk-in closet. The entire apartment covered just 225 square feet.

If a family of five inhabited one of these apartments, the parents would spend the night in the sleeping closet while the children slept in the main room on straw or rags that sat in the corner during the day but were brought out at night and covered with a sheet to make a bed. Five persons was the average household size in Five Points and the First and Fourth wards. But 46 percent of Five Points apartments housed six or more people, and one in six accommodated eight or more.⁶

Tenements were so crowded in part because many immigrants took in boarders or lodgers to help cover the rent. (Lodgers received only a place to sleep; boarders got breakfast and supper, too.) In 1855, 28 percent of Five Points families had lodgers or boarders; the proportion would have been about the same in the Fourth Ward and a bit lower in less impoverished neighborhoods. In the rear building at 51 Mulberry Street in Five Points, for example, Patrick Hogan and his wife, Mary, took in one boarder; the Fox family rented space to two lodgers; the Shieldses, McCormacks, Mullins, and McManuses had three lodgers each; the Kavans and Conways four lodgers each; the Hanlans eight lodgers and a boarder; and widow Mary Sullivan one lodger. These were more boarders and lodgers than one found in the typical tenement. Most families that took in boarders rented space to only one. Still, having even that single stranger in one’s midst made the tiny tenement apartment feel even smaller.⁷

 

Taken in 1875, this photograph of tenements on Baxter Street just north of Worth dramatically illustrates the differences between frame and brick dwellings. Although it appears that the two-story buildings at the center of the image have sunk into the ground, in fact the level of the street was raised after they were built, probably at the time sewer lines were laid.

 

 

These floor plans represent the typical front and rear brick tenements built in New York in the era of the Irish famine emigration. The smaller floor plan is the design for a rear tenement that would sit off the street in the yard behind the bigger one.

 

With so much crowding and no running water, these tenements became terribly dirty. A city inspector reported that the typical Five Points tenement contained walls “with the plaster broken off in many places, exposing the lath and beams, and leaving openings for the escape from within of the effluvia of vermin, dead and alive.” Where the walls remained intact, they were “smeared with the blood of unmentionable insects, and dirt of all indescribable colours.” Another investigation found “sluggish yellow drops pending from the low ceilings, and a dank green slime upon the walls.” A reporter visiting tenements in the Fourth Ward likewise encountered “dirt in every shape, filth of every name, smells in every degree, from . . . unwashed babies, unchanged beds, damp walls and decayed matter, to the full-blown stench which arose from the liquid ooze of the privy.” It was “a matter of surprise,” concluded the state legislature’s tenement committee in 1856, that the occupants of such buildings “did not all die of pestilence generated by their unspeakable filth.”⁸

The oppressive heat that pervaded brick tenements in the summertime probably bothered the immigrants just as much as the dirt. These buildings were supported entirely by their exterior walls—typically a foot or more of solid brick. In the summer these tenements, especially those with southern or western exposures, became veritable ovens, as the brick walls continued to radiate the heat they had absorbed by day long after sunset. “The very idea of refreshing slumber in one of the seething little ovens which must usually shelter not one, but several persons, and sometimes a whole family, appears ridiculous,” wrote one reporter investigating tenement life in the summer months. Many immigrants moved their beds next to their living room windows, and those lucky enough to have fire escapes slept on them (though for tenement residents whose apartments faced the backyard, this meant enduring the stench emanating from the outhouses). Others sought relief on rooftops, stoops, and even sidewalks, “until it is almost impossible to pass along without stepping upon a human body.” Occasionally, a sleeping tenement dweller would fall to his or her death while sleeping on a window ledge, fire escape, or roof.⁹

Immigrants had to worry about stifling tenement heat for only a few months each year, but noise was a constant annoyance. Most tenement dwellers came from the European countryside and were not accustomed to the cacophony of the urban landscape. The sound pollution immigrants hated most was that created by other immigrants—living above, below, and next to them. The thin interior walls in both wooden and brick buildings blocked very few sounds. With wooden floors and minimal carpeting, virtually no movement from above could escape the attention of those below. Children shouting, spouses fighting, and babies wailing all contributed to the din, often making sleep impossible.¹⁰

 

Tenement dwellers sleeping on rooftops, windowsills, and wooden storefront canopies to escape the heat inside their brick tenements.

 

Noise was such a problem in part because of how many immigrants every landlord tried to squeeze onto a twenty-five-by-one-hundred-foot lot. Each one typically held one twenty-five-by-fifty-foot building, while the back half of the lot held privies, pumps, sheds, and clotheslines. But many landlords, hoping to extract as much rent as possible from their property, built a second brick tenement—twenty-five feet wide, twenty-five feet deep, and four or five stories tall, with two apartments per floor—in the yard behind the front tenement. The only windows in these rear tenements faced the outhouses, which would become severely overtaxed by the additional residents in the second tenement. “These tumbling and squalid rookeries,” concluded an investigative committee, were “the most repulsive features of the tenant-house system.”¹¹

With so much demand for inexpensive housing, some enterprising immigrants rented previously uninhabited tenement basements and converted them into lodging houses. The overcrowding in these “filthy, damp and dismal” establishments was truly awful. A friend of minister Samuel Prime saw subterranean lodging houses in Five Points with rooms “as thickly covered with bodies as a field of battle could be with the slain.” In many of these establishments, lodgers slept on two-tiered bunks, often consisting of canvas stretched between two wooden rails. “Without air, without light, filled with damp vapor from the mildewed walls, and with vermin in ratio to the dirtiness of the inhabitants,” commented the Tribune, “they are the most repulsive holes that ever a human being was forced to sleep in. There is not a farmer’s hog-pen in the country, that is not immeasurably ahead of them in point of health—often in point of cleanliness.”¹²

Before the famine immigration, few of the city’s notorious tenements lay outside Five Points. But with the Irish now flooding all across Manhattan Island, nearly every part of town soon had its own infamously crowded and filthy buildings. In the Eighth Ward sat six “infected receptacles” known as “Rotten Row” on Laurens Street (now West Broadway) between Grand and Broome. A few blocks closer to the Hudson was “Soap Fat Alley” at 42 Hamersley Street (now the west end of West Houston Street). Just north of Soap Fat Alley in the Ninth Ward was another teeming tenement complex, Smith’s Court, at 16 Downing Street, whose front and rear buildings in 1856 housed seventy-four families, “all in a filthy condition.”¹³

Perhaps the most infamous tenement outside Five Points in the famine era was the Fourth Ward’s Gotham Court. Occupying both 36 and 38 Cherry Street, Gotham Court was undoubtedly the biggest tenement in Civil War–era New York, measuring five stories high, 34 feet wide, and a staggering 240 feet deep. Whereas the typical brick tenement had four apartments per floor, ­Gotham Court had twenty-four. Twelve could be entered only from the alley on the east side of the building and the others only from the alley on the west side. Ironically, when the huge tenement was constructed in 1850, observers called it “praiseworthy” and “well worthy of imitation.” A few years later, however, it had become clear that trying to cram so many impoverished immigrants into so small a space had been misguided. Gotham Court, reported the Times in 1857, was “in a very filthy condition.” It housed as many as eight hundred inhabitants in its 120 two-room apartments, almost all “wretched-looking Irish people” with “scores of haggard, hungry-eyed, half-nude children.”¹⁴

One reason Gotham Court teemed with so many immigrants was that, unlike most tenements, it had no backyard. The builder placed the pumps and privies on the cellar level under the alleyways and positioned grates on the surface above the privies in an attempt to provide ventilation. Nonetheless, the odor emanating from the alleys was “most sickening.” Inside was no better. The hallways were “filled with a fetid vapor, so thick that you can see it.” Even in the years immediately after the Civil War, when tenement conditions generally improved and the building was far less crowded, the death rate of Gotham Court’s inhabitants was thirteen times greater than that in the city’s less crowded upper wards. “Divill a bit of sickness is iver here,” an eld­erly Irish resident told a reporter. Thirty percent of babies born to Gotham Court mothers, reported the Times in 1872, died before their first birthday.¹⁵

With the proliferation of five-story brick tenements and rear tenements, the taking in of boarders, and the spread of basement lodging houses, New York’s Irish neighborhoods became, by the conclusion of the famine emigration in the mid-1850s, the most crowded plots of land on the planet. The most densely populated was Five Points, with 198,000 inhabitants per square mile. Close behind was the residential portion of the Fourth Ward around Water, Cherry, and Oak streets, bursting at the seams with 192,000 per square mile. Even with the advent of high-rise buildings, no part of New York is as densely populated today as were these neighborhoods in the 1850s. In fact, only a few places in the contemporary world (the Mong Kok section of Hong Kong and the slums of Mumbai, Dhaka, and Nairobi) surpass the crowding of these antebellum New York neighborhoods.¹⁶

 

The tenement on the right, Gotham Court, was the city’s largest in 1860 and its most notorious. It stood near the East River waterfront on Cherry Street, a half block east of where the Brooklyn Bridge first touches the Manhattan mainland.

 

Most famine immigrants arrived in the United States without any occupational training and had to take the lowest-paying jobs New York had to offer, almost all of which required long hours of backbreaking labor. Even by 1860, when some had had the chance to acquire training in a trade and move up the occupational ladder, 46 percent of male Irish immigrants still did work that required no training or experience whatsoever. Some worked as longshoremen, loading and unloading barrels and crates from the hundreds of ships that arrived in and departed from New York Harbor each week. Others worked as cartmen, coachmen, or porters.

 

EMPLOYMENT OF NEW YORK MEN BY OCCUPATIONAL CATEGORY AND BIRTHPLACE, 1860 ¹⁷

 

	IRISH-BORN MEN	AMERICAN-BORN MEN
Professionals	0.1%	4%
Business owners	5%	14%
Clerks/Lower-status white collar	6%	25%
Skilled manual workers	38%	33%
Unskilled workers	46%	15%
Other/Difficult to classify	5%	9%

 

Source: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), “1% sample of the 1860 U.S. Census.”

 

The vast majority of the unskilled toiled as day laborers, and the building industry provided most of a laborer’s employment in New York. Pretty much anything done on a construction site today by a backhoe, bulldozer, steam shovel, or construction crane was done in the antebellum era by Irish day laborers. They dug foundations, carried heavy hods full of bricks and mortar to masons, hoisted lumber and beams to the carpenters, and hauled away debris. Municipal projects also employed many laborers, especially the digging of sewer lines and the paving of streets with cobblestones. Laborers’ work was frequently very dangerous. “How often do we see such paragraphs in the paper,” complained one immigrant, “as an Irishman drowned—an Irishman crushed by a beam—an Irishman suffocated in a pit—an Irishman blown to atoms by a steam engine—ten, twenty Irishmen buried alive . . . and other like casualties and perils to which honest Pat is constantly exposed, in the hard toils for his daily bread.”¹⁸

As hazardous as a laborer’s work might be, his greatest fear was probably not death but unemployment. Some might secure a long-term commitment from the foreman at a single construction site, but others had to search for a new position each and every morning. And on days too wet or cold to work (almost the entire New York construction industry shut down in midwinter), even the steadily employed laborer did not get paid. Sudden sickness or a job-related injury could also throw one out of work at any time. Even in perfect health, noted the Tribune, only “an energetic and lucky man . . . can make more than two hundred and fifty days’ work as an out-door laborer in the course of a year, while the larger number will not average two hundred.” Laborers had to fall back on summer savings to get by during the lean winter months. As an Irish journalist observed, “A month’s idleness, or a fortnight’s sickness, and what misery!” The majority of Irish immigrants who arrived in New York as laborers remained laborers for the rest of their lives. Many may not even have minded, reasoning that their circumstances were far better than they had been in Ireland. They may also have enjoyed working in a field dominated by the Irish. In 1855, 98 percent of the city’s laborers were immigrants, and 88 percent of those immigrants were Irish-born.¹⁹

Those who did manual labor, both skilled and unskilled, generally worked six days a week for ten hours each day from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with a one-hour “dinner” break at noon. While the long workday was nothing new to New York’s immigrants, they were startled by the productivity Americans expected from their employees. “‘Hurry up’ is a phrase in the mouth of every person in the United States,” noted an English immigrant. German bricklayers found that while laying 1,000 to 1,200 bricks was an acceptable day’s work in their native land, contractors demanded 1,500 in New York. When English visitor John White told a New York Irish American that he should be happy earning “three times the Irish wages,” the laborer complained that “he did six times the Irish work.”²⁰

We associate New York’s famine Irishmen with menial day labor, as did contemporary New Yorkers. Yet 54 percent of male Irish immigrants held jobs farther up the occupational hierarchy. If a laborer hoped to secure a position that paid better or was more secure, there were a number of strategies he might employ. One was to learn a building trade from co-workers on construction sites, a possibility because, as a German immigrant reported gleefully to family back in Europe, “you don’t have to pay to learn a trade in America.” That may be how John Tucker, a famine immigrant from Limerick who worked as a laborer during his first five years in the city, managed to become a stonecutter by 1857. Others learned crafts unrelated to their previous work. Laborer James Carson, who emigrated from County Tyrone in 1850, became a blacksmith; laborer Michael Coghlan from County Limerick became a bookbinder; and laborer Francis Campbell from County Mayo became a chair maker. Once one family member managed to acquire a trade, he could teach it to his siblings and eventually to his children.²¹

A plurality of Irish-born artisans labored in the building industry—as carpenters, plasterers, painters, bricklayers, masons, plumbers, and gas fitters. Many Irish immigrants also toiled in the clothing industry as tailors and shoemakers. Some of the most lucrative trades, however, seemed to have glass ceilings that only the exceptional Irish immigrant could break through. Relatively few found work as butchers or bakers, for example. Nor did the Irish often get jobs in high-end carpentry specialties such as shipbuilding and cabinet, furniture, or coach making. Such barriers cost them dearly. Tailors and shoemakers made little more than a dollar a day, and a carpenter could also command only $7.50 to $8 a week, whereas a baker earned $9 to $10, a cabinetmaker $10, and a ship carpenter $12 to $15 per week.²²

If an immigrant wanted to earn significantly more money, his best chance to do so was to move out of manual labor altogether. If he could read and write well, the famine immigrant might transition into an office job. Hugh Hughes from Armagh worked four years as a laborer after his arrival in 1850 before he landed a job as a clerk. Maurice Ahern, after emigrating in 1848 from County Cork, toiled for more than a decade as a porter before he, too, became a clerical worker around 1860.²³

The most common path up the socioeconomic ladder was entrepreneurship. Immigrants who wanted to open their own businesses often started out as peddlers because the start-up costs were so low. Peddlers were a ubiquitous sight in antebellum New York, hawking anything that would bring a profit, but especially items that the immigrant housewife (who did not stray far from home) might need: buttons, thread, cheap jewelry, used clothes, and food. “The Emerald Isle furnishes a large quota to the ranks of these street-merchants,” noted Scribner’s Monthly. Irish immigrants were especially known for peddling seafood, crying, “Fresh sha-a-d!” or “My clams I want to sell to-day; the best of clams from Rock-away.” Irishmen from Donegal were especially drawn to peddling; one-fifth of New York’s Irish peddlers were natives of that single Irish county. But Germans were even more ubiquitous than the Irish among the ranks of New York’s peddlers (outnumbering the Irish by about three to one). Jews, who made up only a small fraction of the city’s German immigrants in this period, constituted a majority of New York’s German-born peddlers.²⁴

Some peddlers became well known all over town. In 1842, Englishman Henry Smith immigrated to New York from London, where he had worked in a textile factory. He brought with him £6 his friends had collected as a parting gift, for, as he later explained, “it is customary in England, when a workman leaves home and friends, for his shopmates to get up a subscription, or ‘petition,’ as it is called, for his benefit, as a token of their esteem and confidence, and as a kind of memento to cheer him on his way.” Upon his arrival in New York, Smith peddled spools of cotton he had brought with him from his old workplace. He soon became a peddler of razor strops, the strips of leather used to hone straight razors. His sales pitch, often delivered on the steps of the Stock Exchange or in front of a swank hotel, was a masterpiece of showmanship that made him one of the city’s best-known characters. He made a small fortune as a peddler, lost it all in the Panic of 1857, was shot in the leg at the Battle of Gettysburg, and after the war returned to New York and peddling.²⁵

Irish immigrant peddlers could also do quite well. Hugh Torpey, who emigrated from Mitchelstown, Cork, to New York in 1847, hawked “port-monnaie,” small pocketbooks and wallets. By 1864 he had accumulated in his account at the Emigrant Savings Bank more than $2,000, equivalent to $50,000 today. Most would have earned more moderate sums, while some failed altogether at peddling. Laborers Patrick Healy from County Galway and James Higgins from County Tyrone both tried peddling in the early 1850s but were back at day labor just two years later.²⁶

For every Irish immigrant who worked as a peddler, there were several who managed to save enough to open their own brick-and-mortar businesses. Irish immigrants could be found in almost every conceivable commercial enterprise, wholesaling hay and hosiery, lemons and linen, paper and potatoes, milk and morocco leather. The Irish became especially associated with the junk trade, a line of work they could enter without having to rent a storefront. James Deasey of the Seventh Ward and County Cork, Patrick Sullivan from Kerry and the Fourth Ward, and John Harrington from Kerry and Five Points all moved from day labor to the junk trade during the 1850s.²⁷

The businesses Irish immigrants owned more than any others were groceries. Grocers carried virtually everything a tenement dweller might need—food, fuel, soap, candles, crockery, pipes, and tobacco. Irish grocers knew they had to stock their shelves with cheap goods in order to appeal to their frugal customers, yet their shops did not lack variety. Even in Five Points, the cornucopia of products for sale at a neighborhood grocery store was quite impressive. In Crown’s Grocery at 150 Anthony Street (now Worth), reported one journalist,

 

piles of cabbages, potatoes, squashes, egg-plants, tomatoes, turnips, eggs, dried apples, chesnuts and beans rise like miniature mountains round you. At the left hand as you enter is a row of little boxes, containing anthracite and charcoal, nails, plug-tobacco, &c. &c. which are dealt out in any quantity, from a bushel or a dollar to a cent’s-worth. On a shelf near by is a pile of fire-wood, seven sticks for sixpence, or a cent apiece, and kindling-wood three sticks for two cents. Along the walls are ranged upright casks containing lamp-oil, molasses, rum, whisky, brandy, and all sorts of cordials, (carefully manufactured in the back room, where a kettle and furnace, with all the necessary instruments of spiritual devilment, are provided for the purpose.) The cross-beams that support the ceiling are thickly hung with hams, tongues, sausages, strings of onions, and other light and airy articles, and at every step you tumble over a butter-firkin or a meal-bin. Across one end of the room runs a “long, low, black” counter, armed at either end with bottles of poisoned fire-water, doled out at three cents a glass . . . while the shelves behind are filled with an uncatalogueable jumble of candles, allspice, crackers, sugar and tea, pickles, ginger, mustard, and other kitchen necessaries. In the opposite corner is a shorter counter filled with three-cent pies, mince, apple, pumpkin and custard—all kept smoking hot—where you can get a cup of coffee with plenty of milk and sugar, for the same price, and buy a hat-full of “Americans with Spanish wrappers” [cigars] for a penny.

 

Irish groceries may have been renowned for their variety, but those glasses of “fire-water” made them notorious. Women in the United States rarely drank in public, but that did not stop some Irish immigrant housewives from stopping at the bar of their local grocery for a glass of gin or brandy. As a result, natives saw Irish groceries as one of the most objectionable features of New York’s Irish enclaves.²⁸

While a grocery could be very profitable, the American dream of most Irish immigrants was to become a saloonkeeper. In contrast to crowded groceries, saloons were typically long, narrow open spaces with a bar running down one long wall and an empty floor beside it. They contained no barstools or seating of any kind, primarily because there was no space for them. Unlike the palatial watering holes one might find on Broadway, the typical saloon in an immigrant neighborhood was the same size as a tenement apartment—twelve feet wide and at most twenty-two feet deep. Those that were particularly successful might break through to the back half of the tenement, but even then, that extra space usually remained separate—a back room that local labor, fraternal, and political organizations could use for meetings. Unlike the grocery, the saloon was an exclusively male domain. Anyone could open a saloon in an Irish neighborhood, but most were run by Irish Americans, for as one journalist noted, Irish immigrants preferred patronizing “the bar-keeper whose name has in it a flavour of the shamrock.”²⁹

With “scarcely room enough to turn around” inside their tenements, one immigrant noted, the saloon was a place where men could escape their cramped domestic life for a bit of camaraderie with their friends and neighbors. At the local saloon, observed charity pioneer Charles Loring Brace, the immigrant “can find jolly companions, a lighted and warmed room, a newspaper, and, above all, a draught which . . . can change poverty into riches, and drive care and labor and the thought of all his burdens and annoyances far away . . . His glass is the magic transmuter of care to cheerfulness, of penury to plenty, of a low, ignorant, worried life, to an existence for the moment buoyant, contented, and hopeful.”³⁰

 

The circular pieces of paper hung high on the wall of this Five Points saloon are targets, indicating that a neighborhood militia company held its meetings here. The man behind the bar is probably the proprietor, Irish immigrant Richard Barry. In 1860 and 1861 he served as alderman for the Sixth Ward, the pinnacle of success for most saloonkeepers.

 

The saloonkeeper won most of his respect because of his palpable power among his fellow immigrants. He “was a social force in the community,” remembered minister Charles Stelzle, a child of German immigrants who grew up in New York.

 

Often he secured work for both the workingman and his children . . . As a young apprentice, when I was arrested, . . . the first man to whom my friends turned was the saloon-keeper on the block. And he furnished bail gladly. He was doing it all the time. He had close affiliation with the dominant political party; he was instrumental in getting the young men of the neighborhood onto the police force and into the fire department, the most coveted jobs in the city among my young workmen friends. He loaned money . . . [and] no questions were asked as to whether or not the recipient was deserving.

 

The Nation agreed, reporting that “the liquor-dealer is [the immigrants’] guide, philosopher, and creditor. He sees them more frequently and familiarly than anybody else, and is more trusted by them than anybody else, and is the person through whom the news and meaning of what passes in the upper regions of city politics reach them.”³¹

Given saloonkeepers’ power and largesse, immigrants deferred to them in virtually every arena, and the liquor business thus became a natural stepping-stone into politics. Almost every Irish American political leader in New York in the antebellum period had at some point been a saloonkeeper. Matthew Breen recalled that in the Civil War era, if you had business to transact with your alderman, you went to his saloon, “as it was the Alderman’s only place of business.” A saloon was a virtual precondition for candidacy, as saloonkeepers built up the network of support necessary for a successful candidacy by treating customers and supporting other saloonkeepers in their campaigns for office until they had garnered enough political capital to make a run themselves. Irish immigrants operated more than a thousand saloons in New York by the eve of the Civil War, more than all other New Yorkers combined. Any Irish immigrant looking to escape manual labor, earn a substantial income, win the respect and admiration of his neighbors, and wield political clout would do whatever it took to open a saloon. Even some who arrived penniless at the height of the famine managed to do so.³²

 

Irish immigrant women were much more likely to work for pay than other female immigrants or native-born women. Thirty-five percent of female Irish-born New Yorkers aged sixteen and older reported working for pay, while among native-born women and those from the rest of Europe, only one in six was employed. Poverty was undoubtedly the reason why Irish-born women worked in greater numbers than other female New Yorkers. Furthermore, many Irish women came to America on their own expressly to raise money to support indigent parents or finance the emigration of other family members, a practice that was less common among other European immigrant groups in this period.³³

Nearly two-thirds of all employed Irish women worked as domestic servants. Irish-born women dominated domestic service almost as thoroughly as their menfolk did day labor: Irish immigrants held 70 percent of domestic service jobs in 1860 even though they accounted for only 39 percent of the city’s adult female population.³⁴

 

Employment of Immigrant Women in New York, 1860

 

	IRISH-BORN WOMEN	OTHER IMMIGRANTS
Percentage of population employed	35%	18%

 

Occupations of employed women ³⁵

 

	IRISH-BORN WOMEN	OTHER IMMIGRANTS
Household servant	63%	43%
Needle trades	17%	38%
Washing	7%	3%
Business owner	4%	2%
Nurse	3%	2%
Other/Difficult to categorize	7%	11%

 

One of the most difficult aspects of domestic service for an immigrant was finding that first job without references (though some, anticipating this need, brought letters of recommendation from Ireland). Many New Yorkers preferred not to hire the Irish. An 1853 advertisement in the New York Sun read: “WOMAN WANTED—To do general housework; she must be clean, neat, and industrious, and above all good tempered and willing. English, Scotch, Welsh, German, or any country or color will answer except Irish.” A help-wanted notice in the Herald two days later likewise specified “any country or color except Irish.” The Irish-American—voice of the New York Irish community in this era—condemned such prejudice, vowing to “kill this anti-Irish-servant-maid crusade” and hiring a lawyer to sue the advertisers and newspapers involved. While the Irish-American’s campaign did halt the appearance of specifically anti-Irish advertisements, employers simply modified their ads. About one in ten continued to specify “Protestants” or “Americans” (though ads seeking male employees were remarkably free of such overt discrimination). While the Irish-American might boast by 1857 that “No Irish need apply” provisos had virtually disappeared, thinly veiled prejudice against hiring Irish Catholics, especially as domestic servants, continued to be a staple of New York life.³⁶

 

Many Irish immigrants found work as domestic servants through placement agencies such as these photographed in New York in the late nineteenth century.

 

Once an Irish immigrant secured a position as a domestic, her workday was grueling. Typically living with her employer, she was expected to rise each morning well before the family to light the fires and prepare breakfast from scratch. She then spent the rest of the day cooking meals (again, doing everything from scratch), cleaning the dishes and the rest of the house, scrubbing the floors on hands and knees, washing and ironing the clothes (in an era when clothes had to be washed by hand and heavy irons had to be heated over a stove), and caring for children. Her typical workday did not end until well after the family had gone to bed. Some domestics slept in quarters far nicer than they could have afforded in Five Points or some other Irish enclave, but many were “thrust into noxious dark bed-rooms or unventilated garrets and lofts.” All this for as little as $4 to $8 per month (plus room and board).³⁷

Domestic service also involved a heavy psychological toll. “The relationship between the servant girl and her employer, is nearly the same as that of master and slave,” wrote a southern visitor to New York. “The duties expected and exacted are precisely the same. The respect, and obedience, and humility required, are also nearly the same.” As under slavery, a male employer might try to force himself on his young female servants, knowing that he was unlikely to face any consequences unless his wife found out. In some ways the domestic was in an even worse position than a slave, because the employer had no obligation to care for a sick servant and might simply fire her when she was unfit to work.

Servants also had very little free time. Because most of them lived with their employers, they were on duty nearly every waking moment. The typical servant got every other Sunday off, reported the Tribune, alternating with the cook, chambermaid, or laundress “so that the house shall never be ‘left alone.’” But if she worked for a middle-class family and was the only employee, she might get only one Sunday off a month, especially if she lacked experience or references, or had a child who might distract her from her work. Even if a servant had two days off per month, this meant that she had virtually no social life whatsoever, making the young Irish woman’s already difficult task of finding a mate (in a city where Irish-born women outnumbered men by three to two) exceedingly difficult.³⁸

There were some advantages to domestic service. Domestics ate well (often the same food they cooked for their employers) and lived rent-free in safer, cleaner neighborhoods than other immigrants. Furthermore, with middle-class New Yorkers so utterly dependent on their servants, in some ways Irish domestics had more leverage over their employers than perhaps any other immigrants. “Whenever one thinks she is imposed upon, the invariable plan is to threaten to leave the situation at once,” noted the Tribune, “instead, as in other kinds of employment, of being fearful of losing it.” This power could translate into better pay, more time off, and other benefits.³⁹

With room and board covered, the domestic could also send virtually all her income to relatives back in Ireland to support elderly parents or finance the emigration of other family members. “The great ambition of the Irish girl is to send ‘something’ to her people as soon as possible after she has landed in America,” observed a visiting Irish journalist in 1868.

 

Loving a bit of finery dearly, she will resolutely shut her eyes to the attractions of some enticing article of dress, to prove to the loved ones at home that she has not forgotten them; and she will risk the danger of insufficient clothing, or boots not proof against rain or snow, rather than diminish the amount of the little hoard to which she is weekly adding, and which she intends as a delightful surprise to parents who possibly did not altogether approve of her hazardous enterprise. To send money to her people, she will deny herself innocent enjoyments, womanly indulgences, and the gratifications of legitimate vanity.

 

Of the $120 million (according to one estimate) that Irish Americans remitted to Ireland from 1845 to 1865, a large portion came from the savings of domestic servants.⁴⁰

That figure came from an Irish journalist, John Francis Maguire, who sought to dramatize the sacrifices of his countrymen. A more conservative estimate, made by the British government, was that Irish emigrants sent $57 million to Ireland from 1848 to 1860. Even that smaller figure equates to a staggering $1.67 billion in 2015 dollars. Maguire’s figure, which covers two decades rather than thirteen years, equates to $3.5 billion.⁴¹

The second most common occupation for Irish immigrant women in the antebellum era was needlework. A few needleworkers had relatively high-paying jobs as dressmakers or milliners to wealthy New Yorkers, while others sewed part-time, supplementing the incomes of husbands, fathers, or brothers. Most needleworkers, however, supported either themselves or whole families doing piecework—barely eking out a living sewing collars or hems for a penny apiece, working eighteen- or twenty-hour days yet earning only a few dollars a week. New York’s needlewomen, reported the Times, inevitably led lives of “misery, degradation, and wretchedness.”

The vast majority of women who sewed for a living did so because they had children to care for and thus could not work as domestics. Knowing this, employers exploited needleworkers terribly, often refusing to pay for work completed on the grounds that it was subpar or late. But since the employer owned the shirt and the collar the needlewoman had stitched together, he took them from the seamstresses, who suspected that he sold these “ruined” shirts anyway, pocketing the extra money. “No serf in the middle ages,” concluded the Tribune, “was ever more helplessly under the absolute control of his superior lord as are the needle women to the employers.” In the 1850s, “the wretchedness of needlewomen” became something of a cause célèbre in New York. Newspaper exposés documented their pitiable lives, reformers held meeting to organ­ize relief for them, and charitable organizations chronicled their struggles to support themselves and their families. Approximately 70 percent of these needlewomen were immigrants.⁴²

The next most common avocation for Irish immigrant women in the Civil War era was taking in washing. The city was full of single men who could afford to pay someone else to do their laundry. The advent of the commercial laundry was still decades away, so immigrant women filled the void. Some women took in washing on a casual basis, from men who lived in their tenements. Others were ambitious businesswomen who ran small washing empires, farming out the work to other immigrants and keeping the bulk of the profits for themselves.

That seems to have been the case with Mary Mulvey, who emigrated from Dublin to New York in 1846 at age thirty-five with her husband, Charles, and four daughters aged ten or less. A year later Charles disappeared, probably while out of town looking for work, and was never seen again. Needing to support herself and her children, Mary began working as a “washer and ironer.” In 1851 she opened an account at the Emigrant Savings Bank with an initial deposit of $200. Somehow, Mary saved an additional $2,000 (equivalent to about $57,000 today) by January 1857 and nearly $1,000 more by the eve of the Civil War. Perhaps her children helped her save. (We know two became teachers, but only one was old enough to have been so employed by 1857.) Perhaps she inherited the money. Perhaps her brother, who lived around the corner, contributed to his sister’s account, though as a tailor he was not in a high-income occupation either. More likely she was very frugal or a very smart businesswoman—probably both. These accomplishments are all the more impressive because Mary Mulvey was illiterate. Like 63 percent of the Emigrant Bank’s female Irish-born depositors and 21 percent of its male Irish customers, she could not even write her own name. Washerwomen did not typically accumulate nearly this much cash, but their median savings at the Emigrant Bank, about $200 (a little more than $5,000 in today’s dollars), was twice as high as that of needlewomen.⁴³

There were undoubtedly a lot more employed women than the historical records indicate. Even in the Irish immigrant community there was a stigma attached to married women working for pay, so women often lied about their employment. Kerry native Catherine (Kate) Sullivan of Five Points, for example, described herself as a homemaker married to husband Sandy, a laborer, when she opened an account at the Emigrant Bank in 1860. Nor did she report an occupation to the census taker who visited her later that year. Yet a few months earlier, a reporter and sketch artist for the New York Illustrated News had visited “Mrs. Sandy Sullivan’s Genteel Lodging House” in the basement of 35 Baxter Street. Kate was undoubtedly the one who ran the place, keeping it clean, feeding the inhabitants if they paid for food as well as a bed, and washing the sheets each Thursday. Another reporter who toured the “damp and filthy cellar” in the summer of 1859 found “wretched beds,” “fetid odors,” and floors and walls “damp with pestiferous exhalations.” But Sandy, “with much loquacity,” assured the visitors that the beds were “clane and dacent sure” and that, for six cents per night, “the place was quite sweet.” In the summer of 1860, the Sullivans’ boardinghouse lodged a seventy-one-year-old Irish paperhanger, his thirty-five-year-old daughter, five Irish-born domestic servants, and a baby.⁴⁴

Children would also help immigrant families make ends meet, although most did not typically earn a wage. Five Points was famous for its adolescent bootblacks, newsboys, and girls peddling hot corn in summertime, but these waifs were typically orphans living on their own or with adoptive parents, or children who helped keep their family afloat after their father died. Thousands of children in immigrant neighborhoods did, however, supplement their family income in informal ways. The most common was to scavenge for coal, looking for chunks of the shiny black rocks on the street near coal yards or by the docks, where it was transferred from barges to wagons. Owen Kildare knew not to come home until he had met his daily coal quota, thus reducing the amount of money his stepparents had to spend on fuel. Other children collected scrap wood, which could be burned in the family stove or sold for kindling. Still others prowled the streets looking for (or stealing) scrap metal, glass, or anything that could be sold to the city’s many Irish junk dealers.⁴⁵

Given these struggles, scholars tend to paint a “gloomy picture of Irish-American deprivation,” arguing that the famine Irish did not thrive in New York, but instead lived a life “of poverty and hardship.” There is certainly much evidence to support this interpretation. “It is a well established fact,” reported one Irish American, “that the average length of life of the emigrant after landing here is six years; and many insist it is much less.” In a similar vein, a New York Irish newspaper complained in 1859 that most of the famine immigrants were still “a mere floating population” who lacked real economic security and were despised by native-born Americans.⁴⁶

Yet there is more evidence to support the argument that the Irish viewed their move to New York in mostly positive terms. Despite the terrible conditions and high mortality rates in certain tenements, the death rate for immigrants in New York City was no higher than for the native-born population. In the year ending on June 1, 1855, when immigrants made up 51 percent of the city’s population, the foreign-born accounted for 50 percent of New York’s deaths. The famine Irish believed that they were healthier in New York than they had been in Ireland, and attributed this improvement in large part to their American diet. Even laborers in New York “can eat good beef, and pork, and butter, and eggs, and bread—not so at home in the old country,” remarked an immigrant from County Carlow living in Five Points, even though “an Irish laborer had to work harder there than here.”

There were other benefits, ones that could not be measured in bank balances but were nonetheless palpable and important to the immigrants. “Here we have a free government, just laws, and a Constitution which guarantees equal rights and privelages to all,” a far cry from the “tyrany and persecution at home,” wrote Peter Welsh to his father-in-law in Ireland. “And those who posses the abilitys can raise themselves to positions of honor and emolument. Here Irishmen and their decendents have a claim, a stake in the nation and an interest in its prosperity . . . It is the best and most liberal government in the world . . . It is impossible to estimate the amount of distress and misery that has been warded off” by those Irish men and women who chose to immigrate to America.⁴⁷

Other immigrants shared Welsh’s point of view. Comparing his old life in Ireland to his new one in New York as he proudly sent his parents $20 (the equivalent of about $500 today) just months after arriving from County Sligo, Pat McGowan wondered why he had waited so long to emigrate. Despite living in decrepit Five Points, Eliza Quinn felt the same way. The United States, she reported to her family back in Ireland, “is the best country in the world.”⁴⁸