Irish New York: From The Five Points to St. Patrick's Cathedral

There's a park in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan where you can stand on a patch of Irish countryside. The Irish Hunger Memorial rises 25 feet above street level, built around an authentic stone cottage shipped over from County Mayo, with stones from all 32 Irish counties embedded in its walking path. That memorial exists because of a catastrophe that reshaped the city. To understand Irish New York, you have to start with the famine that created it.

The Hunger and the Crossing

Between 1845 and 1852, the Potato Famine drove roughly 2.1 million people out of Ireland. Over 410,000 of them landed in New York between 1846 and 1851 alone. By 1850, there were 133,730 Irish-born residents in the city. That was 26% of the total population. New York had more Irish people than Dublin.

Most arrived with nothing. They'd been rural people in Ireland, tenant farmers and laborers, and now they were urban settlers for the first time, crammed into the cheapest housing the city had to offer. There had been a steady stream of Irish immigration since the 1820s, but the Famine turned a stream into a flood.

On January 1, 1892, the day Ellis Island opened, the very first immigrant processed was Annie Moore, a 17-year-old from County Cork who'd spent twelve days crossing the Atlantic. An official presented her with a $10 gold piece. Bronze statues of Annie now stand at both Ellis Island and Cobh, Ireland, the port she sailed from. Two statues on opposite sides of the ocean, bookending a one-way trip.

Annie Moore was the exception, though. For the majority, the crossing ended not in ceremony but in The Five Points.

The Five Points: Where Irish New York Began

A small lake, the Collect Pond, once occupied what became the first Irish stronghold in New York. Deep and clean enough that the city drew drinking water from it, it eventually attracted tanneries and slaughterhouses too. Eventually poisoned, the city drained and buried the Collect Pond, and the swampy, unstable landfill that remained drove wealthier residents out. 

The neighborhood that filled the void, named for the convergence of five streets above the now filled-in water, became The Five Points. At its peak, The Five Points packed about 63,000 people into 1,665 tenements. An average of 35 people per 4-story building. The Irish were the largest group, roughly 34,000. Only London's East End rivaled it for density, infant mortality, and disease. The Old Brewery on Cross Street, a former brewery converted to housing, reportedly averaged a murder per night. 

Free Black New Yorkers and Irish immigrants lived side by side as the most marginalized groups in the city. They competed for the same low-wage jobs, which produced real tension, but they also shared dance halls and saloons. Irish step dancing met African rhythmic traditions, and tap dance was born. 

Irish gangs, with names like The Dead Rabbits and the Forty Thieves, emerged partly as a response to nativist violence. The Dead Rabbits Riot on July 4, 1857, left eight dead and over a hundred injured.

Today the neighborhood is gone. Columbus Park occupies the heart of what was Five Points and Collect Pond Park marks the approximate spot of that vanished lake. Five Points was a foothold. What came next was a fight to turn that into something permanent. 

The Machine

The Irish didn't create Tammany Hall. Founded in 1786 as a social club, it became the most powerful political machine in American history once the Irish got a hold of it.

The math was simple. The Famine delivered hundreds of thousands of destitute immigrants who needed jobs, housing, legal help, and a path to citizenship. Tammany provided all of it, in exchange for votes. By 1855, 34% of the city's voters were Irish immigrants. From 1872 onward, every Tammany boss was Irish Catholic.

William "Boss" Tweed, though himself of Scottish descent, perfected the system. The Tweed Courthouse tells the story. Original budget: $250,000. Final cost: $12 million (roughly $200 million today). The bills were spectacular: $3 million for plaster work, $250,000 (the entire original budget) for brooms alone.Tweed was convicted in 1873 and, in a detail almost too perfect, tried inside the still-unfinished courthouse he'd looted.

Writing off Tammany as pure corruption misses the bigger picture. In a city with almost no social services, the machine was a de facto welfare system. The corruption and the safety net were 2 sides of the same coin. 

While the Tammany machine was busy counting votes, one immigrant from County Tyrone was building something that would outlast all of it.

Dagger John and the Cathedral on Fifth Avenue

John Joseph "Dagger John" Hughes came to America as an immigrant gardener and later rose to become the first Catholic Archbishop of New York and founder of Fordham University. His nickname was partly because of the cross (†) he drew beside his signature and partly because of his temperament. 

This was an era of open anti-Catholic violence. Nativist mobs had burned churches in Philadelphia. When they threatened to do the same in New York, Hughes stationed armed Irishmen around every Catholic church in the city and told the mayor: "If a single Catholic church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow." Moscow had been burned by its own citizens during Napoleon's 1812 invasion to deny him winter quarters. No churches were burned in New York.

Before the cathedral everyone knows, there was Old St. Patrick's on Mulberry Street, built between 1809 and 1815. The churchyard wall once served a real defensive purpose: parishioners literally guarded the building from nativist mobs. Today the catacombs are open for candlelight tours. 

But Hughes wanted something bigger. Something that would make a statement the Protestant establishment couldn't ignore. On August 15, 1858, he laid the cornerstone for a new St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue before a crowd of over 100,000. The location was a deliberate provocation. The site on Fifth Avenue, then far uptown, was among the mansions of New York's wealthiest families.

When dedicated in 1879, it was the largest Gothic Revival Catholic cathedral in North America. The spires rise 330 feet and there are 3000 stained glass panels. All of this was financed by contributions from thousands of poor immigrants alongside pledges of $1,000 each from 103 prominent citizens. They were betting on the city's growth and on their community's future

Marching Up Fifth Avenue

The cathedral made a permanent statement in stone. The St. Patrick's Day Parade made the same case each year, on foot, up Fifth Avenue. On March 17, 1762 Irish colonists and soldiers serving in the British Army marched through the streets of Manhattan. It was the first St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York City and the start of the oldest continuous one in the world. (St. Augustine, Florida claims a parade in 1601 but it didn't stick.). This was an era when wearing green was banned in Ireland, so the parade wasn't just nostalgia for the home country, it was cultural defiance.

For the first decades, military units organized the parade. Eventually the Ancient Order of Hibernians took over as official sponsor, with the US Army’s 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, 'The Fighting Irish,' leading the march. 150,000 people now march up Fifth Avenue each year, passing directly in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Coda

On March 17, 1930, St. Patrick's Day, groundbreaking began on the Empire State Building. Al Smith, president of the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building, turned the first shovel. Smith was a Tammany politician, a former governor of New York State, the first Roman Catholic nominated for president by a major party, and partly of Irish descent. He chose the date on purpose.Like the cathedral and the parade before it, it said we're here to stay.