photo #9279560

When the Irish arrived in New York in their tens of thousands, fleeing hunger and hardship, they came with little more than their hands and their willingness to use them. They found a city that was still being built, and they built it. The tunnels beneath the streets, the bridges across the rivers, and the great buildings rising into the sky all rose in part on Irish labour. It was dangerous, punishing work, often taken up because no one else would do it and no better door was open to them. Men balanced on high steel and stone, dug through rock, and laid the foundations of a metropolis, while the wages they earned crossed the ocean again as remittances to the families left behind. The phrase that circulated among them held a hard truth, that the streets were paved not with gold but with the sweat of the people who paved them. Within a generation those same families moved from the labouring gangs into the police, the fire houses, the unions, the church, and eventually City Hall itself. The Irish did not merely settle in New York, they helped shape its character and its accent. To walk the city today is to walk through a place their hands helped raise.