When Irish immigrants arrived in New York City, they often stepped off the boat into a city where they knew no one.  Often without money and a place to go, the Irish immigrants in New York City, like other immigrant groups, banded together.  By staying close to their fellow Irishmen and women, immigrants had a safety net of sorts.  Since the Irish were not a popular group in the United States during the nineteenth century, they often were forced to live in quite unenviable neighborhoods in the larger cities.  In Manhattan, where most Irish immigrants in New York City lived until the Italian and Eastern European immigrants arrived in the 1880s, the Irish settled in large groups in the 4th and 6th Wards.1  The 6th Ward in particular became a neighborhood famous for its inhabitants.
     Manhattan’s 6th Ward is a district just north of City Hall on Manhattan’s east side.  Throughout the nineteenth century it was a very undesirable place, often called the “world’s most notorious slum.”2  Though as the nineteenth century passed the Irish began to move out of the 6th Ward, between thirty and forty-five percent of New York’s Irish immigrants lived there up until 1875. 3    These numbers indicate two things: that the Irish in New York had a hard time moving up the socio-economic ladder and that as lower class members of New York society, they formed a strong sense of community.  This sense of unity indicates national pride, however, Irish sense of community and pride could not keep the immigrants from the problems of urban slums.
     Crowded, dirty, and dangerous.  Those are probably the three best words to describe Five Points area in New York’s 6th Ward.  Thousands of Irish immigrants lived in close proximity to slaughter houses, where farm animals ran around in the streets.  Dirt floors in their tenement houses also were common, and the houses often did not have indoor restrooms and sewage.  The combination of the animals and lack of a sanitation system caused New York Archbishop John Hughes to remark that the residents of Five Points were “the poorest and most wretched population that can be found in the world.”4  Although this was obviously an overstatement, it does give one an idea as to the sickening conditions that Irish immigrants were exposed to during the nineteenth century.

Mullen's Alley in New York City, 1890.
Taken from The Irish in America
by Terry Golway and Michael Coffey.

        Crime perpetuated the 6th Ward in the same parasitic manner as dirt and disease.  One of the most visible forms of crime in the nineteenth century was prostitution.  A minister who worked with the neighborhood's most impoverished residents remembered that on his arrival there in 1850 "every house was a brothel, and every brothel a hell."5  Another common form of crime in the 6th Ward was violence directed at African-Americans, which became a big problem for New York during the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863.  Bars located in the 6th Ward “served as a common ground between pickpockets, counterfeiters, and thugs.”6  Irish gangs such as the Forty Thieves, the Roach Guards, and the Dead Rabbits were often the cause of this widespread criminal activity, but political machines like Tammany Hall also played a role in the 6th Ward’s condition.  Although the Five Points district was dangerous, violent attacks on individuals was not as common during the mid-nineteenth century as one might suspect.  Bayor and Meagher report that only thirteen people were convicted of murder in almost a decade.  It seems that the criminal activities of the 6th Ward, as can be seen in present-day slums, directly resulted from the poor conditions, which seem to have been far from acceptable.
     As told above, it took the Irish quite a while to move up in New York society, though they did, particularly after the huge influx of Italian and Eastern European immigrants to New York in the late 1880s and early 1900s.  When these new groups came into New York, suddenly the Irish became more popular, for they were white and spoke English much better than the new immigrants.  These factors eventually resulted in a rise in social status for the Irish.  With better jobs and higher income, they began to move out of the slums of downtown Manhattan into the nicer neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and uptown Manhattan.  In uptown Manhattan apartments around Central Park and in Washington Heights, the conditions were much better than they were downtown, but still not exactly what Irish families wanted.  In these new apartments, “space was still a premium, and such space-saving furniture as folding cots and drop-leaf tables were popular.”7  Thus the vast majority of Irish that left the slums went to other boroughs, where they had enough room.  As the Irish moved out of the slums, one family at a time, the “Irishness” of New York’s neighborhoods became less important and obvious.  The huge numbers of immigrants contributed to this ethnic dilution, as did the pattern of Irish leaving Manhattan.
     Better modes of transportation facilitated the Irish move to the new neighborhoods into New York’s other four boroughs.  In the early 1900’s, the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges were built as the popularity of the automobile increased.  Subways also became an integral factor in the Irish move out of Manhattan.  These new developments in New York resulted in more than fifty thousand Irish persons moving out of Manhattan in the thirty years between 1900 and 1930.8  This number was roughly one-quarter the total number of Irish persons living in New York City during those years.  The large majority of Irish from who had enough money to leave its slums and crowded tenement housing settled in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
The move of the Irish population from downtown Manhattan to uptown and the other boroughs changed the face of New York City forever.  No longer would the Irish be able to claim Manhattan as their city, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once claimed.  Although the Irish relinquished control of New York City by dispersing throughout the five boroughs in the early twentieth century, their mark on the city was left in the jobs they performed, the politics they involved themselves in, their relations with other ethnic groups, and their unwavering dedication to Catholicism.

The Manhattan Bridge. Picture taken from
http://www.home.nyu.edu/~jh15/