New York City is perhaps the most culturally diverse city in the world.  People from all over the world have made it their home over the past two hundred years.  Some of the more visible groups in New York City over the years have included Italian, Chinese, African, and Irish Americans.  Although New York has a more modern face than it used to, it once was a city divided.  Immigrants of different ethnic groups did not live amongst each other the way they do now.  Each group had their own section of the city.  Although it has always been a multi-cultural city, there was a time when New York belonged to the Irish.
     The first Irish came to America not after the Great Hunger of the 1840s, but during colonial times.  Most of the forty-four thousand Irish-born immigrants living in the United States in 1798 were Protestants who left make it in the New World.1 Irish Catholics did immigrate to the United States by choice during these times.  Many that came to America in the eighteenth century were exiled because of nationalist activity, or they left to escape the lives of vassals to their English rulers.2 A number of others came as convicts and others as indentured servants.  After 1800 the reasons for Irish immigration to the United States changed.  Britain experienced an economic recession following the Napoleonic Wars that changed the normal agricultural practice in Ireland from tilling to grazing, which forced Irish farmers to look elsewhere for land.3 A rapidly increasing population in Ireland also forced many to emigrate.  Between 1672 and 1841, the population of Ireland doubled three times, from just over one million to more than eight million.  4 With the demand for land to farm rising exponentially, disputes over ownership became common in Ireland.  Since the land in Ireland was mostly owned by the British, secret societies like the Molly Maguires often took matters into their own hands by committing acts of sabotage and violence towards the owners of the land and their agents.  Aside from acting out violently, the only choice for most Irish to improve their condition in Ireland was to emigrate to America. 5
 

    The first half of the nineteenth century saw more than one million Irish immigrate to the United States before they began to migrate en masse by the middle of that same century. 6  Adapting to life in America was not easy for the newly arrived immigrants.  Besides being on the whole quite poor, these immigrants had religious beliefs and manners that conflicted with those who had lived in America for some time.7 Because they were not a respected people and were quite poor, the Irish who came to the United States in the early nineteenth often ended up in almshouses or other unenviable living conditions.  The close quarters in which they lived put them at high risk for infectious diseases.  In New Orleans in 1832, six thousand people died from a cholera outbreak, the majority of whom were Irish.8 At this same time, the Irish in New York City were multiplying quickly and acquiring a notorious name for themselves.
     Many of the Irish that settled in New York City from 1800 to 1850 lived in the area of Manhattan known as the Five Points, which was known as a hotbed of criminal activity at the time.  By 1845, there were almost one hundred thousand Irish in New York City, which was more than twenty-five percent of the total population there.9  Although the Irish in New York City originally did not live in good conditions, New York was attractive to many Irish because it “was becoming increasingly accessible, productive, democratic, and also urban.  New York was also an American city in which the ideals of equality, liberty, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion were praised.10  For the Catholic majority in Ireland, these were extremely important values, the opposite of what they were experiencing at that time.  Thus New York became a very attractive place for Irish immigrants to settle in the United States.
     From 1845 to 1920, Irish immigrants came to America in huge waves.  The first wave came as a result of a famine.  In the 1840s, the potato crop in Ireland grew a fungus, and thus the crop failed, causing the Great Hunger.  Almost one million Irish died of starvation between 1845 and 1850, and so during these years almost a half million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States.  This was nearly one-third of the total number of immigrants that arrived in the U.S. from 1841 until 1850. 11  Before the federal government in the United States began regulating immigration, most Irish immigrants in the United States simply got off a boat at Manhattan and immediately began to look for somewhere to live and work.  The arriving Irish immigrants had no one to tell them where they were or where to go.  In the 1850s the average number of Irish immigrants to the United States was sixty-three thousand per year, significantly less that the previous decade, though by 1870, more than two million people had emigrated from Ireland to the United States.12  More than two hundred thousand of these Irish immigrants made New York City their home.
     After the migration of the “famine generation” to the United States between 1845 and 1870, there was one more great wave of Irish immigrants.  In the next fifty years, more than two million more Irish immigrants would adopt the United States as their home.13   After 1892, when the federal government began to regulate immigration, all arriving immigrants had to go through the immigration and naturalization center at Ellis Island in New York City.  Although more Irish immigrants came into the United States between 1870 and 1920, the population of them in New York City declined.  By 1920, only two hundred thousand residents of New York City were Irish, compared to almost three hundred thousand in 1870.14  These years represent bookends to the massive amounts of Irish immigrants in New York City, the period when New York City was an Irish city.  Because of their numbers, cultural habits, and positions in New York life, the Irish made a distinct impression on the history of New York City from 1850 to 1920.