Irish Neighborhoods in New York City: A Heritage Guide

From the Famine ships at the Battery to the parishes of Queens — a guide to the neighborhoods where Irish-America was built

More than 5 million people of Irish heritage live in the New York metropolitan area, making it the largest concentration of the Irish diaspora outside Ireland itself. The city's Irish story began before the Famine — the United Irishmen of 1798 brought political exiles, and the first Irish Catholic parish in the country, St Peter's on Barclay Street, opened in 1785. But it was the Great Famine of 1845–1852 that transformed New York. Between 1847 and 1852, roughly a million Irish people landed at the Battery, most of them destitute, most of them Catholic, all of them arriving into a city that was not waiting for them.

What they built in the decades that followed — the parishes, the police precincts, the political clubs, the labor unions, the neighbourhood pubs — is the physical foundation of modern New York. The neighborhoods they settled tell the story of how Irish-America came to be.

Five Points — Where Irish New York Began

The Five Points neighbourhood in lower Manhattan no longer exists as a geographic entity — it was demolished in the late 19th century to build Columbus Park, and is now part of what is called Chinatown. But for the Irish immigrants who arrived in the Famine years, Five Points was the first address of Irish New York.

The neighbourhood took its name from the five-pointed intersection where Anthony, Orange, and Cross Streets met near the old Collect Pond. By the 1840s it was one of the most densely populated slums in the world — entire families living in single rooms in the Old Brewery and the tenements that replaced it. Irish and Black residents lived side by side in the same buildings, sharing the poverty of the city's most neglected district. The nativist press depicted Five Points as proof of Irish degeneracy. What it was, in fact, was the holding ground for a people who had nowhere else to go.

The institutions that Irish New Yorkers built to survive Five Points — the Catholic parishes, the mutual aid societies, the Tammany Hall political machine — spread from this point outward across the city over the next century.

Hell's Kitchen — The West Side Irish

As the Irish prospered and moved out of Five Points, they settled the West Side of Manhattan — the neighbourhood between roughly 34th and 59th Streets west of Eighth Avenue that became known as Hell's Kitchen (or Clinton, in the gentler formulation of later decades). The Irish dockworkers, construction workers, and longshoremen who built the Hudson River piers and the West Side railroad yards lived in the tenements directly behind them.

Hell's Kitchen was the Irish working-class West Side at its most concentrated. The longshoremen's unions were Irish institutions. The parish of Sacred Heart on 51st Street was an Irish parish. The political clubs that ran the local Democratic machine were Irish political clubs. The neighbourhood retained a strong Irish identity well into the 1970s — the Westies, the Irish-American gang that controlled the local criminal underworld, were a product of this world, as was the more legitimate network of Irish tradespeople and civil servants who defined the neighbourhood's social fabric.

Woodside, Queens — The New Irish Capital

As Manhattan gentrified and the post-war Irish middle class moved to the suburbs, Queens — particularly Woodside, Sunnyside, and Jackson Heights — became the new centre of working-class Irish New York. Woodside's Roosevelt Avenue corridor has been informally called "the most Irish block in New York" by multiple publications, and while the demographic has shifted with successive waves of immigration, the Irish pubs, the GAA club (the New York GAA has its grounds in Gaelic Park in the Bronx), and the parish networks remain.

The immigration that sustained these Queens communities was different from the Famine generation — the Irish who came in the 1950s and 1980s were economic migrants, not refugees, many of them undocumented. The Irish Emigrant Centre in Woodside was founded specifically to support this population. The community it served was more recent, less settled, and more attached to the idea of eventual return than its predecessors — but it built the same institutions: the parish, the pub, the sporting club.

The Bronx — Kingsbridge and the Irish Uptown

Kingsbridge in the northwest Bronx was the Irish-American neighbourhood for the families that had made it to the middle class but hadn't yet left the city. The elevated subway line that reached Kingsbridge in the 1880s made it accessible to Manhattan workers, and Irish-American families — police, firefighters, civil servants, teachers — moved into the solid brick apartment buildings that still define the neighbourhood. The Gaelic Park grounds on West 240th Street hosted hurling and Gaelic football matches for much of the 20th century.