East Cambridge and Cambridgeport

Irish Cambridge Before Harvard — The Working-Class Shore

The Cambridge that the Irish settled in the mid-19th century bore little resemblance to the university city that now defines the name. Harvard College had existed in Cambridge since 1636, but in the 1840s it was a small institution of a few hundred students, clustered around Harvard Yard in the western part of the city (then called Old Cambridge), whose influence barely extended to the industrial and commercial districts along the Charles River. East Cambridge and Cambridgeport — the areas closest to the river and to the bridges connecting Cambridge to Boston — were working-class, industrial, and almost entirely disconnected from the academic world a mile to the west.

The Middlesex Canal, completed in 1803, had shaped East Cambridge's economy before the Irish arrived. The canal connected the Merrimack River at Lowell to the Mystic River at Charlestown, passing through East Cambridge at the Lechmere Canal basin, and the trades associated with its operation — boatbuilding, rope-making, cooperage, and the various waterfront industries — had established a working-class economy that Irish immigrants could enter on their arrival. When the Boston and Lowell Railroad displaced the canal in the 1830s, the rail terminus at Lechmere became a new focus of industrial development, and the Irish, who had been arriving in Cambridge through the 1830s and 1840s to work on the railroads themselves, stayed to work in the industries the railroads created.

The Irish of East Cambridge came primarily from Connacht — County Galway, County Mayo, County Roscommon — with a significant contingent from County Clare and the western fringes of Munster. These were the same communities that supplied labour to the Massachusetts canal and railroad projects from the 1820s, and family networks and county loyalties were the primary mechanism by which new arrivals were connected to employment and housing in Cambridge. A man who arrived on the Liverpool packet knowing no one in Massachusetts could find a bed and a job within days if he had a cousin or a parish neighbour already established in East Cambridge; those without such connections faced the full harshness of the labour market.

By the 1860s, East Cambridge and Cambridgeport were well-established Irish Catholic communities. The physical character of the neighbourhood was determined by its proximity to industry: the streets closest to the river and the railroad were the most densely packed and the least salubrious, with wooden tenements that housed working families in conditions not dissimilar from the South Boston waterfront. The streets closer to Inman Square, which sits at the intersection of Cambridge Street and Hampshire Street roughly equidistant between Harvard Square and Lechmere, were slightly more spacious — the territory of families a generation or two further from the waterfront, the early Irish Catholic professional class of lawyers, contractors, and municipal employees who were beginning to establish themselves by the 1880s.

The Glassblowers and the Irish Artisan Tradition

The New England Glass Company, founded in East Cambridge in 1818, became one of the most important employers of Irish labour in the Boston area and the source of a skilled-trade tradition that distinguished East Cambridge's Irish community from the purely unskilled labour force of the waterfront. The company was established by a group of Boston merchants who recognised the commercial potential of cut and pressed glass at a moment when the American market for domestic glassware was largely supplied by British imports. They built their factory on the Cambridge riverfront, taking advantage of the fuel supply from the canal and the sand resources of the region, and they initially staffed it with skilled workers brought from Europe.

Irish workers entered the glassworks initially in unskilled supporting roles — carrying, cleaning, maintaining the furnaces — but over the decades they acquired the skills of the craft through the apprenticeship system and through the informal transmission of technique that characterised artisan trades. Glassblowing in the mid-19th century was a highly skilled occupation: the glassblower controlled the temperature, the composition, and the physical manipulation of molten glass through technique acquired over years of practice, and the best blowers commanded wages and status that placed them firmly in the skilled working class. An Irish family with a glassblower's income in East Cambridge in the 1870s was economically secure in a way that dock workers' families were not.

The New England Glass Company's history intersected with the broader story of American industrial transformation in ways that reflected directly on its Irish workforce. The company faced intensifying competition from the Midwest in the 1870s and 1880s, where natural gas provided cheaper fuel for glass production than the coal and wood available in New England. When the company was reorganised and eventually relocated to Toledo, Ohio, in 1888 — becoming the Libbey Glass Company, still in existence — it left behind a workforce with specialised skills and strong community ties that had to adapt to the industrial landscape of Cambridge. Some workers followed the factory to Ohio; most remained in Cambridge and found employment in the other industries that had grown up around the original glassworks corridor.

The Irish glassblower's tradition in East Cambridge was not merely an economic fact; it was a source of community identity and pride that distinguished the neighbourhood from the purely labouring Irish of South Boston and Charlestown. The craft traditions of the glassworks fed into a broader Irish artisan culture in Cambridge — stonecutters, carpenters, plasterers, and the various building trades that supported the construction boom of the late 19th century — that gave East Cambridge's Irish community a degree of occupational diversity and stability unusual in Irish America of that period. The artisan's pride in skilled work, and the social networks that the skilled trades created through apprenticeship and union organisation, were among the foundations of Irish Cambridge's subsequent professional ascent.

The Cambridge Political Machine and the Irish Professionals

Cambridge's Irish community followed the same trajectory as Boston's but with a distinctive character imposed by the city's physical compactness and its mixed population — the university presence, the industrial working class, and a surviving Yankee professional class created a more complex political environment than the overwhelmingly Irish Catholic wards of South Boston or Charlestown. Irish political organisation in Cambridge developed through the Democratic ward system from the 1870s, but Cambridge's wards were more heterogeneous and its politics more competitive than Boston's, requiring a different kind of political skill — one more oriented toward coalition-building and less toward pure ethnic mobilisation.

The Middlesex County Courthouse, located in East Cambridge, was the most important single institution in the development of the Irish Catholic professional class in Cambridge. The courthouse generated employment for lawyers, clerks, bailiffs, court officers, and the various administrative personnel of the county government, and from the 1880s Irish Catholics were securing these positions with increasing frequency. A position as a court officer or a clerk of courts was not merely a job; it was an entry point into the legal world, and the men who began as court clerks and document filers often became lawyers through night school and then judges through political patronage. The Middlesex County Courthouse was, in effect, the East Cambridge equivalent of the Boston police department as a mechanism for Irish Catholic upward mobility.

The Kennedy family connection to Cambridge was more direct than to most of Boston's Irish communities. Patrick Joseph Kennedy — JFK's paternal grandfather — had been a Boston ward boss from East Boston, but the Kennedy family's political and social networks extended across the Irish Catholic communities of the greater Boston area, including Cambridge. The Cambridge Irish community voted solidly Democratic and provided the organised support that Massachusetts Irish Catholic politicians expected. More significantly, the Irish Catholic professional class that Cambridge's parish school network had produced — the lawyers and judges of Middlesex County — was the social milieu in which the Kennedy family operated during JFK's rise to political prominence in the late 1940s. Cambridge's Irish professionals were not the ward machine men of South Boston; they were the lawyers and courthouse officials whose endorsements and networks gave a candidate legitimacy among the Irish Catholic middle class.

The parish schools that anchored the Cambridge Irish community — St Francis of Assisi in Cambridgeport, St John the Evangelist in North Cambridge, Sacred Heart in East Cambridge — produced the graduates who staffed the courthouse, the law offices, and the Cambridge city government. The pathway was well-established: parish school to Boston College High School or Catholic Memorial, then to Boston College or Holy Cross, then to law school or the civil service examination, then to the courthouse or city hall. This was not a meritocratic system in the abstract sense — it operated through the patronage networks of Democratic ward politics — but it functioned as a genuine mechanism of social mobility for Irish Catholic families who had arrived in Cambridge with nothing two generations earlier.

Where the Irish Cambridge Community Went

The dispersal of East Cambridge's Irish community began earlier than in South Boston or Charlestown, partly because Cambridge's property market was more sensitive to the university economy and partly because the industrial base of East Cambridge — the glassworks, the candy factories, the light manufacturing that had employed Irish workers for three generations — declined more rapidly. The closing of the New England Glass Company in 1888 was an early signal; the progressive deindustrialisation of the Cambridge riverfront through the early 20th century reduced the economic rationale for Irish families to remain in the neighbourhood.

Somerville, directly north of Cambridge, was the first destination for East Cambridge Irish families moving up and out. Somerville in the early 20th century was a dense, working-class, predominantly Irish Catholic city whose social character was almost indistinguishable from East Cambridge's — the same parishes, the same ward politics, the same occupational mix of labourers, artisans, and civil servants. Families who moved from Inman Square to Somerville's Union Square or Winter Hill were not leaving their community; they were following it northward as it expanded into cheaper and more spacious housing.

Watertown, to the west along the Charles River, became the preferred destination for Cambridge Irish families with professional incomes from the 1920s through the 1950s. Watertown retained strong Irish Catholic institutions — St Patrick's parish was among the most prominent in the Archdiocese — and its single-family housing offered the suburban standard of living that the children of Inman Square tenement-dwellers aspired to. The Watertown Irish community in its peak period was recognisably an extension of the Cambridge Irish: the same family names, the same parish networks, the same Democratic voting patterns, but in a more spacious and prosperous setting.

The gentrification of Cambridge, which proceeded from the 1970s outward from Harvard Square and from the MIT corridor, transformed the entire city including East Cambridge and Inman Square over the following decades. The transformation was accelerated by the technology industry's arrival in the 1990s and then its explosive growth in the 2000s and 2010s: the Kendall Square area, immediately adjacent to East Cambridge, became one of the most valuable commercial real estate districts in the United States, and the residential spillover pushed property values throughout Cambridge to levels that made the neighbourhood inaccessible to working-class families. The Irish Catholic community that had built East Cambridge over a century was replaced, gradually and then rapidly, by graduate students, technology workers, and the professional class of the knowledge economy. Their heritage survives in the parish records of Sacred Heart and St Francis of Assisi, in the Cambridge Historical Society's archives, and in the extended families who now live in Somerville, Watertown, Waltham, and the further suburbs, but who know with precision which street in East Cambridge their great-grandparents came from.

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