Sunnyside, Queens

The 7 Train and Irish Queens

The extension of the IRT Flushing Line — the 7 train — through western Queens in the early 20th century transformed what had been farmland and market gardens into one of New York City's most important immigrant reception zones. The train gave working-class Manhattan residents access to Queens housing at a fraction of Manhattan costs, and the Irish communities of Hell's Kitchen, the West 40s, and Inwood followed it into Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jackson Heights.

Sunnyside was the first major Irish settlement along the 7 line. Its grid of two- and three-family houses, built in the 1920s and 1930s for exactly this wave of inner-city dispersal, provided owner-occupiable housing that a generation of Irish-Americans who had lived as tenants in Manhattan could actually buy. The Sunnyside Gardens development — a planned community of the 1920s — attracted middle-class residents, but the less formal streets between Queens Boulevard and the Long Island Rail Road elevated tracks were where the Irish working class actually settled.

The Irish character of Sunnyside and the neighbouring Woodside was so pronounced by the 1940s that the area was simply known as 'the Irish neighbourhood' in Queens. The pubs along Skillman Avenue and Greenpoint Avenue were Irish-owned and Irish-patronised. The GAA structure centred in Sunnyside was the most active in Queens. The Catholic parish network of Our Lady of Mercy and Blessed Sacrament served a congregation that was Irish through its first and second generations.

GAA in Queens

The Gaelic Athletic Association's Queens County Board was centred in western Queens, and Sunnyside was its heartland. The pitches in Flushing Meadows Park, accessible by the 7 train, were the main playing fields for Queens GAA clubs whose membership was predominantly from Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jackson Heights.

The GAA in this context was more than sport. It was a social infrastructure for a community of working people — police officers, construction workers, nurses, civil servants — who had no particular wealth but a strong community identity. The annual county finals at Gaelic Park in the Bronx, to which Sunnyside clubs sent regular competitors, were community events as significant as the St Patrick's Day parade.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians' Woodside division, closely linked to the Sunnyside community, was the political dimension of the same social structure. The AOH ran Irish nationalist events, supported Democratic Party candidates with Irish Catholic credentials, and provided welfare and social support for the community in ways that the public services did not. Membership was a statement of identity as much as a practical affiliation.

New Irish in the 1980s and 1990s

When Irish immigration to New York resumed in the 1980s — a new wave of young, undocumented Irish workers fleeing recession-era Ireland — Sunnyside and Woodside were again the primary destination. The existing community provided networks: jobs in construction, accommodation with Irish landladies, documentation routes for those who needed them, and the social infrastructure of pubs and GAA clubs that made the transition from rural Ireland to New York City less disorienting.

This generation of 'new Irish' in Sunnyside became the subject of considerable media attention. Their undocumented status, their concentration in construction and domestic service, and the particular cultural dislocation of young Irish people in Reagan-era New York produced a literature and a politics that helped change US immigration law. The Irish Immigration Reform Movement was founded in part from the Sunnyside community.

Sunnyside today is genuinely diverse — Ecuadorian, Mexican, Turkish, and Bangladeshi communities have transformed its commercial streets. The Irish character is historical rather than demographic. But the GAA still plays in Flushing Meadows, the AOH still meets in Woodside, and the parish records of Our Lady of Mercy still document a century of Irish Queens.

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