The immigrant communities — Irish, Italian, Polish — who built the City of Brotherly Love one rowhouse and one parish at a time
Philadelphia was one of the great ports of entry for European immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the city's neighbourhood map is still legible as a record of where each wave of arrivals settled and what they built. The Irish came first — to the waterfront districts of Fishtown, Kensington, and Port Richmond, where the river offered work and the cheap rowhouses offered shelter. The Italians, arriving from the 1880s onward, concentrated south of South Street in the grid of streets that became one of the most famous Italian-American communities in the United States.
These were not interchangeable immigrant communities. Each brought specific regional origins, specific labour skills, specific religious and social traditions, and specific ways of organising collective life. The Fishtown Irish were different from the Port Richmond Irish; the Abruzzesi of South Philadelphia were different from the Sicilian and Neapolitan communities that dominated New York and Chicago. Philadelphia's immigrant heritage is, in the details, a story of extraordinary specificity.
Irish Heritage Neighbourhoods
The original Irish neighborhood — shad fishermen, Kensington weavers, the 1844 nativist riots, and Sacred Heart Parish on Belgrade Street. One of America's most aggressively gentrified neighborhoods; its Irish story is one of the most complete urban Irish narratives in America.
Five generations of Irish and Polish railroad workers and dock hands who built the industrial waterfront north of Fishtown and, unlike their neighbours, never entirely left. The most intact working-class neighbourhood surviving in Philadelphia.
Italian Heritage Neighbourhoods
The most famous Italian-American neighbourhood in the United States — the Italian Market, the Abruzzesi of 9th Street, Rocky, Mario Lanza, Eddie Fisher, and the Mummers Parade tradition. A living heritage neighbourhood and a working food market in one.
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