The Delaware Fisheries · The Row Houses · The Irish Catholic Parish
Heritage guide for Irish-American descendants
| Location | Northeast Philadelphia, between the Delaware River to the east, Girard Avenue to the north, and the Kensington neighbourhood to the west |
| Name origin | Named for the seine fishing operations run by Irish immigrant families along the Delaware River shad run |
| Irish immigration | Predominantly from Counties Mayo and Galway; arrived in large numbers 1840s–1860s, many during the Famine years |
| Key landmarks | Church of the Assumption (1849), 19th-century row house blocks along Frankford Avenue and side streets, the Delaware riverfront |
| Notable connections | Jack Kelly (father of Grace Kelly), champion rower and brick magnate from Philadelphia's Irish working class; Kelly Drive boathouse district on the Schuylkill |
| Parish structure | Irish Catholic parish life centred on the Church of the Assumption; parish records beginning 1849 are a primary genealogical resource |
| Today | Significantly gentrified since 2000; known for restaurant and bar scene; the Irish Catholic parish structure and some 19th-century row house blocks remain |
Fishtown's name is not a romantic invention or a developer's branding exercise — it describes exactly what happened on the bank of the Delaware River where the neighbourhood now stands. From the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century, the Delaware was one of the great shad rivers of the Atlantic coast, and the annual shad run drew fishing operations that strung seine nets across the river's width to intercept the migrating fish. The Irish immigrant families who settled along the Delaware bank in the 1840s and 1850s inherited and expanded this fishing tradition — it was dangerous, seasonal, exhausting work, but it was work that required no capital and no connections beyond the physical strength and willingness to stand waist-deep in cold water that the newly arrived Famine Irish possessed in abundance.
The fishing was done from the bank and from flat-bottomed boats, and the nets — sometimes hundreds of yards long — were hauled in by teams of men working together in a coordination that reinforced the communal bonds of the immigrant neighbourhood. The shad catch was sold in the Philadelphia markets and preserved for inland trade. By the 1870s the fishery was declining — industrial pollution from upstream, overfishing, and the expanding city were all taking their toll — but the name had stuck, and the neighbourhood of working-class Irish row houses along the Delaware bank was Fishtown in the mind of every Philadelphian who knew it. The Irish identity of the neighbourhood was by this point so established that the name served as a kind of shorthand for the community itself.
The Irish who arrived in Fishtown from the 1840s onward were predominantly from the west of Ireland — the counties of Connacht hardest hit by the Great Famine: Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, Sligo. They arrived in Philadelphia through the port on the Delaware, often after transatlantic crossings in the worst conditions — the coffin ships whose mortality rates shocked contemporary observers. Those who survived came ashore with little beyond their lives and their kinship networks, and they settled in the densest and cheapest housing available: the two-storey brick row houses that lined the streets of Fishtown and the adjacent Kensington neighbourhood.
These row houses — the characteristic Philadelphia building type, narrow-fronted brick structures two rooms wide and two or three storeys tall, with a small yard behind — survive in Fishtown in remarkable density. The blocks along Girard Avenue, Frankford Avenue, and the side streets between them preserve a nineteenth-century urban landscape that has largely disappeared from comparable American neighbourhoods. Each house was built for a single working-class family, and in the Famine years they often sheltered far more than one family: extended kin groups, recently arrived relatives, boarders from the same Irish county. The Catholic parish, centred on the Church of the Assumption on Spring Garden Street, provided the community's social and spiritual infrastructure. The parish registers — baptisms, marriages, burials — are the primary genealogical record for Fishtown's Irish community and are held in the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Archives.
John Brendan Kelly — Jack Kelly — was born in Philadelphia in 1889 to Irish immigrant parents who had come from County Mayo. His father, John Henry Kelly, worked in the mills and construction trades of North Philadelphia; his mother Mary Costello was from the same immigrant stock. Jack Kelly grew up in the working-class Irish Catholic world of the Philadelphia riverfront neighbourhoods, and he channelled the physical strength and competitive drive of that world into rowing — first on the Schuylkill River from the East Falls boathouse district, and then into an athletic career that made him one of the most celebrated oarsmen in American history.
Kelly won three Olympic gold medals — in the single sculls and double sculls at Antwerp in 1920, and in the double sculls again at Paris in 1924. He also became enormously wealthy as a brick contractor, building the Kelly Brickwork business into one of the largest construction enterprises in Philadelphia. The Kelly family's trajectory — from Famine immigrants in the 1840s to Olympic champions and business magnates by the 1920s — was in some ways the trajectory of Philadelphia's Irish Catholic community as a whole. Jack Kelly's daughter Grace was born in 1929 and grew up in the Philadelphia Irish Catholic world before becoming a film actress and, in 1956, Princess of Monaco. The boathouse district on Kelly Drive along the Schuylkill is named for Jack Kelly, and his statue stands on the drive near where he trained.
The Church of the Assumption on Spring Garden Street was established in 1849 to serve the growing Irish Catholic population of Fishtown and the surrounding neighbourhood. The church was built at a moment when the Irish Famine immigration was at its height and the Catholic population of Philadelphia was expanding faster than the existing parish infrastructure could accommodate. The Assumption was intended specifically for the working-class Irish community of the riverfront — not a grand church, but the Irish community's own church, built with the pennies and shillings that fishermen and mill workers and day labourers could contribute.
The parish life that centred on the Assumption — the sodalities and confraternities, the parish school, the communal ceremonies that marked birth, marriage, and death — was the social glue that held the Fishtown Irish community together across generations. The pattern was replicated in Irish Catholic neighbourhoods across the industrial northeast: the parish as the organisational core of immigrant life, the priest as the most educated figure in the community, the church building as the one permanent, collectively owned space in the lives of people who owned little else. For Irish-American families tracing Fishtown ancestry, the Assumption's parish records — baptisms from 1849, marriages and burial records from the same year — are the essential starting point, supplemented by Philadelphia city directories and the federal census records.
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