The Avenues · New Dublin · Fog City's Irish Heartland
Heritage guide for Irish-American descendants — the families who came west and found home in the fog
| Location | Northwestern San Francisco — running from Arguello Boulevard west to the Pacific Ocean, north of Golden Gate Park |
| Informal names | "The Richmond," "The Avenues," and informally "New Dublin" by the Irish community of the early 20th century |
| Dominant ancestry (peak) | Irish-American, 1890s–1960s; subsequently Russian-Jewish, then Chinese-American in Outer Richmond |
| Counties of origin | Predominantly Clare, Galway, Mayo, Kerry — Connacht and Munster, reflecting the west of Ireland emigration patterns to California |
| Key parishes | St. Monica's, St. Brendan's (both in the Richmond), St. James the Apostle — anchors of Irish Catholic life in the Avenues |
| Irish political prominence | The Richmond produced several San Francisco mayors, city supervisors, and state legislators through the 20th century |
| Today | Inner Richmond retains some Irish businesses and institutions; Outer Richmond predominantly Chinese-American; Irish identity most visible in bars and annual events |
The Richmond District's story begins with geography. In the 1870s the area was known as the Outside Lands — sand dunes, fog, and scrub stretching west of the settled city toward the Pacific. It was not desirable. The city's established residents lived closer to downtown, on the hills and in the valleys that had been developed since the Gold Rush years. The Outside Lands were for people who couldn't afford the established neighbourhoods.
Irish immigrants had been arriving in San Francisco since the Gold Rush of 1849, when ships from Cork and Kerry sailed around Cape Horn to reach California. Unlike the Irish in eastern cities, who came fleeing the Famine and arrived with nothing, many of the California Irish came seeking something — gold, land, opportunity — and a proportion of them found it. By the 1870s, San Francisco had a substantial Irish population that spanned economic classes from labourer to landowner, and a political class that was beginning to dominate city government.
The first wave of Irish settlers in the Richmond came in the 1880s and 1890s, as a street grid was laid through the Outside Lands and affordable housing was built for working-class families. Families from Connacht — Clare, Galway, Mayo — who had come to California for the railroads and the building trades found themselves on the foggy west side of the city, where the rents were low and the fog was thick and the Pacific Ocean was a short walk away. The fog, it turned out, reminded them of home.
The Catholic Church organised Irish life in the Richmond as it organised Irish life everywhere. The establishment of St. Monica's Parish in the Inner Richmond and St. Brendan's in the Outer Richmond created the institutional framework around which the Irish community organised itself. The parishes were not merely spiritual institutions — they ran the schools, organised the social clubs, managed the charitable networks that kept struggling families from destitution, and provided the meeting halls where politics and community life overlapped.
St. Monica's, established in the 1880s, served the Inner Richmond's Irish community for generations. The parish school educated the children of Irish labourers and sent them into the police and fire departments, the construction trades, the law, and politics. The combination of parish school education and the Catholic networks that ran through San Francisco's Irish community was a reliable pathway out of the working class for the children and grandchildren of immigrants.
The parish network also shaped the Richmond's relationship with Irish nationalism. San Francisco's Irish community was engaged with events in Ireland throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries — the Land League, the IRB, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence. The churches were careful to keep overt political organisation outside their walls, but the social clubs and fraternal organisations that met in parish halls were often heavily engaged with Irish-American nationalist politics. Money raised in the Richmond helped fund organisations that were lobbying the US government for Irish independence.
The Irish in San Francisco achieved political power earlier and more completely than in most American cities. By the 1890s, Irish-American politicians controlled major offices in the city, and the Richmond District was a crucial part of the electoral base. The neighbourhood voted in blocs — organised through parish networks, precinct captains, and the ward organisations that were the machinery of urban Democratic politics — and the politicians who represented it delivered services and patronage in return.
The patronage system was not merely corrupt — it was also functional. Irish families in the Richmond got jobs in the police department, the fire department, the Department of Public Works, and the city bureaucracy through connections rather than merit. This was true, but it was also the mechanism by which working-class families achieved economic stability in an era when the formal labour market offered few protections. The city job with its pension and its security was the Irish immigrant's version of the safety net.
Several men from the Richmond or with deep Richmond connections became Mayor of San Francisco. The Irish dominated the Board of Supervisors through the mid-20th century. The connection between the Richmond's Irish parishes and the Democratic Party machine that ran San Francisco was so intimate that the two could barely be distinguished. When Archbishop Patrick Riordan — himself Irish-born, from Tipperary — blessed a new public building, he was also blessing the political arrangements that had made it possible.
The Richmond's Irish character expressed itself in small ways that persisted long after the demographic centre of gravity shifted. The Irish pubs — places like the Plough and Stars on Clement Street, which opened in 1975 and has been a centre of Irish music, sport, and community life ever since — maintained the social function of the old neighbourhood institutions even as the neighbourhood itself changed. On weekends, the Plough and Stars shows Gaelic football and hurling on television, serves Irish food alongside Guinness, and hosts music sessions that began in the 1970s and have continued through every demographic change the Richmond has experienced.
Clement Street, the Inner Richmond's commercial main street, still shows traces of its Irish past alongside the Chinese restaurants and Russian bakeries that arrived in later decades. The overlap of cultures on Clement Street — Irish, Russian, Chinese, and now a younger generation of mixed San Franciscans — is a compressed history of 20th-century immigration to the Bay Area, all on one street.
The fog that deterred the first settlers turned out to be one of the Richmond's identifying features. San Franciscans from other neighbourhoods complain about the Avenues being cold and grey; Richmond residents tend to be somewhat proud of the fact. The fog connects the district to the west of Ireland in a way that is felt rather than logical — the same grey sky, the same Atlantic moisture, the same muted light that is somehow more companionable than unsettling once you have grown up in it.
The informal name reflected the density of the Irish community in the Richmond in the early 20th century — the high concentration of Irish families, Irish churches, Irish pubs, and Irish political organisations made the neighbourhood feel distinctly Irish in character. The name was used affectionately within the community and sometimes in the city press, though it was never an official designation.
The California Irish were disproportionately from Connacht and Munster — Clare, Galway, Mayo, Kerry — reflecting the west of Ireland's heavy emigration to California in the 1870s–1900s. This distinguished them from the eastern-city Irish, who were more heavily from Ulster and east Leinster. The Connacht background influenced the Irish language and cultural traditions that came to California with the immigrants.
The Inner Richmond retains some Irish character — Irish pubs, Irish-owned businesses, and an annual Irish presence — but the demographic centre shifted in the mid-20th century. The Outer Richmond became predominantly Russian-Jewish in the mid-century and Chinese-American in recent decades. Irish identity in the Richmond today is most visible in specific institutions (the Plough and Stars, St. Monica's) and annual events.
The San Francisco Catholic Archives holds parish records for St. Monica's, St. Brendan's, and other Richmond parishes. The California State Archives and San Francisco Public Library both hold city records from the 19th and 20th centuries. For Irish origins, the National Archives of Ireland and IrishGenealogy.ie hold civil and church records from the counties of Clare, Galway, Mayo, and Kerry. Love Ireland covers west of Ireland heritage and genealogy.
Love Ireland covers Irish history, culture, and diaspora stories for 64,000 readers — from the west of Ireland to the foggy avenues of San Francisco, from the townlands of Clare to the streets of the Richmond.
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