A Vanished Irish New York Described By Columnist Earl Wilson
The Bronx, Gaelic Park, Irish Bars and Dance Halls
Earl Wilson (1907 – 1987) was a New York Post based nationally syndicated columnist (It Happened Last Night). Wilson also wrote several books during his nearly fifty year journalism career.
Among Wilson’s best books is an atypical guide book to New York called Earl Wilson’s New York (Simon and Schuster, 1964).
While Wilson covers some of the usual touristy things to do, such as where to stay and eat, he also writes about “Where To Find A Psychiatrist For Your Dog”; “How To Get ANYTHING You Want Day Or Night”; “Where The Best Corner For Girl Watching Is” and other topics not usually covered in guide books to the city.
Among the most interesting reading is Wilson’s chapter on the Irish in New York. Though Gaelic Park is still active for events involving the sons of Erin, (Manhattan College leases the park for events from the MTA who own the property), the rest of this section is now nostalgia for those who remember.
Big Little Ireland
Several million New Yorkers don’t know that up at 240th Street and Broadway, in the Bronx, there’s a “Little Ireland.”
You can drive or subway up there, to Gaelic Park, where the Irish march and drink and indulge in the sports of hurling and international Gaelic football. Oh, it’s no miracle that they feel Irish in the Bronx on the weekends. For teams come across the sea from Galway and Limerick and “Cark” to perform for the Irish of New York—always on Sundays . . . after Mass.
You’ll hear the brogue spoken there—you will that—and you’ll hear about “the old hairpin” and “himself” and “me-bye”—for the Irish feeling runs strong around Gaelic Park when the bands begin to play.
Sweeny’s and Fay’s and Keenan’s are some of the names you see on the saloons from 231st Street to 240th. And McSherry’s and Farrell & Dolan—where the jukebox played Johnny Cash’s “Forty Shades of Green” and an Irish colleen bounced around on a bar stool in tight-fitting shorts.
“She’s havin’ some Irish hors d’oeuvres with her beer remarked my wife, who is Irish.
“What are ‘Irish hors d oeuvres?” I asked.
“Peanuts and potato chips,” said she.
You should drink a wee drop of Irish whisky in these bars—“Paddy’s” brew is me own favorite—and stndy the Irish coats of arms on the wall behind the bartender. “The Gaelic” is an acquired taste—as it touches the lips, it reminds you, if you’ve ever lived on a farm, of the taste of a blade of timothy hay that you’ve bitten into, the way farmers do.
After you’ve had “a few jars” of the Gaelic, you’ll be armed for adventuring.
I had paused at a newsstand at 23lst Street and Broadway to see how Irish the neighborhood really is. I was astonished. There, for sale, were three weeklies—the Irish Echo, the Advocate and the green-bordered Irish World and the Gaelic American.
“Ireland Must Be Free, From the Center to the Sea,” proclaimed several small editorial boxes in the latter newspaper.
And there were editorials about the Irish martyrs and the cruelty of the British. And ads about weekend dances at Erin’s Isle Ballroom, at 327 East Fordham Road, “in the heart of the Irish-American Area.” The New Irish Center Ballroom at 173rd Street and Jerome Avenue boasted that its band was “from Kilkenny.”
I strolled around. At the end of 23lst Street I came to an interesting old house sitting up over the street that looked like a Swiss chalet. I went into a liquor store—what else?— named Callahan’s — who else— on the comer and asked about that house. Was it Swiss perhaps?
“Oh no,” the man said. “It’s just an old house that’s stubborn and won’t be torn down to make way for the new apartments.”
“It’s not Swiss or French or German?”
“No, it’s just an old house. There were many of them, but they’re after tearing them down to build new ones.”
It was as unexpected here in this enormous city as some of the sights on the way up. Passing under the Third Avenue el on the way up, in the lower Bronx I had seen another new world, a Spanish section not unlike Spanish Harlem Except that this was Spanish Bronx. Under the el, one of the few that survive deep in the shadows and shade under it, Puerto Ricans squatted on curbs, shooting craps.
But even more unexpected in the Irish community was the existence of an organization called “The Pioneers’— dedicated to opposing alcoholic drinks. (“It’s a lie! Somebody’s defamin’ us!” cried TV star Chuck Connors when I mentioned it to him.)
“They wear badges and they’re very serious—they had a meeting of them in Dublin, with an attendance of 110,000,” Patrick J. (Paddy) Grimes, a longtime successful travel agent at 1849 Broadway and publisher of the Irish Echo, solemnly assured me.
(“I can’t believe it—110,000 sober people in Dublin! Somebody’s joking!” Chuck Connors insisted.)
“It has to do with the Church,” Paddy Grimes said, “and many of the young fellows coming out from Ireland to New York are not the drinking kind. They have meetings at St. John’s Church on 30th Street in Manhattan.”
Regardless, there are some Irish still tippling around Gaelic Park.
It’s from a miniature Dublin, around Eighth Avenue in the 40s, in Times Square, that Gaelic Park is commanded. The lessee of the park, John Kerry O’Donnell, runs O’Donnell’s simple-enough, clean, neat O’Donnell’s Bar on Eighth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Street in midtown. (“Kerry
is his county name, a friend confides. )
You can get a preliminary taste of old Ireland walking along Eighth Avenue there—Downey’s, famous with the Broadway crowd; McGirr’s illustrious billiard parlor; McHale’s, Gilhuly Brothers, Sullivvan’s, Monohan’s, Andy Murphy’s and O’Brien’s Corner. They’re all around the Manhattan Hotel and Madison Square Garden. And on Saturday night they’re very Irish.
Very Irish it is, too, at the Friday, Saturday and Sunday night Irish-American dances run by Carmel Quinn’s husband, Bill Fuller, at the City Center Ballroom, on W. 5th Street between Seventh and Sixth Avenues, next door to the City Center of Music and Drama operated by Jean
Dalrymple.
Carmel and Bill Fuller frequently go up to Gaelic Park for the games on Sunday. (“I never miss a Sunday,” says Paddy Grimes.) In good weather you can see 5,000 Irish screaming in the stands through five or more hours of fiercely fought Irish football and hurling.
Three big Catholic churches in the Riverdale area — St. Margaret’s, St. Gabriel’s and St. John’s—feed some of their parishioners to Gaelic Park after the service.
The husky Irish hurlers, who are amateurs, battle each other violently, swinging their sticks bloodthirstily, almost totally unprotected by shields or helmets or padding. You buy a ticket to all five games scheduled on a Sunday afternoon.
“Sure, and it’s been goin’ on here since about 1928,” we were told by one of the athletes who’d been involved in the game.
The Irish games were booming along nicely until World War II. Then immigration authorities enforced their rules against travel quite strictly, and Irish athletes on the visiting teams had difficulty getting into the U.S.
“The game died out for a while because people here go tired of watching the same old players. After the war if got back to normal,” Paddy Grimes says.
“We often drop into Mickey Sullivan’s place,” Bill Fuller told me. Carmel Quinn frequently looks in on her husband’s midtown City Center dances. She met him in Dublin in one of his dance halls there. He now has dance halls in Chicago and San Francisco, too.
I looked in on a Sunday morning about 1:30 a.m. at City Center Ballroom. The capacity is about 1,400—it looked jammed. There were scores of black-haired, open-faced girls, who looked as though their names could be Bridget, lounging or dancing. I saw a few girls dancing with each other—and that dance was a twist. It seemed rather sad. They also had the Irish dances and an “old-fashioned waltz.”
There was an Irish brogue on the tongue of the man who handed me a green-tinted handbill about the next attraction, “Ireland’s Greatest!” It was the Clipper Carlton Show-band. “Give the boys from Ireland a real New York welcome!” the handbill urged. .
Danny Devlin—known in Manhattan’s Irishtown up close to Yorkville as “The Devlin’—is another immigrant, like Fuller, who’s becoming an authority on his people. A former fighter who frequently referees fights at Madison Square Garden, he’s a breeder of championship greyhounds, a dance-hall proprietor and a barkeeper, bossing a colorful — restaurant at 1649 Second Avenue near 86th Street.
“It was just a coincidence that the St. Patty’s Day parade — ended last year right on this corner,” he says.
He and “the brother” (Jimmy) operate the Tuxedo Ballroom, 86th Street and Third Avenue, where on Saturday nights the Irish dance “The Stalk of Barley” and “The Siege of Ennis,” which is something like square dancing. “You line up in fours and dance with different partners, says Danny.
“The Irish dancing is good because there are more lonely ~ people in New York than you would guess. This changing partners helps people get acquainted.”
The Devlin,” as the Irish get to calling him later in the evening comes from Killybeggs in Donegal. Polite, gentle in speech, self-effacing, he loves to talk about his championship greyhounds.
My Irish stew I make with real beef,” he says. “That’s what I feed my greyhounds to give them a foundation”
After eating Irish beef stew there, you finish off with Irish coffee—which is Irish whisky, sugar and hot coffee with whipped cream floating on it. You take a deep breath, lift the cup, taste the whipped cream—and then the blast of the Irish whisky.
When Danny Devlin says, “How about a little more of the Gaelic?” it seems almost barbaric to refuse.
Once I ordered steak and waited eagerly for onion rings which the waiter had forgotten. I mentioned it~and he brought me two enormous portions. I begged Danny Devlin for help in eating so much.
“Yer on your own!” he shouted.
By the bye, as the Irish say, you could have a taste of that Irish coffee that’s so warming to the blood and the spirit at a nice little Irish coffee bar, Jim Downey’s, at Eighth Avenue near 44th Street in Times Square. Though the makin’ of an Irish coffee is quite an art, with a strict command that you must not mix the whipped cream with the coffee and the whisky but must Keep it on top— “separate’ — I noticed that Downey’s barmen are very speedy and do not fool around. Could it be that the customers in Times Square who are Irish are in such a hurry?
