Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995

3 The 1970s: The Interim

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of transition for the Irish in Ireland and Irish Americans in New York. In order to understand the relationship between the New Irish of the 1980s and the emigrant and Irish American community that survived in New York from the end of World War II, it is necessary to look at that twentyyear period. Social, legislative, religious, demographic, and cultural changes in Ireland and New York in the sixties and seventies had a profound impact on the daily lives of Irish on both sides of the Atlantic. These changes also affected immigration , in terms of both number and perception. For Ireland and the ethnic community in New York, the exodus and presence of Irish in New York had been a fairly constant phenomenon for generations. Late-twentieth-century politics and society interrupted that continuum, with speci¤c consequence for the generation of migrants who left Ireland in the 1980s. In the 1960s and 1970s European ethnic communities throughout New York emptied out as upwardly mobile second- and third-generation families left for jobs, better housing, and less crowded schools in the metropolitan perimeter counties of New York, New Jersey, and Long Island. As these families left, they drained the strength and vitality of their respective immigrant communities in New York. This was particularly true of the ¤rst-generation (the immigrant) and secondgeneration (native of foreign or mixed parentage) Irish who by 1970 represented only 2.8 percent of the city’s population, compared to 4 percent in 1960.3 Pockets of strength and solidarity remained in Inwood in Manhattan; in the Bronx neighborhoods north of Tremont Avenue, running east and west along the Grand Concourse and University Avenue; in Prospect Park in Brooklyn; and in the Woodside
3 The 1970s: The Interim When the immigration laws were changed in the 1960s the old social and benevolent organizations began to die. The Irish moment was over. —Pete Hamill 1 . . . the best of decades. —Fergal Tobin 2 area of Queens, but these communities were aging, populated primarily by people aged twenty-¤ve years and older. Less than 20 percent of these neighborhood inhabitants were elementary and high school age children.4 Consider Inwood, one of the strongest ethnic communities left. In the neighborhood which ran north from Dyckman Street to West 218th Street between Inwood Hill Park and 10th Avenue, the Irish made up almost 18 percent of the population .5 They represented the largest designated ethnic group, with the exception of people who identi¤ed themselves as persons of Spanish language. The latter was dominated by immigrants from the Dominican Republic.6 As Robert Snyder observed in his study of ethnic transition in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood during the 1970s, Irish communities like the Heights and Inwood became increasingly insulated ethnically as they watched their peers in surrounding parishes and neighborhoods leave for the suburbs. They “gathered the wagons”against the new immigrant groups who replaced their neighbors .7 Despite the migration of Irish out of upper Manhattan through the sixties, Inwood remained, demographically,a community of immigrants.In 1960,61.5 percent of the total population was foreign stock—either born abroad or born in the United States to immigrant parents. Just under 30 percent of the total population was born outside the United States. Ten years later 61.8 percent of the population was still foreign stock, including the 33.5 percent of the total who were born abroad. The difference in 1970 was the place of birth.8 Comparing the population of Irish in the Inwood census tracts 291, 293, and 295 in 1960, examined in an earlier chapter, with the same tracts in 1970, the population of Irish was still close to one in ¤ve.9 However, in 1960, 99 percent of the population was white, and just about 2 percent were either born in Puerto Rico or had parents who were born in Puerto Rico. By 1970 almost one-quarter of the neighborhood population consisted of people who identi¤ed themselves as persons of Spanish language, most of whom, Snyder reported, came originally from the Dominican Republic. In terms of other population characteristics, a smaller, though signi¤cant, number of schoolchildren still attended private school in 1970: 52 percent of elementary students and 38 percent of secondary students, compared to 66 percent and 56 percent respectively in the previous decade. (Private or nonpublic schools could include Catholic schools, those af¤liated with other religious institutions, independent schools—any school...