 Good evening and welcome. For those of you who I've not yet met, I'm Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University. And I am so thrilled to be able to bring this presentation to you via Zoom. In my position here at the university, I have the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country, coordinating with chapter leaders and volunteers, toast events that keep alumni and parents connected to and engage with Fairfield. We have nine regional chapters from Boston to Washington, D.C. alphabetically and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. So hopefully I will have the opportunity to meet many of you in person at an event in your local area soon. Before I introduce our esteemed guest presenter, I would like to go over the format of the lecture this evening. It is a PowerPoint slide presentation and our guest lecturer will be speaking to those slides. We will have time for questions. So please type any questions you have in the chat function on the Zoom and I will be monitoring it and I will relay them to our guest. We do wanna see you, but please make sure your audio capabilities are turned off. When I'm asked to describe my role here at Fairfield, I start with the catchphrases I opened with this evening. And then I add that I'd like to partner with alumni with special areas of expertise, alumni who own businesses and beloved professors and former professors or esteemed lecturer falls into a number of these categories. Dr. Kirk Slicking is the E. Gerald Corrigan 63 Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences Emeritus. At Fairfield, Dr. Slicking served as the Dean and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Waterfront Manhattan from Henry Hudson to the Highline 2018 is his third book for Johns Hopkins University Press, Grand Central Terminal 2002, won the Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional Scholarly Book in Architecture and Urbanism. Grand Central was the basis for the 2008 PBS American Experience Grand Central, an award-winning documentary. Dr. Slicking was the academic advisor and appeared on screen as well. His academic research is at the cutting edge of the field of Historic Geographical Information System, HGIS, which he used to study the Irish in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. In the spring of 2017, he was a visiting fellow at the Moore Research Institute, National University, Ireland, Galway. Currently, he is co-director of the NYHGIS, New York Historical GIS, centered at the New York Public Library and is an advisor to the Library Center for Digital Humanities. He remains active at Fairfield University, serving as co-principal investigator for the Center for Social Action's major project to conduct a needs assessment for the United Way of Greenwich, Connecticut. Kurt also remains active as an Office of Alumni Relations volunteer, as he and I have now partnered six times on events, two actual tours of Grand Central Station and one of the New York City Waterfront and then our online offerings. And these events are always incredibly well attended. So, back by popular demand, I have the great honor and pleasure of introducing Fairfield University alumnus from the class of 1970 and beloved former professor, Dr. Kurt Schlechting. Well, thank you, Pat. That's very nice to hear. And it's great to be here and to share this work that I've been doing with the Irish in New York and as well as the Irish in Newport, Rhode Island. And as Pat mentioned, Pat. Pat, I'm going to have to stop the share. Okay. I'll share again. And hopefully we'll get the PowerPoint to go from the beginning. There you go. And as Pat mentioned, I was a visiting fellow at the Moore Institute at the National University in Arlen-Gallway and doing work with some of the faculty at the Moore Institute. And I also did a book chapter for the Rutledge Handbook of Spatial History and it was about little Germany and Klein-Deutschland and that's the Lower East Side. Many of us remember the Lower East Side. Think about the Lower East Side as where the Jewish immigrants came and they did, but the Germans preceded them. And then I've done a number of presentations at the Museum of Newport Irish History and you can see some of that here. So it's a little shameless self-promotion. What I want to do is I want to talk about New York and the evolution of the Irish in New York. And, you know, we need to remember that New York has been a preeminent city in this country since its settlement. And it's the center, it has been, it has been the center of immigration to the United States and it's a very small island. It's 12 miles long and at 14th Street, it's two miles wide and it's the most densely populated city, the largest and most densely populated city in the United States. And it's been that way from colonial times to 2021. And what we're going to talk about primarily here is Manhattan Island because that was New York City until the consolidation in 1889 with the other boroughs. And short over to book in 2005 in modestly titled The Island at the Center of the World. And many people, many of New Yorkers think that it's still the center of the world. Telling the story of the Irish in New York City, it's a really complicated process. And there's literally thousands of books, about thousands of books, memoirs, movies have been made about the Irish and the Irish coming to America. And for example, Kevin Baker published a Paradise Green, which I believe they won the Pulitzer Prize. There's films, Gangs of New York. Now Scorsese's other famous movie, The Departed, isn't about New York, it's about Boston, it's about Southeast and so is Goodwill Hunting. And there's real parallels between Southeast and Boston and parts of New York City. And historians have written extensively about the history of New York and particularly focused on the Irish. And Kyle just put a couple here. Machine made, Tammany Hall and the creation of modern politics. Tyler Anbinder was a colleague of mine, wrote the five points. You can see the subtitle is quite ambitious. And then there's individual biographies of someone like Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy clan. And then there's family history and memory. Now, whether you have an Irish heritage and Italian heritage or Hispanic heritage, family history and memory is important. I like to think that all of us have a sainted grandmother or great aunt who tells the family story and often tells that family story at Thanksgiving, sits down and relates a tale about grandpa or great grandfather coming in X, Y and Z. But that's important in shaping how we think about the ethnic experience in an American history. And of course, a lot of us, especially when I was younger and you went to high school or college and histories were narrative in nature. And if you really want to think about New York, I mean, look at what Ed Burroughs and Mike Wallace, won the Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, the history of New York City to 1898. And it's 1300 pages. Now, Ed Wynne Burroughs passed away, but Mike Wallace, who teaches at Brooklyn College, continued and wrote a greater Gotham. And then a famous historian, Kenneth Jackson, who was at Columbia for years, organized the project to publish the Encyclopedia of New York City. And lo and behold, my computer is propped up on that this evening. And you can see that that's massive, a massive reference book. And then Johns Hopkins in 1996 published an anthology of articles about simply the New York Irish. And it's wonderful, it's wonderful to read. It's very, very well organized. The research is terrific. And so that we have this rich, rich heritage of narrative history of New York City. And that's what many of us were raised with or are familiar with. So let me begin by talking about the, just giving an overview of immigration between 1820 and the end of the century in 1999. And I'd like to point out that the period of time from 1820 to 1924 is called the century of immigration. But we really need to think about that as it's really the European immigration is in that century with the exception of immigration from China, which really didn't affect the Eastern coast. There was a Chinatown in New York, but really it was immigration to China. Immigration to China, immigration from China to California as a result of the Gold Rush. And post-war immigration, certainly in the 20th century was, first of all, there was a real decline in immigration because we passed immigration limitations and the drastic immigration limitations in 1924 followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War II. But the immigration that followed for the rest of the 20th century was not from Europe. And that's obviously true today. Post-war War II, it's Asia, Central America and Mexico. And immigration has accelerated over the past decade. But we're gonna be looking primarily at that century of immigration because that's when the Irish come. Now, this is an outline of Irish immigration between 1820 and 1975. And you can see the impact, we're gonna see the impact that the Irish famine had and the resulting massive immigration to the United States. From 1841 to 1860, about two million, almost two million Irish immigrants came to the United States. And they came, the port, we'll see in a moment, the port that they came to was New York. And then over this time period, 4.7 million people have emigrated from Ireland to the United States. And I want you to keep that 4.7 million number in mind if you join us for our second part to this on November 9th, we'll talk about that 4.7 million. Now, why New York? Well, in colonial times, there were other ports that competed with New York to be the primary entree port to the United States, Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston. But why did New York emerge triumphant? Newport and Boston are closer to England and closer to England. But what happened was in 1817, ships used to come to all of these ports, they'd arrive and then when they were about to depart, they might put an advertisement in a newsletter or to sign up on the dock that they were gonna leave on a certain date. And people would come to the port and they'd wanna sail, they'd wanna leave to go to ex-leave, leave to go to another country, and the ship wouldn't leave. So a group of merchants in New York decided that they would form a shipping company called the Black Ball Line. And what they would do is they would have a ship that was advertised to sail on a certain day each month in effect on schedule. And they kept that, whether it was a bombing June day or if it was the middle of a blizzard in February, that ship would leave from the pier's along the shoreline of Manhattan and leave, and this was primarily to link New York with Liverpool, and then eventually New York with London and New York with Ahar, France and Hamburg, Germany, but these were called package ships. And so that gave New York an enormous advantage over every other major port in colonial America or the early United States because they sailed on schedule. And then what was really important is to understand that the prevailing winds in the North Atlantic blow from the West to the East. So that makes sailing from Liverpool to New York much more challenging. And during the day era of sailing in the first and almost second, continued into the second half of the 19th century, ship passage over from Liverpool to New York could be very, very challenging. And the passage averaged 30, 40, 50, sometimes over 60 days. And this was particularly challenging during the famine years because what the Black Wall and the other package ship lines did was they took an area just below the deck of the boat and called that above the storage in the hull of the boat and they called it the twin decks. And that's where the immigrants, that's where they were housed when the ships were sailing. And if a storm arose, what they would do is they would cover the hatches to where the immigrants were sleeping, as you can see in that woodcut and they'd be locked under there at that until the storm was over. And there were no, obviously there were no toilets. There was nothing like a toilet. It was called a head on the ship. And so chamber pots had to be used. And it was held in those twin decks with hundreds of immigrants crowded in, fleeing Ireland from the famine years, during the famine years. And the Great Famine. This is an event that changed both Irish history and American history. And a huge amount of research has been done on the famine and people have written extensively on the famine. And that's something that if you visit a place like the Moore Institute, they wanna understand that particular event because it's central to Ireland's history. And one book I'd recommend it's The Graves Are Walking. That was published in 2012 by John Kelly who's out in another name. It's a heart wrenching book in places. So the population of Ireland, the English, first of all in the English, it was part of England in 1841. In 1841, they had conducted a census. And the population was estimated probably pretty accurately or collected at 8.2 million people. And by 1851, they used to do it on every, every first every year, every 10 years. And the 1851 census was 5.1 million. So approximately 1.1 million people died and 2 million immigrated. And now Ireland was part of England and England was the wealthiest person, wealthiest country in the world. And the question that Kelly and other historians ask is what was the response? What was their effort to alleviate the famine years in Ireland? And it was horrific. One thing that the, what the English parliament did is they set up a workhouse program. And this was in parts of Ireland, they would have a workhouse and that was built with government money. And then destitute people would come to the workhouse and they could live in the workhouse, but it separated the family. The men were on one floor, the women were on another floor, the, they're with their smallest age children. And then the children were on another floor. And you could only stay in the workhouse if you were destitute and then you worked. You worked on building roads and that's what you did. And then with the landowners, with the British armed forces, the British soldiers stationed in Ireland is they went and evicted peasants from their homes who couldn't continue to pay their rent during the famine years. And it was horrific, the suffering was unbelievable. And so this immigration, this movement from Ireland to the United States ensues. And you can see that picture, that woodcut on the right-hand side, often when the farewell was to take place, there would be a gathering in their cottage, the night or two before the emigres were gonna leave. And they called that an Irish wake. And because the reason was they never returned. And in 1850s and 60s, that would have been very difficult for someone to go back to Ireland. They could send a letter. And by the way, at the Moore Institute, I was talking to the director recently, they've received a gift from an American collector of 20,000, roughly 20,000 letters written by Irish immigrants back to Ireland. And they're gonna make those, they're gonna digitize those, they're gonna be online for people to read. And a couple of points. Ireland was an overwhelmingly rural country at the time of the famine. And the Irish came to the cities, the American cities. And they had little money and they often stayed in the city that they arrived in, and that was New York primarily. And in 1850, a quarter of the population in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore were Irish immigrants, people born in Ireland. And they worked on the docks in New York. They worked on the docks. They built tenements, they were laborers. They didn't have skills. They didn't have skills. What they did is they gave their labor. That was what they came. Now, another way of following this, I wanna return to family history and memory. And you'll notice my family's names are O'Connell, Tobin, and Donovan. And my grandmother was, my mother's maiden name was O'Connell and my grandmother's name obviously was O'Connell. And her father's name was Tobin. And there are records that he came, he was born in Ireland in 1867 and he came to New York in 1883. Well, now what we can do on ancestry.com is we can go and find what's called the ship list. And this happens to be the ship he arrived on in August 17th, 1883. And there was a list. I'll explain more about this later. And you can see James Tobin is there. So he's on the ship Republic. It was a sailing ship and he came across. And there were 696 immigrants on that ship. And this wasn't in the famine years. This was significantly later than the famine years. He left in 1867. So here's where family history and memory interacts with history, the history of the study of the Irish coming to New York. And I'm going to explain how one can do that. And New York played a major role in immigration. It was the Golden Door. And before there was Ellis Island, that the New York state legislature in response to the overwhelming numbers of people coming to New York on the immigrant ships. They opened, there was an old fort on the battery in the tip of Manhattan Isle and it's still there. And that was called Castle Garden. And they set that up as an immigration center that the ships would anchor in the harbor and the steerage passengers who were the immigrants coming had to proceed to Castle Garden to be processed. And then Ellis Island opens in 1892. Now, what happened before that? A ship simply went to the East River. Package ship came back from Liverpool and the ship tied up on the pier on the East River. And the immigrants walked down the gang plank and were in America. And there are scenes and gangs of New York of them doing that. But here's a woodcut of Castle Garden and you can see the immigrants coming. And Tyler Anbinder published a book in 2017, another terrific book, City of Dreams, the 400 year epic history of immigration in Red New York. And he talks about immigration more broadly than just the Irish, but the German and eventually the Italians and Eastern European immigrants who came and the immigrants who come today. So here's going back to those ship lists. And what I did is working on the Manhattan Waterfront book, I wanted to look at the ships that actually came in a given period of time. And I hope you can see this name, Steve Morse. This is a website he's built. You can look at this online and it turns out, it turns out Steve Morse was a founder of Intel who must be a billionaire and he's retired. And for the last 15 years, he's been building these incredible with other colleagues and a lot of very smart people. He's been building these websites where we can go and we can look at something like these records of the Lucy Thompson, William Stetson arriving in New York in 1853. And what you do is you enter the year and then up comes this kind of a list here. I entered September, October, 1853 and it found 194 ships that came to New York Harbor in those two months in 1850, 194 sailing ships. And the one I was interested in was the Lucy Thompson and I clicked on this and it goes to ancestry.com and it opens this ship list. This is the list that the officers on the ship had to make of everybody, all every passenger that was on the list. And they had to bring this to the customs office when they arrived in New York. This was federal law. And you can imagine how many pages there are that look like this to record, to list the 835 people who came on the Lucy Thompson. And here's a piece to this. Here's a piece to this. People died in this passage. And on the Lucy Thompson, 40 of the passengers died while they were on the ship coming to America. So there, and so here's the ship list. Here's the report they left from. And you can see they simply wrote died on passage. Well, what did they do with the bodies? They tied them up in sailcloth and they lowered them, tossed them overboard. There was, that's what they did. So imagine you're an Irish immigrant coming to America with your family and you're desperate to get to America and on the passage to, across the Atlantic, one of your family dies. And it could have been a baby, it could have been an older relative, could have been your best friend and they were buried at sea. Well, I also wanna talk about the real, the revolution that's underway in this type of the type of work that I do. And it goes by a number of names, digital humanities, historic data, quantitative history. But what underlies it is, as Pat mentioned, historical GIS mapping. And that's called the spatial term. That's been in process now for about 15, 15, 20 years. And it allows us to explore research questions about immigration history. You're gonna see some of this. That was impossible. You couldn't answer these particular questions. It's not narrative history. And a colleague of mine, Ann Knowles, that I've known for years, who was at Amherst and now is at University of Maine, she wrote an essay that gathered unbelievable interest and the title was What Could Lee See at Gettysburg? Now, I'm not gonna talk about that tonight. We wanna talk about the Irish in New York. And then she published the Anthology in 2002 and Benjamin Ray did a chapter called Teaching the Salem Witch Trials. And you can see what he did over here. Here's Salem. This is the famous event in American history. And what he did is he mapped the boundaries of Salem and he pinpointed where the accusers lived and where the accused lived. And he found patterns that were spatial in nature. So that's the idea of the spatial term. And there are resources to do this kind of work. And what I'm gonna show you is doing microgeography, historical geography, and we can then look at the Irish coming at the neighborhood level, the city block level, and the building level. That's possible now, that was impossible. Now, there would be narratives about this, but you'll see that it's beyond the narrative. And some of these resources are at the New York Public Library, a program called the Map Warp that I'm gonna show you in a moment. They took 20,000 maps, historic maps of basically Manhattan and surrounding areas and they scanned them. And then they're basically a digital picture. And I'll show you how you use that. Columbia, up at Columbia, there's a project underway called Mapping Historical New York. And they're building historic GIS maps. GIS, that's when we open Google Maps, up pops this map. And then we can see the streets over it and we can type in an address and a point appears. That's what GIS is all about, the geographical information system. And then there's these mega projects to collect historical data. And an example would be out at the University of Minnesota, the Population Center. There is the NHGIS, that's National Historic GIS. And it's an online project where you can download census data from 1790 to the present. And then Brown University, John Logan has a project underway that'll look at race in the American cities, the large American cities historically. And then of course, there's Ancestry.com. And I'm sure many of you use Ancestry. And that's really the Mormon Church. Ancestry is basically started by the Mormon Church. And what they began to do was they began to scan historical census records from 1790 to 1940. And now 1950 will be available next summer. And they created these digital files. And they built that sophisticated website that's searchable. You open it up and there comes first name, last name. And you can choose to look at the US census records. And you search and you find an ancestor and it up pops the picture, the digital picture of the book that that data was entered into in, let's say, 1880. And it's searchable. That database, that scan has to be a billion records. It has to be over a billion records. It's unbelievable. Just take the US population, Google the US population over time, and then add up 1790 to 1940. You'll be close to a billion records. And it's searchable. Uh-oh, I'm stopped. That's okay. You wanna reboot and then start from here? Yeah, I'll be, maybe I gotta leave that first, right? I gotta leave that first, right? Okay, yes. All right, let me just, I can't leave. I'll stop my share. Right. Hello everyone, it's great to see everybody. This happened and we don't know why. And we're gonna just come back here. And we're back here and I'm gonna go here. Right. I'm gonna, okay, so from current slide. Sorry everybody, we don't know why this is happening, but it's happening. So here we are. And here's an example of what this spatial turn means. Data was always published for each decennial census. But when you look at the 1860 or 1870 census, it's by, in cities, political wars. And they're quite big. So there were 96 words on Manhattan Island in 1860 and 388 in 1870. But then the Census Bureau decided to change the spatial scale to zoom in and they organized the census by census enumeration districts. And here's a map of the census enumeration districts in the West Greenwich Village. This is where Pat and I have done our walking tours and we're planning another one in the spring. So what the Census Bureau did is they took a map, a map and probably with a black crayon, drew these boundary lines and they labeled each one. They gave it a number. And there were, for Manhattan, there were 681 of those in 1880 and that made the number of, the average number of census records per enumeration district is about 1700. And then later on there, that decreases because they increased the number of enumeration districts. But think of this as zooming in. They're zooming in to West Greenwich Village. And this continues to today. In the 2000, for the 2020 census, the Census Bureau doesn't use enumeration districts any longer. It uses what it calls block groups, but they're very similar to this. They cover specific geographical areas. And for the 2020 census, the Census Bureau designated over 217,000 block groups. And now I want everyone on the Zoom tonight to realize that you live in a block group. And the Census Bureau provides digital maps of that. And you can link that with census data. So the spatial turn really continues, continues. And here's map warper. Now, this is, I cut and pasted here, as you can see from, I cut and pasted from the website itself. But what map warper does is you open map warper and you zoom in on a Google Street map here. This is interactive. And as you do that, here I set the timeframe from 1851 to 1910. And what it does is it opens the maps that have been scanned and geo-rectified. That means oriented to longitude and latitude because that's how the Google maps are set up. And what you do is you select one of those and you highlight it and then you download it to your computer and you open it in a GIS program. And so for example, I'm gonna give you an example of that. Here's the Google map of Manhattan Island. And that's right off of Google. And all those streets are there, all the streets are there, the modern streets. And of course, this map then you type in an address and it places a point somewhere in lower Manhattan Island, depending on what particular address you're looking for. Well, what I can do is I can take that geo-rectified Romley map and it opens perfectly. It opens right on the Google map. And you can see that it fits perfectly. So here, if we zoom in, here's Water Street and here's Water Street here. And this is the Water Street on the Google map. And then just fits perfectly. This then allows us to do all sorts of really neat research. This is the fourth ward. And I'm gonna talk about the fourth ward because this was a ward where these are the piers here along the East River. They're no longer there. This is the East River was the major part of the Port of New York until late 1880s turn of this ninth to the century. So the ships came tied up on these piers once the, and that's the way it worked. Then what we wanna be able to do is we wanna be able to zoom in. And here's Steve Morse again. He built this app with this web page. And this allows us to find an enumeration district. And I've got this set up to find 28 Cherry Street. And so you can Google Steve Morse, ED Finder and this is what we'll open. And I chose to try to find an ED for this street to address in the fourth ward in 1880. And I type in the address in the back street and the cross street. And then it comes up and says it's census. It's ED 32. Well, I opened ED 32 in ancestry.com. And here's what you see. This is what the ancestry is. These are pages from the 1880 census. And these were handwritten. They were handwritten records. What the Mormons started to do was volunteers would sit with, they'd sit with a device that had a reel of the 1880 census for this enumeration district in this particular street. And they'd read the name, Daniel Donovan. And then they'd have open an Excel spreadsheet and they'd enter that name. And he's the head of the household they'd read this text up here that he works in and they wrote in and they entered this. Here's the city. And here's where he was born, Daniel Donovan. But his parents were both born in Ireland. So that's Daniel Donovan. And then you go down and here's Michael Sullivan and his wife Ellen are both born in Ireland all of their four or five children are born in New York. So that's their birthplace. Their parents obviously were born in Ireland. And then what you can do is you can create a code. You can code and create a new variable, ethnicity. And the Sullivan children are first generation, first gen. And this database for the 1880 census, which is just for Manhattan Island has 1,214,029 records. And I happen to hear on the computer, I'm doing this with. And this is this revolution because now we can look at a particular address in a particular neighborhood. In a particular neighborhood and we can look at the people who were living in that building. And this allows us to look at all sorts of different questions. These are mainly Irish immigrants, as you can see in 28. What type of occupations did they have? Here's a longshoreman. Here's a watchman on a dock, watchman on a vessel because this street is three blocks up from the East River. And we can see it's this particular address is where the Irish came to. So that's that idea of immigration patterns. And we can do this for New York. We can do this for Boston. I've done it for Newport. All the major cities can be accessed through this particular process. And it just changes the way we can do and think about immigration. The Irish immigration, the Irish come into New York. And what we also, so what we can do is we're looking here at the famine period of time. And the estimates are that there were approximately 96,000 people born in Ireland in 1845. And by 1960, that's the, this is a large, this is the famine years, population is 200,000. So 107,000 population, the Irish population increased by 100,000. And the Irish were 25%, Irish born were 25%. Of New York's population, never mind their children. But also notice the German, they're beginning to come. And that's another set of reasons why the Germans come. It's not from famine, but they're coming to New York. So the two major immigrant groups in the first half of the 18th century, 19th century were Irish and the Irish born and in Germany. And then there's another database that you can download from the United States, the U.S. National Archives and it's the famine Irish database. And then we can look at this by neighborhood. So here are the ethnic conflicts and they persist over time. Chelsea, West Greenwich Village, on the East River it's Ward 4, which we're looking at in Ward 7 and the five points. And then the Germans went to Klein-Deutschland on the Lower East Side, wards 11 and 17. So we can look at this now at the neighborhood level. And of course, Tyler Randbinder does this with the five points and the gangs of New York. Tyler Randbinder, the five points is not the fourth ward in the river, it's actually what is now little Italy, this neighborhood here. And so that we can then zoom in and we can think about this particular, these the Irish neighborhoods, the Irish enclaves. And you can see that the, we can also look at that along the East River, those four and seven, 53% Irish, West Greenwich Village of 41% Irish, Chelsea 51%. And in turn, in Klein-Deutschland, the Germans were 58% and so what emerges are these distinct ethnic conclaves and they have an ethnic identity and for the East River, West Village and Chelsea it's the Irish and what's common to those three areas it's on the waterfront. And here's another way of looking at this is to analyze this data by the ethnicity in all of the 681 EDs in 1880 in New York and you can see these spatial patterns. So there are these specific ethnic enclaves and you can see here's Klein-Deutschland, little Germany is here and the Irish are here along the East River and West Greenwich Village, Chelsea. This is called the Gas House District up above 14th Street. By the way, this map is from a lesson plan that I'm working on with the Columbia University Project mapping historic New York. And let's take a look at West Greenwich Village. Well, as you can see, here's a brownie map of West Greenwich Village and you know, when I was at Fairfield full-time I had some terrific, I had terrific students and with my Corrigan chair, I had some research money and I would have them work with me on the projects these HGIS projects and this is a map that they created and what they did is they gave a number to each block here. So this is a block and that was block 16. And so we were able to look at the enumeration districts, the city blocks and then on these 76 city blocks, there's this 44 shown here, there were a total of 861 addresses and then we could aggregate that to the ED enumeration district, the block and the building level. And that allows us then to, well, this is about the Longshoremen because this is what they did. But here's a map of the buildings, individual buildings in 1880 in the West Village on Horatio and Jane Street. And these numbers here are the number of people in the buildings and then we know what the ethnic makeup is. And you can see that in this one here is more native. Now native means someone born in America in the United States with both parents born in the United States. And that's very different here along Washington Street. These rivers right over here, you can see these buildings are overwhelmingly Irish. And so what we see is a neighborhood that is somewhat mixed ethnically. And you can see that here, and not the Germans, they weren't over here. They were living over in... And this persists for a long period of time in the West Village. And you can see people have written about this. You can look at that data and you can see that between 1880 and 1920, the Irish predominate, but not later on by 1930. And that's another story. That's the Italian immigration coming and they came to the docks as well. And we can look at a particular building, 32 Bethune Street. And here's 32 Bethune Street and here's half a century of Irish immigration to one particular building. Whether it's 1880 or 1930, you can see that there are Irish immigrants and their children living at 32 Bethune Street. And of course, what I would do is take my students to New York and we would walk the streets and we'd go to Bethune Street. And what I would do before I took the group, the class down there, they would study a particular building. And since West Greenwich Village is one of the oldest parts of Manhattan, many, many, many of the historic buildings are still there in 32 Bethune Street. And then I hope everybody has their checkbook out because it's sold last month for $6.6 million. That's this. This is from Zillow, but that's what it's sold for. And that's of course the gentrification of Greenwich Village. Then I'd like to do just a piece on the East River. We'll look at the fourth ward. So we're over here now on the East River and we're looking at Cherry Street. And I wanna look at a particular tenement on Cherry Street. We're gonna look at a particular, we're gonna look at a particular, we're gonna look at Coffin Court on Cherry Street. And that's here. This is where Al Smith was born. This is Water Street here. And here's the East River Pairs. And Longshoremen, that word comes from what would happen early in the history of New York City. The ship would come and tie up on a pier. And the cry went out, Longshoremen, and that's where the Longshoremen come. And in this particular enumeration district, we're almost 2,000 people. And 81% of them were either born in Ireland or a first gen. And 51, only 51 residents in 1880 were native, born in the United States with both parents born in the United States. This was an intensely ethnic enclave. The fourth ward on the East River in 1880. Gotham Court, and they lived in these tenements. And it was awful. These were awful. Here's an outline of a floor in a survey that I'll show you in a moment. There were four apartments per floor. So you had what they call the living space. And then there was a bedroom. That's what this is here. If you go to the Tenement Museum in New York, you can see these. And of course, out in the back here was the shed. This wasn't for garden tools. This was the privy. There were no sewers. There were no toilets. You went out and used the privy. And if you were in your apartment, you had a chamber pot. And these privies were unbelievably awful. Source of diseases we'll see in a moment. And people had to live in that environment. And periodically the privies had to be cleaned out. You had to clean your privies. Well, Gotham Court, this was a tenement in the fourth ward. And we'll talk about it in a moment. And Harper's Weekly did a story and they found there was a Danny Burke, four years old, who sold papers on the streets for two cents. And the writer of the article interviewed his mother and he said, how many children? The answer had 12 of them. Question, are they all living? No, sir, seven are dead with an Irish accent. Seven children were dead. She had 12 and seven died living in Gotham Court. And here's a schematic of Gotham Court. When Charles Dickens comes to America, he travels to both the five points and then he goes down to the fourth ward. And he said that Gotham Court was the worst tenement in New York and he had seen some of the worst tenements in London. And it wasn't torn down until 1892. It was poverty, righteousness and vice. That's what he said. And there's a sanitary report. This was a study and I'll show you this in a minute. There were 400, in 1865, there were 400, 500 people living in these apartments and they were two rooms. And it was multiple stories high. And so if you're on the top floor, the fifth floor, you had to carry your, if you didn't use the privies in the cellar, you had to carry your chamber pot down five flights of stairs. And in this particular report, which I'll show you in some of it in a minute, they found that there were 138 births in 1864, 1865. 12 were stillborn, 77 survived to age two. So the infant mortality rate was 44%. This was a hell hole. And this is where the Irish had to live because they were impoverished when they came. And then here's the Gotham Court in the 1870 census. And you can see that these four families, they're all Irish or either first gen and they're living in Gotham Court. And they're the father, the men work as laborers, excuse me, longshoremen or laborers. And they're living in a two room apartment. Each of the apartments was two rooms. And then we can see, getting back to Cherry Street and we look at the building, you can see it's overwhelmingly Irish. It is just overwhelmingly Irish and no natives. So this is this enclave living on Cherry Street, two blocks from the East River. The Irish predominate here. And I've got other maps which will show where all the liquor stores were or bars were on Cherry Street, Water Street. And it was filled with that. There were more places to buy alcohol or to drink alcohol than there were groceries, source of groceries. And then we even went back to the 1870 census and we looked at 329 Water Street and that was the sailors boarding house. And the sailors live unbelievably, they're all from Ireland. And when they got back on shore, they had a few dollars, they drank, they womanized. And then they ran out of money and they had to sign on to sail on another ship. And they got an advance and often the boarding house kept that. And later, if a ship needed, the last minute needed some additional sailor, sometimes they were shanked. And then 351. Here's the 1870 census for 351. And the census taker writes that this was a house of ill fame. And you can see that it was a house of prostitution. And this is not, by the way, what the, you know, with the wonderful advertisements for ancestry.com. This isn't what we expect to find. This isn't what we expect to find. And Annie McGowan and Catherine Sullivan are immigrants from Ireland and their prostitutes. And it's a way of life they had to live. Tyler Manbinder writes about that in the five points. And there were young girls who were hot corn girls, they called it. They had blazers out on the city streets, a couple of city streets and they sold corn. They would roast the corn over the fire. But they were also prostitutes. And that's how people had to live. And this was this reports of, and there was a response to this, but it wasn't by government. No government thought that it was their responsibility to help, to monitor the hygiene and public health. And so there were these two organizations and this one, the Citizens Association of New York was very prominent. They did a survey of all the tenements in New York by dividing the, they divided the city up into 27 districts. They hired a doctor and staff to collect information about the tenements in their particular district. And the fourth sanitary district was the fourth ward. And Ezra Pulling was the doctor who led this. And he built, or he had drawn a detailed spatial map, a detailed map, which we can use for a spatial analysis. By the way, this report was 507 pages. And here's what Pulling and his staff did. They found where there had been typhus and smallpox. And you can see it's everywhere in the fourth ward. In the fourth ward. And here's Gotham Court. And what they then did is they mapped where the privies were. And they divided the privies into two types, privies, and then privies that were extremely offensive. And by the way, the city was now building sewers, but there was enormous battle in the fourth ward and everywhere to get the tenement owners to connect to the sewers. And then they had to obviously have built toilets and they didn't want to do that because it was expensive. And this was the year before the germ theory of disease. And the thought was my asthma, the bad air, especially the bad air of the privies was the source of disease. And they were correct that the privies were at the source of disease, but not because they smelled or gave off gases. It was because of germs. So this was, you can see how the spatial analysis of this on you can do this or we were able to do this spatial analysis that we see. And then the Irish faced enormous discrimination when they came. And Thomas Nast was a journalist and he was also an artist and he would do these woodcuts that would be published in magazines. And here's the, this is the picture of the Capitol and he's got the Vatican flag flying from it. The schools are up here. Here's the, here's the Cardinals threats to the American children. And then this is the picture that Nast always used of the Irish that they were Simeon, they were apes. And that stereotype of the drunken Irishman was there for all to see. And then the New York times would argue, well, what Bible should we use or which Bible should be used in the public schools? And of course the King James Bible. And well, that created an enormous uproar and we'll talk in the second, when we do our second part to this about this, but they faced an enormous discrimination and there would be these broadsheets and illustrations in magazines about the Irish immigrants coming. And the Pope would control America. The Irish were poor, they were slobbingly, they were drunks. In New York, there was a proposal to change the immigration law and change the law about becoming a citizen and being able to vote. And before the New York state legislature and I believe it was 1855 or was it 1865, the proposal was to change the period you had to wait before you became, or before you registered to vote. They wanted a 21 year period. And that was proposed across the United States and many states which had large immigrant populations. And then I'm gonna end our part here tonight by just reminding us that this continued. And this was the television show when I was a kid in the 1950s, the Jackie Gleeson show was on every Sunday night. And often it was Jackie Gleeson as the bartender and here's the Irish drunk. And then I just wanna, and I know this is difficult to read, but this is when Fairfield University was going to start at the prep and the university and a pastor in St. Peter's Parish and Bridgeport wrote a letter to the New England Jesuit provincial explaining why the Jesuits had to come to Fairfield. And as you can see, the reaction there was one of the sense that the Catholics, Irish Catholics were still not accepted. And John Kennedy faced the same thing when he ran for president. So I'll stop here. It's Pat's here. Yes, and I do have a couple of questions for you. Yeah, so you did mention about doing the same type of research not only in New York, but other cities as well. Are we using that Steve Morse app to do that, say in Boston? Yes, yes, absolutely. And there is, I haven't been on that. I can't remember the name of the website, but there's a website that has these detailed historical maps of Boston, which you can download just as I did for New York. And so the answer is yes. Okay. And the immigration records for the immigrants coming on ships to Boston or on ancestry.com. You can just choose Boston instead of New York because Boston was the second largest port. Someone asked, why is New York City called Gotham City? I don't know. That'll be for part two. Yeah, well, I think someone while the group was there. You need Batman. We're gonna have to look that up and answer that on part two. Does anyone else have any questions? I'm monitoring the chat. Pat, can you turn people on so that maybe just someone could ask a question? I certainly can. Let me, let me see. No, I don't know that I can. Well, we can just unmute ourselves. Yeah, you can unmute yourselves, right. Right, I don't have a question, but I wanted to say thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this. And I look forward to the next session. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's really good work and you know what you need. So this would be a part of courses I taught all the time. And many students at Verifield today, as we all know, are not first generation, they're second, third generation, whatever they are, whether they're Irish or Italian or Portuguese, it doesn't matter. And it's important for them to understand where they came from. Right. And that struggle of, for upward mobility, that's something I'll talk about in the second session, that's real. And it's still real for the immigrants who come today. And there really are parallels. There really are parallels. But sometimes when I would talk about Catholic, the discrimination that Catholics face, people are stunned. They can't imagine that. The Irish Catholics in particular had to confront when they came to America. And that's by the way, the reason why they built, you know, if you were raised as a Catholic, you were in a particular parish and the parish had the church, the parish had the rectory, then the parish had the school, and then it had the convent where the nuns lived. And imagine building that system. The bishops met in like the 1870s and said, American bishops, they wanted every Catholic child to be to attend a Catholic school. And they went out and built it. And by the way, that infrastructure is still there today. I don't know if I am. Okay. If I can be heard. George, I'm wondering. I'm wondering. I'd like, sorry, can I go ahead? Oh, sure. Yeah, Kurt, I'm wondering if you would consider putting this slideshow online for people who attended this lecture. Patrick McCarthy. Patrick, I was going to answer that question. I have recorded this and I will go on the university's YouTube channel. Great. Yeah. Terrific. Excellent. Superb. Thank you. Thank you. But sometimes this is not, sometimes the students, you know, we feel comfortable now at a Fairfield to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Put on the green. Well, for generations, that was very difficult. You know, you had to fight to be able to do that. And feel comfortable and, I guess comfortable in your own skin. Yeah. Kurt, I was going to say, there are a couple more questions that just came up on the chat. So I'm going to, has there been any much of this type of research done in Ireland? Yes, there is. It's, there's parallels in Ireland and what they're working on at the Moore Institute in Galway and others is imagine that we're looking at the story of the Irish once they arrive in America. But what about the story of where they leave from and the particular challenges that they faced? And remember Irish immigration continues long after the famine years have ended. By the way, what some of the landlords, the English landlords did in Ireland was they paid for the Irish who were living in the fat tuts on their land. They paid for their voyage to America because what they wanted then to do was to enclose the lion and raise sheep and cattle. And so that was a particular aspect of immigration that Tyler Ranbinder talked about where the Irish, I forget the Lord's name, but it was from Ken Mayer in the west of Ireland. And the landlord, a wealthy, wealthy, wealthy sir, whatever his name was, he paid for their passage to America. Another question, have you implemented artificial intelligence for further research? I haven't, but out in Minnesota, the University of Minnesota, what they're doing is, so here's what the work that this is, you look at the 1880 census and then you look at the 1900 census. The 1890 census was burned, so you can't use that. And when you look, for example, when we looked at 32 Bethune Street, you notice, as you did notice, that the people living in 1900 weren't there in 1880 and the people living in 1910 weren't there in 1900. Well, how did that work? So can we follow particular families through the census over time? And to do that, you need to write these huge algorithms that are going to try to match people over time. And they used artificial intelligence for that. And you can imagine doing it for the men in the family, but the women, it's harder, right? Because if something, a woman was 10 in the 1900 census, and now she's 20 in the 1920 census and she's married, her name changes. So that's what, that's quite complicated. They're doing it. Okay, interesting. Another question, did the Irish and Germans collaborate to improve their living conditions given they appeared to be in close proximity? Not so much. Not so much because first of all, the language barrier. And then the Germans came for political reasons often, not famine. And they had more resources. Some of them had gone to school, they had trades. So if you were looking, if we could fly back to 1880 and we're gonna go over and look at the building of the tenements, it was the Irish carrying the bricks on their shoulder, up the ladder to where the German makes them was. Or the Irish were shoveling coal into a fire where the German was the machinist was working there or the blacksmith. And so for example, and you can see that because the Germans are in Lower East Side in 1880, but they're gone basically a decade, a decade and a half later and they've moved uptown to Yorkville and Yorkville was a better neighborhood. And the buildings that they lived in in the Lower East Side, that's where the Jewish immigrants come. So they had, then the Catholic churchmen's, I'm gonna talk about the Catholic church in the second one, our second session, but the Irish dominated the Catholic church. The Archdiocese of New York, the bishops of all Irish and the Germans resented that because they didn't want to have an Irish pastor in their particular churches. So that was a conflict within the Catholic church. Let's see, there's a question here. Can you talk more about the anti-clerical sentiment? For example, it was expressed in the cartoon depicting cardinals as crocodiles. Well, that was the, so the argument, the native argument about the Catholics coming was that their loyalty would be to the church, to the bishop, to the cardinal and then to the pope. And so that was a threat. They couldn't be loyal Americans because they had a faith that bound them to the church hierarchy. And that was perceived as a threat. By the, that was the argument made about the Irish. Okay, okay. A few more questions, this person asked, they are from the northern tip of Manhattan. Are there any resources on the history on how the Irish neighborhoods migrated north? There are because they would go up to, went up the island and then they went to the Bronx. The Irish went to certain parts of Brooklyn and then as upward mobility starts and they're no longer working as Longshoremen, they move to Sunnyside Queens. And I'm sure some of the people on the session know where Sunnyside Queens is. And so yes, their people have written about that, the migration of the Irish to other parts of the initially of the city and then of course suburbanization. I have one more question. Okay. Does the experience show us that the issue of immigration is not a race issue, but an economic issue of haves versus have nots? It is, it partially is. I wouldn't dismiss race. That's another factor. We might want to talk about that in our second session, but it is social class because certainly the Irish came and they were at the bottom of American society. And they didn't have skills. So what do you have if you come? And all you have is your labor. And you'll take jobs at the bottom of the, at the bottom of the wage scale, the occupational scale. So for example, when the Italians come in large numbers, the way New York, the way people heated their homes and eventually generated electricity was with coal. And so in the shops, the manufacturing centers on Manhattan Island use coal. So coal barges were brought to New York to the along, on the piers in the river and it was backbreaking awful labor to unload those coal barges. And the Italians had to do it because they had just come and they didn't speak English. Many of them didn't speak English. Pat and I have talked about this often and that's all they did. So they had to take the worst jobs. And you know, since the Irish arrived first in terms of city jobs, they end up as the policemen and firemen and the Italian immigrants coming later end up as the sanitation workers. And so there's that hierarchy there. And of course, then the most recent immigrants take the jobs at the bottom of the occupational scale. Right. Those are some great questions. Yes, they are. So we have a lot to look forward to, to November 9th. Okay. Yeah, so if I may, thank you Kurt. It is always a privilege and a joy to partner with you, both on virtual and in-person events. I can never thank you enough for sharing your time, your talents and your expertise with us. I want to give everybody just an overview of what's happening and then what I usually do is we're all going to unmute ourselves and we're going to give Kurt a round of applause. But before we do that, I want to thank everyone for coming as well. As Kurt and I both said, two-part series, part two will be on November 9th. It's a part of alumni college. So keep an eye out for the e-blast. Again, I've recorded this and I'm going to put it out on the YouTube channel. And as I always do, there's a reminder to visit www.fairfield.edu forward slash alumni events to learn about other in-person and online happenings throughout the university. Thank you, thank you. I want, I hopefully I will see you all in an in-person event soon. But until then be well, stay safe and go stags and everybody unmute themselves. Let's give Kurt a huge round of applause. Thank you, Kurt. Kurt, thank you. Hope to see you all soon. Okay, thank you.