IF I THINK about it I will frighten myself. Instead, I force my mind back to a time when travel was rare and only for those rich or desperate. In those periodic times of despair, emigration is one hopeful option.
I write this onboard an aircraft pointed in the direction of New York City. My immediate goal is to get some form of accommodation for my son who is following me from Dublin in two weeks’ time. He loves Ireland and being Irish but is desperate for a job. He has been out of work for a year now and despite his youth, he feels the time is wasting. I’m concerned what another year of unemployment will do to him.
My own parents emigrated to New York in the late 1940s trailing my two eldest siblings. My father had been laid off from his on-off job, driving a bread van for Bolands Mills. However, he was one of the lucky ones who had a sponsor in America. This was only because of his hurling feats in Croke Park in 1939 and 1947.
Those were desperate years in Ireland, with too many Irish for too few jobs in what was mostly an agrarian economy. They left for England’s major cities and also arrived in the United States, mainly along the north eastern seaboard.
My parents settled in the west Bronx because my father’s sponsor, Father Sean Reid from Kilkenny, found him an apartment near the only dedicated Irish sports ground in New York. So every Sunday for as long back as I can remember, I’d watch from the stands in Gaelic Park as my father tore up and down the field in the black and amber to the roars of throaty and hoarse men.
More importantly for all our futures however was the job Father Reid found for my father in the bus company on West 215th Street alongside the Harlem River.
So my son follows his trail seven decades later for the same reason.
Although things are bound to get better in Ireland, his youth and hunger for something to do won’t let him wait.
I hadn’t thought about looking for accommodation in the Bronx as I no longer have friends there. Since I moved to Ireland my trips back home have always been Manhattan-based.
I was born in the west Bronx but, as they say, you move downtown when you know better. I lived in Manhattan before moving to Dublin more than 28 years ago. Manhattan rents were sky high then but at that time an intrepid hunter could find cubby holes in the upper East Side, with bathtubs in the kitchen and the pipes for gas lighting still hanging on the ceilings, all for the equivalent of one week’s pay packet. They were the tenements from a much earlier time that were quickly built to house the hoards of immigrants from all over the globe seeking a new life in the new world. Now torn down or converted to condominiums, these fashionable Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn apartments are out of the reckoning.
The odd trip up to the Bronx to see the old neighbourhood at 242nd and Broadway was always fleeting as one wanted to get back “down the city” before nightfall. I believe many of my old stomping grounds such as Inwood, Fordham or Kingsbridge Road, once predominantly Irish neighbourhoods, have now started to succumb to urban decay.
My sister suggested Woodlawn and although it’s only just the other side of Van Cortlandt Park from the old neighbourhood, I couldn’t say I knew it, although occasionally we’d go to visit my aunt and her six kids who lived beside St Barnabas Church. I wasn’t aware it still had a strong Irish community.
What popped first onto my screen when I looked it up was an impressive array of Irish pubs. A quick scan down Katonah Avenue which runs through the heart of it finds the Celtic House, the Lark’s Nest, John Mulligan’s, Rambling House, Behan’s and McGinn’s. It is bordered on the north side by McLean Avenue with Rory Dolan’s, An Bodhrán, Fagan’s, Ned Devine’s, McKeon’s and others. It seems an active, lively and thriving area.
There’s also the Emerald Isle Immigration Centre and the Aisling Irish Community Centre. It seems a good place to acclimatise.
My job will be done when my son finds a job and starts making a life for himself, just as I did in Ireland and my parents did before me in the States. He will have his 21st birthday in the States. More than likely it will be celebrated in downtown Manhattan with a bunch of middle-aged and elderly women, my friends and sisters. That alone will be a valuable experience, although I’d say he won’t appreciate it at the time.
As for his future, whether he stays or returns to Ireland, I hope the experience for him makes him grow into a man he can be proud of. I also hope it will heighten an appreciation of his country, culture and kinship.
Maybe it already has. Since he made the decision to emigrate, his musical tastes have switched from rap, rock and house music to that of The Dubliners, The Furey Brothers and The Wolfe Tones.
I am quite sure that Ireland hasn’t lost another son.