Fading Whispers of 1847

 Have you ever been down to the Irish Hunger Memorial on Vesey and North End Avenue in New York City? It’s a place unto itself. 

 

I live within walking distance and often drop by. It’s a little piece of home: an overgrown garden, as it were, seeded from grasses and plants particular to Ireland. 

 

It’s a way of measuring and taking stock of the seasons, plus you get a sense of how things are looking in Kerry or Antrim, Wexford or Donegal. To someone who makes a home in the concrete canyons of Manhattan, even the weeds look good down there.

 

The stones too are from Ireland, some of them fashioned into a symbolic deserted cottage, abandoned by the millions who exited a ruined country back in the mid 19^th Century.

 

“The best left,” my mother and grandfather used to sarcastically mutter about some skinflint local customer, when they’d finally written off a debt unpaid for one of their headstones.

 

The most desperate - or enterprising - did emigrate, and from atop this site, in the shadow of the Freedom Tower, you can see where many of them landed in bustling New York City.

 

What hopes they must have had after their storm-tossed voyages on tiny coffin ships from the west coast of Ireland, or in the steerage of more stately vessels from the port of Liverpool.

 

Though I visit this memorial to summon memories of the fields and hills of Ireland, it’s only a matter of time before I hear their dispossessed voices.

 

At first I ignore their gathering whispers and gaze out at the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the pristine towers of Jersey City. 

 

The huge cranes of Bayonne are mere specks in the distance, but occasionally a cruise liner will pass by carrying thousands of revelers on well-earned vacations. They wave anonymously, cocktails in hand, brave people willing to be cooped up with each other so soon after the ravages of Covid.

 

But the dispossessed voices continue to have their say: when they landed 175 years ago, drained from sea-sickness, and listless from a diet of moldy bread and brackish water, they were suspect too.

 

Fever, typhus, and smallpox, as much as hunger, had killed their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers back in Ireland. Were they still infected, these unwelcome immigrants, would they pass on their hidden diseases to god-fearing, decent Americans?

 

The wind is ever shifting on the banks of the Hudson; sometimes, you get a whiff of the ocean from out beyond the Verrazano Bridge, or the tempting fragrance of fried food from a vendor on Vesey Street.

 

What smells the “Famine Irish” must have experienced in their first minutes in America.

 

There was nothing pristine about the Manhattan dockland where sailing vessels from Europe, New England, the cotton-growing South, and the Caribbean jostled for space.

 

Ship chandlers and various suppliers called out their wares, and thousands offered themselves for hire - you sank or swam in this haven of fetid America.

 

What a shock it must have been to the senses! Pete Hamill once told me that the average Irish immigrant saw more people in their first hour in New York than they had encountered in their whole lives back in Ireland.

 

How did they handle the noise, the hustle, and the hassle, a rural people with little or no education, beaten down by landlords, and finally betrayed by the very earth they depended on for their diet of precious potatoes?

 

To say they were hated and despised by American nativists and Know-Nothings would be an understatement. And in an awful way it’s understandable, for modern America has lost patience with the hordes of refugees arriving from other broken countries.

 

In 20 years, hundreds of thousands of Irish swarmed across the small city of New York, begging, striving, and willing to do practically anything to feed themselves and their families.

 

Somehow or other they survived and eventually thrived, and there’s barely a trace left of the hardship and misery these desperate people experienced back in those disastrous days of Black ’47. 

 

But if you listen closely, you’ll catch the fading whisper of their voices as you wind your way out through the familiar plants and grasses, and deserted stones of the Irish Hunger Memorial down on Vesey Street and North End Avenue.