On Sunday 6 March, Fabian, his housemate and I went to “Saint Pat’s For All”, which is an all-inclusive Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. The complaint was that the organizers of the traditional Saint Patrick’s Day Parade restrict who can march in the parade, notably, by banning LGBT people. St. Pat’s for All is not an LGBT parade, but it is intended to be more fun for participants than it is to be an exhibition for organizers to present sponsors and propagate an ideology.
Mayor De Blasio was at the parade. He gave a speech from a raised platform. The parade started, and bands, community organizations, and individuals marched along the parade route. There was a good turnout of spectators and parade marchers. Various troupes went first, then the mayor was walking along in his own space between some other groups. The event was not so crowded, and the mayor was making eye contact with as many people as possible. Fabian blew him kisses, and the mayor blew kisses back to Fabian. That would not have been allowed in the other Saint Patrick’s Parade, and it is nice to see the major support this one.
Later, I took the day of my birthday off work. Fabian and I went to the Tenement Museum. They were offering an “Irish Immigrants” tour, and we took that one. The museum is in an tenement (low income housing) built in 1863. For whatever reason, this particular building survived until 1988 without major renovation and was re-opened as a museum at that point. Historians have done whatever they can to discover who lived in the building and when, and whatever details of their lives were recorded, and what the neighborhood was like in the past. For our tour, we were taken to some original apartment rooms. In one, nothing was restored, and the room is in decay. In another, the room is recreated in the style of the time as a family might have lived.
The tour guide shared information with us about an Irish family which had lived in the building. Apparently there used to be public address directories in which anyone could register their name, occupation, and address in the directory, and the entire book would be updated yearly and published for distribution throughout New York. I am not sure what I imagined, but the concept seemed to me to be like a phone book. Now I know that these sorts of directories existed before phones. She showed copies of the directory in two subsequent years. In the first, the man listed had one address. In the second, the address listed was of the tenement, and this was presented as evidence that in this year the man moved into the building. They found other records – birth certificates and maybe church records. I was surprised that they found enough to establish a narrative.
For this particular family, there were a husband and wife and 3 children in a 400 square foot apartment. That is the minimum apartment size in New York now. It is very tight, especially for that many people, and supposedly some families had 10 people in such apartments. The guide talked about how much work it was to carry up water, and how hot and cold the room would get, and how daily chores were so burdensome. She also said that the father was employed as a waiter, and the mother stayed at home. From one perspective, they were telling the story of hardships in previous times, and I have no doubt, times used to be harder. Something that I could not understand was how it could have ever been than the income of one waiter could support a family of five. I suppose the area of the museum was cheaper then, and that it was a bad part of town, but New York in any circumstances would have been more expensive than almost anywhere else in America. Surely also waiter jobs paid less then, right? Were the workers not poorly paid and oppressed for lack of social development and no history of demanding rights? How was it that ever in New York a single waiter’s salary could support a family without welfare, or did they have welfare? I am still thinking about that one.
The tour guide said that all Irish people in New York knew about the St. Patrick’s Parade, and that it actually started in 1762. That surprised me. I did not know that the parade was so old, and that it was founded as an Irish solidarity movement for demanding rights. The guide showed political cartoons of the time. In some, the Irish are depicted as drunken apes rioting for the day, and in others, the parade is presented as an orderly respectable affair. I suppose people have said all kinds of things about the parade in its history. I suppose also that it could never have been imagined in the past that non-Irish would want to march in the parade to raise awareness for any number of social issues, long after Irish identity was not anyone’s defining trait in New York.