Real Lace by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

they were Catholics. And, socially, the Murrays always remained—well, just a little bit different, a little bit Brooklyn.”
    * No one personified Irish oratory better than Boston’s Mayor “Honey Fitz,” who once told an audience, “Having been wined and dined by all the high potentates of Europe, I return to the old North End, where every cobblestone beneath my feet seems to say, ‘Welcome home, John F. Fitzgerald, welcome home.…’”

Chapter 4
    â€œMURRAY BAY”
    The first prominent New York Irishman to buy a summer home in Southampton, on Long Island’s southeastern shore, was a New York lawyer named Morgan J. O’Brien. O’Brien—who was always called Judge O’Brien—was the first lawyer of Irish ancestry in the city to assume a place at the top of his profession comparable to the positions held by Protestants, and it is said that he paved the way for a good many other young Catholic lawyers to advance in the big “old family” firms downtown.
    O’Brien bought a big Southampton place in the early 1920’s, and Southampton was then, as it remains today, a resort for the second-rate rich, or at least for the nouveau riche . It has been said that Southampton was colonized in reaction to old-line Newport, which many younger people in society considered too restrictive and stiffly formal, but this is only partly true. The fact is that Newport’s Old Guard would not accept many of the newer-richfamilies, who, if they wanted a strip of Atlantic seashore for themselves, simply had to look elsewhere.
    Certainly, the Irish families would not have been accepted in Newport, and they knew it. A New York lady of ancient Sephardic Jewish heritage recalls visiting a gentile friend in Newport and her friend saying at one point, “I do think our two peoples are getting closer together, don’t you?” The Jewish lady replied that she indeed hoped so. With that, the non-Jewish Newporter said, “Of course we’ll never accept the Catholics.”
    Newport is, after all, in New England, and in New England—particularly in nearby Boston—the Irish experience had been quite different from what it had been in New York. The Irish immigration had disturbed big, bustling, competitive New York in only a relatively minor way, but its impact on prim old Boston had been shattering.
    To begin with, Boston was a smaller city than New York, and geographically much less suited to immigrants. The suburbs could only be approached across bridges which required the payment of a twenty-cent toll in each direction, and so the hordes of arriving Irish who entered Boston Harbor during the famine years—or who struggled down from Grosse Île in Canada, both legally and illegally—were crowded into Ward Eight and the North End, districts that had formerly contained the homes of prosperous merchants. Neighborhoods were literally ruined as wealthy home-owners fled the invasion and fine old Federal houses were surrounded by jerrybuilt shanties and lean-tos. At one point, Paul Revere’s splendid house in Ann Street was so completely encased by tenements that the house within became invisible. In the nine years prior to 1845, some 33,346 immigrants had landed in Boston, a figure which must be increased by 50 percent for those who made their way in by unrecorded or illegal means—or an average of 5,500 a year. These the city had been more or less able to absorb. In the single famine year of 1847, however, more than 37,000 immigrantsarrived in Boston, “three-quarters Irish labourers,” adding their poverty and weight to a city which, two years earlier, had contained a population of 114,366, and the Boston Transcript noted with alarm that “Groups of poor wretches were to be seen in every part of the city, resting their weary and emaciated limbs at the corners of the streets and in the doorways of both private and public