Irish-Irish

Tale of a crusader who took on the Irish criminal sharks ‘On the Waterfront’ by Anthony Glavin in the February 3rd Irish Times

Waterfront Confidential

The City, From Wartime Grit to Modern Soullessness in last weekend’s New York Times

Rocky Sullivan’s: 34 Van Dyke Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, Feb. 3, 7 PM

Which reading/event marks our second foray to the heart of South Brooklyn’s historic “Italian Waterfront.” What a difference a month makes! January 3 found me lugubriously covering the neighborhood’s desolate wind and snow-swept rutted streets in search of Sunny’s Bar, doubting the scheduled reading would even run given the frigid clime; mulling if it did how to disclaim my way out of having written a book on the great Port that berthed but fleetingly alongside the docks of Red Hook? I tell you I was in a bad neighborhood that Sunday afternoon: not Red Hook the confines of me own mind!

Then I spotted Sunny’s readings’ organizer/host Gabriel Cohen lugging a big sign in from the cold against winds so powerful the signage like to set sail; but soon Gabriel had me and fellow reader Lauren Weber slicing pastries for guests, enjoying warm conversation and tea; the makings of a wonderful long afternoon to come. But…the historian’s torment was not immediately assuaged, not even after in walked the delightful Catherine Osborne, a Fordham grad student the world’ll be hearing from in good time; followed by my good friend Sean from all the way cross-Harbor in Essex County; followed by kind folks all kinds til I finally started to relax: why fret over putative slight to Red Hook in presence of fellow landlubber literati?

And then Carolina Salguero introduced herself and some colleagues from PortSide New York, a visionary Red Hook initiative berthed on and around the tanker “Mary Whalen.” PortSide does what I dream: Carolina and crew treat the waterfronts of history and memory but focus on the most important lesson of all: this great port remains a working port; featuring not only vast container terminals plying the international trade but local, “brown-water” and coastwise workaday maritime commerce that continues to move goods and people; forging vital connections originating in places like Red Hook. Lest I misrepresent PortSide’s breathtaking appeal and prospects please do see for yourself.

A déjà vu moment on meeting Carolina was later confirmed in learning she is alum. of the same most lively American Studies program where I taught for seven years (we just missed meeting then). Such dimly-glimpsed connections were on my mind all through the sets of readings that Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn; it was only much later, while traveling between the Verrazano and Goethals that it finally kicked in and how could I forget: my dear comrade and inspiration Adam Davis had regaled me for weeks back in Sept. 2007 with tales of his role in the cast of Il Tabarro, the Puccini opera staged on, you got it, the tanker Mary Whalen, at its berth along Red Hook’s Pier 9B in the Buttermilk Channel of the Great Harbor. Co-produced by PortSide New York.

There is so much more to report on Carolina and PortSide and Red Hook and Adam, who last autumn also alerted me to a production of William Bolcom’s operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s South Brooklyn-inspired View from the Bridge, a production staged by the same Vertical Players Repertory who mounted Il Tabarro on Pier 9B. And now comes a separate production of Miller’s play to open on Broadway January 24. A recent NY Times piece, while interesting, repeated some unfortunately longstanding historical misrepresentations; misperceptions redressed rather squarely in On the Irish Waterfront as among the critical “Brooklyn issues” the book does treat. These in turn are apropos to a story I told at Sunny’s on that Sunday, which most fortuitously made its way into print the following week. Round and round we historians go: Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past?

Perhaps, though I’m currently imagining instead the penultimate scene of director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s tri-color films trilogy: the scene in Red in which the various characters from all three films converge in helping one another from a life raft perilously bobbling against the shore. When I think of Adam Davis, for instance, I think of our Charlie and vice versa. Adam has been ceaselessly kind and concerned for Charlie’s wellbeing since we first met in a Fordham classroom three years ago this week. Charlie is our maritime navigator, guide and steadfast companion: we share a life, Charlie, Dr. Chew and me that may not allow just now for much theater, opera, or movie-going but with such warm friends as Adam we’re truly blessed. And to envision that someday—perhaps not far off—Charlie and us and Adam and Carolina and her colleagues and opera and the Mary Whalen: PortSide in the Great Harbor. How can we ever forget; we’re all vitally connected, all waterfront companions sharing this journey in a manner most lovely.

All Along the Jersey Shore

During the first half of the past century the working waterfronts of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Bayonne were synonymous with “the Jersey shore,” especially in the parlance of maritime industry figures gazing west from their Manhattan dockside redoubts. There were no sunbathers to be found on those historic piers of Hudson County. Then, beginning in the late 1920s and 1930s Frank Hague, Johnny Kenny and other Hudson Co. politicos and associates traded some discretionary swag for real estate down along the sparsely developed Monmouth County seashore. New Jersey’s Irish Riviera was thus born.

In August 1932 Boss Hague bused roughly one in eight of his Hudson County subjects down to Sea Girt for a spectacular oceanfront rally in support of Democratic Presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt. With lunch for tens of thousands cheerfully provided by Hague’s omnipotent “organization,” FDR was so impressed he quickly forgave the Boss for having stubbornly backed his good friend and fellow (semi) Irish Catholic Alfred E. Smith, whose quixotic bid to recapture the nomination, four years after his crushing defeat at the hands of Republican Herbert Hoover, confirmed the wisdom of Hague’s decision never to seek statewide office in the still heavily rural-Protestant Garden State. Who needs Trenton when you already have Jersey City…and Sea Girt and Spring Lake?

Or neighboring Manasquan, the favored girlhood summer destination of my mom and her joyously frolicking cousins and aunts, the “Honan girls.” I instinctively equate that scene with the end of Irish America, simply because in my own earliest memories of places like Manasquan the buoyantly communal imagery is supplanted by familial discord, scarily erratic adult behavior and still-mortifying glimpses of my highly ineffectual fight-or-flight responses.

Memory!: so richly capricious yet inestimably valuable to historians, as reconfirmed decades later during an interview with John O’Brien, an elderly priest of the Newark Archdiocese, who reminisced on his own boyhood Irish Riviera, the fabled Rockaways, along Queens’ Atlantic coast, where—a decade or more before the Honan girls gamboled in Manasquan—O’Brien learned to swim by emulating his idolized cousin, John Corridan, the future waterfront priest. Corridan was a loner, Father O’Brien repeatedly informed me, vividly illustrating his theme with stories of the older boy furiously swimming solo, hundreds of yards “beyond the ropes.” I never relinquished that image while seeking to explain how, decades later, the rechristened Jesuit “Pete” Corridan sabotaged the Irish waterfront’s tribal moorings.

Corridan understood that the waterfront’s militant localism—with each pier functioning as a virtual ethnic parish—ensured that no outsider could ever stitch together a coherent narrative to cover the entire Port, so he presented himself as an insider to the journalists, reformers and filmmakers enlisted as allies in his cause of waterfront justice. The loner fiercely resisted the claims of his tribe: in this sense On the Waterfront originated not in Corridan’s impassioned late 1948 Jersey City oration “Christ in the Shapeup” but in those solitary ocean swims against the tides, far from past the confining ropes of Rockaway’s Irish Riviera.

In On the Irish Waterfront we simply followed this loner’s lead in making the narrative connections suggested by his own boundary-crossing apostolate–working out of a tradition he helped establish–that became virtually “normative” for U.S. Catholic activists and historians alike, at least for a time in the post-Vatican II era. Yet at some point in the course of work on this book I mournfully—or was it resentfully–concluded there was no way of extending this apostolic tradition—as I understood it—to achieve social justice for persons like our son Charlie and millions of others featuring cognitive difference/disabilities. That may simply reflect a failure of imagination on my part, and/or serve as an invitation to eschew the melodrama and move on.

I know the above reads like a jarring un-transition, but this entire post was meant to treat just those questions! We’re clearly not there yet. Next time out we’ll finally treat of Charlie in light of the Honan girls and the post-Irish Riviera Jersey Shore. In the meantime, while I stumble along, you might have a look over here for enduring witness to Charlie and persons like and not so-like him inhabiting the country of difference we once dubbed autismland. That coinage is my sole contribution to Dr. Chew’s brilliant blogging career, apart from a redemptive role behind the wheel along Jersey roads leading to the ocean, with Charlie emphatically urging: ‘this way; this way!’

Warren Beatty, then Irish Waterfront

We’re (WERE) on the NY Times book page, in story that originated on the paper’s City Room blog. Story also found in Jan 7 print edition. In the future how will historians cite all the various versions paper/electronic etc?

We’re most grateful for presence in ‘mixed’ media.

Reading at Sunny’s Red Hook Brooklyn: Sunday the 3rd at 3

Not twenty minutes ago was I barreling up Rte 1 in N. Ctrl Jersey when Rod Stewart demanded yet again that Maggie wake up, and just like every other time that song’s pierced my airwaves over the past three decades or so, I’m right back in that barren room in northwest Bergen County, having slammed the door on returning from a new and alien school. A scared and scary-looking five feet nine, 100 pound fifteen-year old, maybe, if you’d handed me a few rolls of quarters to carry. Staring at those four papered-over walls with daydreams featuring what I believe the great Frederick Exley once described as “sanguinary intent.” I’ve made at least two lifelong friends from discovering we shared that precise experience autumn 1971; staring at those four walls while Rod Stewart rasped on; he’s whining over getting kicked in the head while all we got are those miserable walls for wailing gone unheard.

This is in the way of a tribute to Gracie, my moms, who doth indeed grace a paragraph in the acknowledgments of Irish Waterfront, alongside Jimmy Breslin, who I discovered via Gracie’s intercession  circa 1965 when—as a very lonely, pent-up and exceedingly under-employed housewife married to a corporate soldier oft-away “on business”—she took to her room late of evenings and began dialing the rotary phone: hi-ball in hand, day-old copy (delivered via U.S. postal service) of the New York Herald-Tribune on the nightstand folded to reveal Jimmy’s latest column.

I wasn’t supposed to hear a thing but I missed nary a word, of her side of the conversation at least which often felt like the whole thing (just one of the many endearing/infuriating qualities she bequeathed me). I absorbed every word because I have ADHD ‘somethin’ wicked’—in the parlance of Southern New England where we lived at the time—which means I’m often more attuned to other voices/other rooms than to the conversation (or silence) right before me in which I mean to be engaged. And I was damn lucky to be wired so (again just like Gracie) because the stories and characters she poured over that line to bemused/temporarily captive lady friends!: Marvin the Torch; Klein the Lawyer, who were these mugs and where did my mom acquire such intimacy with the world according to Breslin?

The Trib soon folded but in summer 71 we were finally transferred back to her native North Jersey, where my visions of communing in person with Jimmy Breslin quickly yielded instead to Rod Stewart on the radio and those variously mustard-shaded papered walls. But then very gradually it began to open up: New York talk radio in those days was flush with personalities Gracie had encountered during her glorious stint working in advertising at 710 WOR-Radio, the NYC flagship of the Mutual Broadcasting System with studios at 1440 Broadway hard by Times Square. She knew about ‘em all, not only the wholesome standbys like Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, and Ed and Pegeen Fitzgerald on WOR but such denizens of the night as Barry Gray, to the left of the dial on WMCA AM 530.

Until proven otherwise I’ll maintain conviction that I was the only Irish-Catholic sixteen year old to tune in each night to the Barry Gray program; among his regular guests was a very young Jeff Greenfield, who I finally had the privilege of meeting at Glucksman Ireland House just prior to the Breslin-fest on Dec. 7 (please see our post of Dec. 20 for more on that memorable event). If you had told me circa 1972 while I huddled, ear pressed to forbidden post-midnight radio that two decades later I’d be blessed by presence of Jeff G’s brilliant daughter in my American Studies lecture course at Yale (and that she’d bring him to a lecture only to have me in Ireland that day interviewing for job; curses!). If you’d told me a lot of things they’d have sounded totally preposterous to everyone around me except Gracie, though she surely must’ve nervously harbored more than her share of doubts too.

Gracie suffered emotionally for years: fifty-five to be precise now that I may report her own account, and it’s a heartbreak to see her in throes of “dementia” at a nursing home in these days. But the bottom line is we maintain the same loopy verbal and spiritual connection as always; she’s especially alert in recalling the old radio days and the days of those rakish, brooding, raging newspaper columnists of the great metropolis especially her favorite, Jimmy Breslin. “He’s still around;” as she’s informed me on numerous occasions this autumn.

Love you Gracie: this one’s for you: no “links,” digital images none of those things you were not made to experience much less understand. I was never so proud of my mom as on a sweltering late-60s summer afternoon which for some reason found us attempting to deposit refuse at the town dump in Cheshire, Connecticut, when some dopey citizen driving behind us in his town-and-country station wagon accused her of “holding up the works.” Gracie was anything but tough, God bless her, but she fixed on this faux-Yankee her finest Honan-girl “puss,” as they used to say, and muttered for me to hear at least: “later for you, pal.” We’re with you Gracie, not in Rockland but Morristown and indelible Jersey memory.

KPFA Interview

Go to this link.

Thanks to Dr. Chew and her intrepid cousin Michael in Oakland: and all the Yeungs, and the Chews, and the Wongs

We miss you all Merry Christmas we’re there with you in spirit!

Happy Holidays to all, everywhere

And I should know enough to eschew sentimentality and all but.. as they say; what’s the point of being Irish if you don’t know the world will break your heart someday…

Radio; Reading News

KPFA radio interview airing Christmas Eve morning: 7:30 A.M. East Bay Pacific time; 10:30 Jersey Irish waterfront time and web-streamed. Interview was taped; was fun and story-laden.

First Irish Waterfront reading of New Year set for Sunny’s in historic Red Hook Brooklyn: Sunday Jan. 3 at 3 P.M. We’re lookin at 15-20 readings between then and mid-April: venues all kinds the list will be up under ‘Appearances’ before this year through.

Here’s the news from Sunny’s courtesy of event host Gabriel Cohen:

Once again you are invited to come hear some of New York’s finest
published authors read in a beautiful old waterfront bar. The next
SUNDAYS AT SUNNY’S reading will take place at 3 p.m. on Sunday,
January 3. (That should give you plenty of time to recover from New
Year’s Eve!)

We’re going all-nonfiction for this reading, with an in-depth look
behind the scenes at the true story behind the Marlon Brando film
classic On the Waterfront, a tour of fascinating ethnic neighborhoods
here in NYC, and a reading about a topic that should prove quite
timely these days:  how to live a bit lower on the hog! So come on
down to Red Hook for a visit to the coziest bar in the world.

The January Sundays at Sunny’s reading will feature:

Joseph Berger

Nonfiction writer, author of The World in a City: Traveling the Globe
Through the Neighborhoods of New New York and Displaced Persons:
Growing Up American After the Holocaust

James T. Fisher

Nonfiction writer, author of On the Irish Waterfront: the Crusader,
the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York

Lauren Weber

Nonfiction writer, author of In Cheap We Trust:  the Story of a
Misunderstood American Virtue

Joseph Berger has been a New York Times reporter, columnist, and
editor for a quarter century, writing about education, religion, and
the vivid kaleidoscope that is New York City, as well as chronicling
many of the events that have shaken Israel and the Middle East. He is
the author of three books, including The World in a City: Traveling
the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York, Displaced
Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust, and The Young Scientists: America’s Future and the Winning of the Westinghouse.

James T. Fisher is a Professor of Theology and American Studies at Fordham University. Aside from his new book about the New York waterfront, he is the author of Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America, Dr. America: the Lives of Thomas A Dooley, 1927-1961, and The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933-1962. Visit his blog at irishwaterfront.wordpress.com.

Lauren Weber was formerly a staff reporter at Reuters and Newsday. She has also written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She lives in New York.

The series, co-sponsored by BookCourt bookstore (www.bookcourt.org)
(718-875-3677), will continue on the first Sunday of every month  at
3:00 p.m at Sunny’s, a legendary old bar on the Brooklyn waterfront in
Red Hook at 253 Conover Street (between Beard & Reed Streets). You can
buy books and get them signed by the authors. Suggested donation: $4.
The bar (cash) will be open. Free coffee and Italian pastries and
cookies will be provided. Bar telephone (only available when the bar
is open): 718-625-8211.

UPCOMING:  February 7:  David Biro, M.D., author of The Language of
Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief.

Getting to Sunny’s is easy:

By bus:  take the B61 toward Red Hook from Atlantic Ave. & Court St.
(or from the A train midtrain exit at Jay Street Borough Hall). Get
off near the end of the line at Van Brunt & Beard streets., walk 1
block right and 1/2 block left. Or take the B77 bus down 9th Street
from Park Slope (or from the Smith and 9th Street F train stop–exit
at the rear of the train and come down the stairs to street level and
the corner bus stop.) Take the bus in the direction of Van Brunt
Street and Red Hook. (Sunny’s is right around the corner from the big
Fairway supermarket at the end of Van Brunt.)

If you’re driving: From Manhattan, take the Brooklyn Bridge and get
off at the Court Street exit–then take a left on Cadman Plaza West,
which will turn into Court St. Go about a mile, past Atlantic Avenue,
and take a right on Sackett Street. Continue straight for five blocks,
across the overpass over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and take a
left on Van Brunt Street. Continue down almost to the end of Van Brunt
(you’ll see the waterfront and the Fairway supermarket up ahead) and
take a right on Reed Street. Go one block and take a right on Conover
Street–you’ll see a big sign that says BAR. That’s Sunny’s.

By water:  New York Water Taxi has a stop just several blocks from
Sunny’s, at the new IKEA. For a route map, please see
http://www.nywatertaxi.com/map

Raging Waterfronts

In from the wings glided Tony Bennett, unadvertised, just as the Jimmy Breslin tribute at NYU was ending in the late evening of December 7. We’re talking a college lecture hall here, albeit a classy-looking one. Tony Bennett does not work collegiate lecture rooms. But there rocked Tony (like he for whom “needs no introduction” was coined), swinging away, accompanied by Lee Musiker at a piano well concealed just behind the phalanx of journalists and richly assorted others who’d spent the previous ninety minutes roasting and toasting the pride of South Jamaica/Ozone Park.

Though Anthony Dominick Benedetto hails from Astoria in a distant corner of that same borough of Queens, he did not let the miles separating these “old neighborhoods”—or the fact that he was already an international celebrity while Jimmy Breslin was still hustling copy across the newsroom floor of the old Long Island Press—deter warm reminiscence of growing up idolizing the feisty journalist, a Queens boy made good across the East River (which is no river at all but a tidal estuary, as Breslin surely noted more than once in a vast oeuvre often marked by a kind auto-didacticism, Irish waterfront-style).

Tony Bennett sang warmly of love—he turned that room aglow—just moments after James Breslin had administered his own brand of heat; the passionate language of rage. By Jimmy’s self-account rage was his “only quality” that endured through six decades of reporting and column writing for several New York City newspapers. This is a genus and species of rage bearing as many faces as sources: in biography, in creativity, in notions of manhood, in ethnicity and in religion. This is the multifaceted incarnation of rage that is the Irish waterfront’s enduring legacy.

Jimmy Breslin’s unrepentant, wholly un-therapeutic copping to rage-as-journalistic motivation prompted in us some tentative reflections on his place in that distinctive tradition On the Irish Waterfront grounds in the experience of Pete Corridan, S.J. Separated by two decades (Corridan was born in 1911) the Jesuit and the journalist were both outer-borough, working-class Irish-Catholics who lost their fathers in childhood (Corridan’s cop-dad died; Breslin’s alcoholic father took a walk never to return): their mothers worked, struggled, knew too well the fleeting solace of drink, and loved their children as best they could, like many widowed mothers from that time and place (including my maternal great-grandmother, who—after losing her husband to drowning in a Panama Canal construction accident–endured as a single mother and widow in Brooklyn for seventy-five years).

The analytical skills that fueled Pete Corridan’s mastery of waterfront economics were honed poring over the rosters and statistics of the Dodgers of Brooklyn and the Giants of Coogan’s Bluff (Harlem site of the historic Polo Grounds). Breslin began as a sportswriter: as emcee Pete Hamill astutely noted at NYU, he was the first New York journalist to adapt the sports reporter’s tools (always visit the losing locker room, Breslin counseled) to chronicling the lives and losses endured everyday in the great metropolis. A Breslin sporting connection even provided the epigraph for On the Irish Waterfront, in the form of Queens-bred coach Al McGuire’s testimony that the only promise he ever made to his Marquette basketball recruits was, “you’re born and you die alone.”

John McGuire, Al’s older brother, co-owned Breslin’s favorite old-neighborhood Queens Boulevard saloon. John McGuire was an archetypal ‘Runyonesque’ character of the kind Breslin extolled in a manner described by the New York Times as “the Mock Heroic Deadpan: a prose style in which the author adopts the tone of a Harvard lepidopterist in order to convey events more closely associated with the redemption center at Aqueduct Racetrack.” John McGuire was in fact a chronically broke ‘horse degenerate,’ an ex-cop and world-class raconteur immortalized in a quintessentially ‘Breslinesque’ 1967 Sports Illustrated feature by Pete Axthelm, a prodigiously talented Breslin acolyte who surely would have graced NYU’s dais Dec. 7 had he not died–from the way he lived–in winter 1991. Axthelm had reported in Sports Illustrated Al McGuire’s lamentation over his brother John’s wasted gifts, the same theme invoked by Breslin himself nearly a quarter century later in a rage-filled televised jeremiad (“it’s a terrible thing…I was very close to him…and I’m not going to get teary-eyed over something I detest”) that ignited derision among booze-soaked, would-be Runyon-or Breslin-esque revelers at a “wake” for Pete Axthelm in a Manhattan saloon (Breslin’s outburst was not wholly lost on me, having ridden a boat to the races with ‘Ax’ during the final summer of his life).

Though they surely never met in person, Jimmy Breslin may well have held more in common with Pete Corridan than with Pete Axthelm, who in 1965 proceeded straight from Yale to the New York Herald-Tribune, the old-moneyed Republican redoubt where Breslin had become the star columnist after the paper’s patrician owner and its editor-in-chief decided—according to the “Trib’s” historian—“they had an authentic primitive on their hands, a rowdy noble savage” (a rowdy savage who could write like an angel lest we forget). The Trib’s only pro-Republican rival among New York’s dailies, the New York Sun, had expired in 1950, less than a year after investigative reporter Malcolm “Mike” Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for “Crime on the Waterfront,” a twenty-four installment expose animated by Pete Corridan’s tips, inspiration, and relentless displays of moral courage which effected a kind of conversion experience in Mike Johnson himself.

Pete Corridan spent the remainder of his public apostolate collaborating tirelessly with sympathetic New York journalists, including most notably the great Murray Kempton, whose spirit was invoked continuously during the NYU Breslin-fest. We could readily argue that the triumvirate of Breslin, Kempton, and Pete Hamill defined New York journalism through four postwar decades. Hamill’s good friendship with Corridan’s greatest acolyte, Budd Schulberg, closes a loop of literary inspiration traceable to the fiery Jesuit. It’s a damn shame he and Jimmy Breslin never met!

So the links are abundant. As to themes shared, Corridan and Breslin’s work featured a raging sympathy for the underdog, the dispossessed. Corridan’s goal was to reform the Irish waterfront so that the bodies of slain longshoremen could no longer float noticed but unremarked down the North River, once its temperatures rose in April to reveal a seasonal crop of decomposing corpses. Pete raged publicly against politicians, stevedores, and their gangster cronies, and privately against prominent monsignors and prelates of the New York Archdiocese who blessed the corrupt and vicious political economy of the Irish waterfront.

By the time Jimmy Breslin rose to prominence that story was finished; the battle lost: with containerization transforming the Port and work for longshoremen rapidly dwindling, Breslin found his subjects off the waterfront. Yet his classic portraits of New Yorkers doggedly making their way in a world where they enjoyed little power and less control suggested that in the great metropolis, everyone lived in the shadows of the Irish waterfront and the distinctive urban culture and morality it had wrought. The primary difference between the Jesuit and the journalist was akin to that between the reformer and the artist: Corridan sought to instill in longshoremen the quest for “dignity” in a form they never recognized as their own, while Breslin found dignity in characters who persevered amid the morally ambiguous spaces they created for themselves in an otherwise cold world.

Yet there’s plenty more to the story. When Jimmy Breslin reported from outside the city—as during his forays to the Deep South during the most violent epoch of the Civil Rights movement—his moral outrage was vented unambiguously. Gradually and over time he came to relate the black liberation struggle—and the migration of African American refugees to New York—to the struggles of Irish and Italians and other European exiles who ultimately found their way in Gotham. If Pete Corridan was—as Budd Schulberg insisted—the first liberation theologian, Breslin eventually became a vociferously prophetic—and public–critic of the New York Archdiocese and the church that “forgot Christ.”

Watching Jimmy Breslin on that night at NYU I was transfixed by his commentary on rage; it’s my conviction that is the issue shaping the legacy of the vast metropolitan area Irish-Catholic subculture, formed and solidified in the years between the world wars; contested and fragmented in the decades since. I’d like to try and explain why Jimmy Breslin makes his sole appearance in On the Irish Waterfront in the closing acknowledgments, in a paragraph devoted to my mother, Gracie. This being a blog I imagine it’s ok—after a long and very snowy day here in North Central Jersey/autismland–if it’s ok I’m going to hang up a ‘To Be Continued” and wish all a blessed good night and peaceful, joyous tomorrow on or off the Irish Waterfront or in the spaces between.

Feeling Irish

Thanks to Peter McDermott and folks at the Irish Echo.

And Big Thanks to our friend Jane in Berkeley for tips leading to interview over KPFA radio; taped today, broadcast next week.

Breezy Jimmy Breslin post has turned into wrenching essay; having so confessed I’m good for it by wee hours Friday into Saturday.

Warmest Irish Waterfront wishes to all from Jim