I doubt that there is anyone alive who knows more about the history of the Irish in New York City than John Ridge. A soft-spoken man, Ridge is a founding member and current president of the New York Irish History Roundtable. The son of Irish immigrants, John is a Brooklyn-based historian whose work focuses primarily on New York Irish-American social events and organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, St. Patrick's Day parades, and Irish language clubs.
He has also lectured on several aspects of Irish and Irish-American history. A prolific author, John has written numerous essays and journal articles, as well as his books, “The Flatbush Irish, Celebrating 250 Years of the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade, Erin's Sons in America: The Ancient Order of Hibernians, and Sligo in New York: The Irish from County Sligo, 1849-1991.” He also recently donated a vast collection of archival material to New York University.
Ridge has also created and led guided fascinating easily-done walking tours of eight areas of the city that bring to light New York Irish history. His tours leading all around the city show Irish landmarks where political and religious leaders from Ireland resided, meeting halls where Irish issues were discussed, or even Irish dance halls where the Irish once danced the night away. For example, Ridge tells the story of the Easter Rising through visits to several sites just steps from Manhattan’s City Hall.
John is a modest, unpretentious man who does not get the recognition he deserves, so I decided to interview him about his life, his work and his views on a rapidly changing Irish American community in New York. I asked him about his roots. John was born in Brooklyn of Irish parents. His father was from Carna, Connemara, Co. Galway and his mother from Ballinalee, Co. Longford. They met in one of the Irish dance halls that were popular at the time of their immigration in the late 1920s. His father's first language was Irish. The surname Ridge is more widely known today as Mac Con Iomaire. The Ridges were so well known for their folklore stories of Irish history and literature that the stories of his grandfather and granduncle were recorded by researchers from Dublin to Berlin in the 1930s, some of which were published, and some recordings can even be found online.
Ridge told me his father had initially emigrated to Boston, where almost all the Connemara immigrants settled, but unable to find work there, he joined his cousins who found him a job on the BMT subway, where he worked with other Irish immigrants. His mother came to Brooklyn joining a large Longford community there. When he began researching the history of New York Irish immigrants, Ridge realized that these patterns of immigration were largely unknown and that there was a deeper untold story that was not being covered by historians.
I asked Ridge about the source of his passion for New York Irish history. He said that as a teenager, he began collecting books on Irish history, many of them published in New York in the 19th and early 20th Centuries and realized that there was once a significant "other Ireland" that grew up in America separate from the old country. He was particularly fascinated by the vast treasury of Irish American weekly newspapers that chronicled the New York Irish community, sometimes even reporting events taking places in the homes of the Irish immigrants themselves. Ridge began collecting old Irish-American newspapers, some dating to the 1830s, but the bulk of the collection was from the late 19th Century to the mid-20th Century. Ridge noted that these often-vivid accounts in the old newspapers are the closest thing we have to reliving those long bygone days.
John and I collaborate on the New York Irish History Roundtable, and I asked him about its founding. He credited its formation to Angela Carter and her Irish bookstore, the Keshcarrigan, in downtown New York. The shop attracted many academics and others enthusiastic to learn about the history of the New York Irish. Angela gave space for an organizational meeting of the Roundtable and quickly several hundred people joined up. John recalled that they were a great group who combined a deep love for their city and their ancestral land. All of them realized that time was running out to preserve the story of Irish New York, but the organization’s Journal through its annual publication, New York Irish History, has preserved over almost 40 years a treasury of New York's Irish history that would have been lost forever.
I asked John about his research interests and publications. He told me that he had first written a booklet called “The Flatbush Irish” which attempted to tell the story of the Flatbush Irish community and, specifically, of the Hibernian division, No. 35, which was organized in 1879. When he joined this group over 50 years ago, it had just moved out of its old neighborhood in a time of great transition and had lost practically all its records. Sadly, there were few people left who knew anything about its founding. Flatbush was once an independent town ruled by the Irish until it was merged into Brooklyn and then New York City in the 1890s. John hopes to publish a new much expanded work on the Flatbush Irish.
Ridge discovered many topics where nothing or very little had been researched including the many formerly Irish neighborhoods of the city, the colonies of individual Irish county groups that settled in different neighborhoods and the widespread use of the Irish language in New York City. He also wanted to depict the many colorful characters that made the Irish community so interesting and the network of social and political organizations that produced a virtual "little Ireland in America." Ridge was eager to document the details of New York Irish life he had gleaned from the old newspapers.
I asked Ridge about the achievements of the Roundtable over its long history. He told me that the organization has been very successful in bringing together some wonderful people to tell stories of their experiences and that of their families in what was Irish New York. He claimed that if there had been no Roundtable, much of the hidden and unrecorded Irish history would have been lost forever. John thinks that all Americans, not just Irish Americans, should be very impressed and proud of the role the Irish played in the saga of building New York. John encourages people to read the archived copies of the Roundtable’s journals at https://nyirishhistory.us/
I inquired about some of the challenges in keeping the Roundtable functioning. John related to me that the numbers and significance of the Irish as an ethnic group have drastically declined over the last few decades and that we are only a shadow of the presence the Irish once had. He claimed that an entirely volunteer organization like the Roundtable unfortunately must struggle to maintain its very existence since so many people have moved away from areas that were once convenient to Manhattan. John feels sad about people not attending events like in previous years, particularly since Covid and he regrets that people are reluctant to turn out for events.
John laments that few young Irish seem interested in history. He said, “Our society is geared to living in the present and it's usually only when individuals become more mature that they realize it is too late to gather those family stories that would have provided the fodder for our New York Irish story. As the immigrant generation becomes smaller, the descendants of the Irish become less involved in their ethnic heritage.”
One of the finest tributes to John and his work is from his colleague on the New York Irish History Roundtable Professor Frank Naughton who said, “For nearly four decades, John has been a stalwart of the New York Irish History Roundtable. He is the longest-serving president of the Roundtable and is an unequalled source of information about the experiences and accomplishments of people of Irish heritage in the New York metropolitan area.” In the future when Irish scholars study the history of the Irish in New York they will appreciate the importance of the many contributions John Ridge has made to preserving that history.
