Between 1845 and 1852, Ireland suffered one of the worst famines in European history. The blight that destroyed the potato crop, a staple food for a large portion of the Irish population, killed over one million people and forced millions more to leave the country. The event is known in Irish as An Gorta Mor, which translates roughly as the Great Hunger. For those who managed to survive the crossing, New York City was often the first stop in a new country.

The scale of that migration was enormous. In the decade following 1845, over 900,000 Irish emigrants entered the port of New York. By 1855, Irish-born residents made up nearly one third of the city’s total population. By 1860, the number of Irish living in New York had reached around 200,000, which was close to 25 percent of everyone living in the city at that time.

Most of these newcomers arrived with little money and nowhere to go. They settled in the lowest-rent areas of lower Manhattan, particularly a neighborhood called Five Points, which occupied the area where five streets converged: Orange Street (now Baxter), Anthony Street (now Worth), Little Water Street, Cross Street (now Park), and Mulberry Street. The neighborhood had originally been home to free Black New Yorkers but saw large numbers of Irish immigrants move in during the 1840s. By 1850, Irish Catholics made up the majority of the population in that ward.

Living conditions were severe. Thousands of people crowded into tenement buildings that had not been built for the density they were asked to hold. A large structure known as the Old Brewery, which had originally been a colonial-era beer producer, was converted into a tenement and reportedly housed close to 1,000 people at its peak. The building was eventually torn down in the 1850s.

The Irish who came during the famine years were not a homogeneous group. Many came from the west of Ireland, particularly from Connacht and Munster, where the famine hit hardest. Counties like Mayo, Galway, and Cork sent large numbers of emigrants to New York. Notably, Irish immigration was unusual compared to other waves of immigration in that women made up a significant portion of arrivals. They took jobs as domestic servants, factory workers, teachers, and in religious institutions. Men found work in construction, on the docks, and in the city’s service industries.

The arrival of so many Irish in such a short period created tensions in the city. The Know-Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s promoted an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant agenda, and Irish workers frequently encountered signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” when looking for work. Despite this hostility, the Irish community in New York organized, built institutions, and found ways to advance over the following decades.

The Catholic Church became a central institution for the Irish community. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was originally located on Mott Street in lower Manhattan before the current cathedral was built on Fifth Avenue and 50th Street, served as an anchor for Irish Catholic life in the city. Irish parishes multiplied across Manhattan and Brooklyn as the community grew.

The famine generation also established fraternal and aid organizations that helped new arrivals find housing, work, and community. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, which had been founded in New York City in 1836 at St. James Church near the Five Points neighborhood, grew considerably during and after the famine years. Its membership increased as more Irish immigrants arrived seeking a sense of connection to home and protection from discrimination.

Today, the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City stands as a permanent acknowledgment of what that generation endured. It sits at the corner of Vesey Street and North End Avenue and was dedicated on July 16, 2002. The half-acre site was designed by artist Brian Tolle in collaboration with landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird and the firm 1100 Architect. On its base of Irish limestone and illuminated glass panels, the memorial displays historical accounts of the famine. The landscape above includes native Irish grasses, sedges, and wildflowers, as well as fieldstones imported from County Mayo. At its center stands the reconstructed ruin of an actual 19th-century cottage from the village of Attymass in County Mayo, reassembled stone by stone on the site.

The memorial rises from street level to a height of 25 feet at its western end, giving visitors a view of the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, the same waterway that the famine emigrants would have entered when they arrived in New York. The design was intended not only to honor those who died in Ireland but also to draw attention to famine and hunger in the world today.

The story of Irish immigration during the famine years is not a simple one of suffering followed by triumph. It involved displacement, discrimination, poverty, and hard work over multiple generations. But it also shaped New York City in ways that are still visible, in its neighborhoods, its institutions, its political history, and in the nearly one million people in the metropolitan area who identify as Irish American today.