I do not usually write about things that have nothing to do with Irish arts or heritage, but this past weekend was such a mess that I felt like putting it down somewhere. So bear with me on this one.

I drove down to Washington DC on Saturday morning. The reason for the trip was pretty ordinary. I wanted to visit a friend who recently moved there, and I figured I would make a day of it and see a couple of things while I was in the area. I left New York around 7 in the morning, which I thought would get me down there before any real traffic built up. That part worked out fine. The drive on I-95 was straightforward and I got into the city a little after 10.

We walked around for a few hours. We had lunch somewhere near Dupont Circle, nothing fancy, just sandwiches. My friend showed me the neighborhood where she lives now and we caught up on things. It was a good visit overall. That part of the day I have no complaints about.

The problem started when I got back to my car around 3 in the afternoon and it would not start. I turned the key and got a clicking sound, which I have been told usually means the battery, but I am not a mechanic so I was not entirely sure what I was dealing with. I tried a couple more times and got the same result. The car was not going anywhere on its own.

I sat there for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. I called my friend back and she came over, but neither of us had jumper cables. I asked a few people on the street if they could help and nobody had cables either. So I did what most people end up doing in that situation. I looked up towing washington dc on my phone and went through a few results until I found a company that said they could get to me within the hour.

The tow truck showed up about 45 minutes later. The driver was fine, not unfriendly, just businesslike. He got the car loaded up without any trouble. I had the car taken to a shop that my friend’s neighbor recommended, which was about 15 minutes away. The shop was already starting to close for the day by the time we got there, so I left the car overnight and made arrangements to get a callback on Monday morning.

It turned out to be the battery, which I was glad about because it could have been something worse and more expensive. The shop replaced it Monday and I took the train back down to pick the car up on Tuesday. That added two extra trips I had not planned for and the whole thing cost me a little over $300 between the tow and the battery replacement.

I am writing this on Wednesday and the car seems to be running fine. I do not have any great lesson to share from the experience. I probably should have known the battery was getting old. I had noticed the car starting a little slowly a few times over the past month but I kept putting off getting it checked. That is the kind of thing that catches up with you eventually.

Anyway, next week I will be back to writing about Irish music and dance events happening around New York City. I just needed to get this one out of my system first.

At 15 East 7th Street in the East Village, McSorley’s Old Ale House has been serving two types of beer, one light and one dark, for most of the last 170 years. The bar is widely cited as New York City’s oldest continuously operating saloon. Its founder, John McSorley, was an Irish immigrant from County Tyrone who arrived in New York on January 23, 1851, aboard a ship called the Colonist, at the age of 18. He opened his ale house sometime in the 1850s, calling it The Old House at Home, a name that pointed to the role he intended the bar to play for the Irish community around him.

The exact founding date of McSorley’s has been debated. The bar has long claimed 1854, and John McSorley himself wrote in a document now held at the Museum of the City of New York that the establishment was founded that year. A New York Tribune article from 1895 referred to the bar as having “stood for 40 years,” which would also point to the mid-1850s. However, city records show that the building currently occupied by the bar was constructed no earlier than 1858, and McSorley’s name first appears in New York City directories in 1862. Historians have suggested there may have been an earlier, smaller structure on the site. Whatever the precise date, the bar has been operating in the same building on East 7th Street for well over 160 years.

The location mattered. When McSorley opened his saloon, East 7th Street was close to the Five Points neighborhood, the densely packed area in lower Manhattan where many of the Irish famine immigrants had settled. The area was poor and crowded, and the working men who lived there had few comfortable spaces to spend time outside their overcrowded tenement apartments. The pub served a social function that was familiar from Ireland, where the local public house was a place for men to gather, talk, find out about work, and maintain community ties after long days of physical labor.

McSorley kept his menu simple. The bar served only ale, and the food was basic, with cheese and crackers provided to patrons. His ale came from the Fidelio Brewery on First Avenue, which had been founded in 1852. The simplicity was deliberate. McSorley patterned his saloon on the public houses he had known in Ireland, where the emphasis was on the community gathered around the bar rather than on elaborate food or drink offerings.

Notable visitors came through over the years. Abraham Lincoln is said to have visited McSorley’s in 1860 after delivering his famous speech at Cooper Union, which was located just a few blocks away. The bar has a framed newspaper announcing Lincoln’s death on its walls, along with a wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth. Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt are also listed among historical visitors.

John McSorley died in 1910 on the second floor of the building, at the age of 83. His son Bill took over the bar and refused to remove any of the paintings, newspaper clippings, and artifacts that his father had collected and hung on the walls. Those items remain today, giving the bar the quality of a museum as much as a drinking establishment. On the old gas chandelier that hangs in the main room, visitors can see wishbones left by soldiers before they shipped out to fight in World War I.

For the first century of its operation, McSorley’s did not admit women. This was consistent with the social norms of the working-class Irish saloon culture the bar was modeled on, where the pub was understood as a male space. The restriction ended after a legal challenge. The National Organization for Women filed a lawsuit in 1969, and in 1970, McSorley’s was required to open its doors to women. The current owner, Teresa Maher de la Haba, inherited the bar from her father and is herself a woman.

McSorley’s survived Prohibition, which ran from 1920 to 1933, by serving what it called “near beer,” a product with very low or no alcohol content. The bar’s distinctive mugs, which are still used today, are a holdover from the Prohibition era. Woody Guthrie is said to have played guitar at a table near the front door. In 1940, the writer Joseph Mitchell visited the bar and wrote a profile of it called “The Old House at Home” for The New Yorker. His articles were collected and published in 1943 in a book called McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which brought the bar a new wave of attention.

The painter John French Sloan, who was part of the Ashcan School of American art, depicted McSorley’s in several works. His painting “McSorley’s Bar” from 1912 was shown at the famous Armory Show of 1913, one of the most important art exhibitions in American history.

Beyond McSorley’s, the Irish pub became a fixture of New York City life in general. In neighborhoods with large Irish populations across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, pubs served the function that McSorley had understood from the start: they were living rooms for people who did not have much room to live. They were places to find out about jobs, to meet people from the same county in Ireland, to mark occasions like funerals and christenings, and to maintain the social bonds of a community that was far from home.

That tradition has continued into the present. Irish bars remain part of the fabric of New York City’s neighborhoods, and McSorley’s, with its sawdust floors and unchanged walls, continues to draw both longtime regulars and visitors who want to sit in a room that has been part of the city’s Irish heritage since before the Civil War.

For much of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, New York City politics ran through a Democratic Party organization called Tammany Hall. The Irish were central to that organization for well over a century. Understanding the relationship between Tammany and the Irish community in New York is part of understanding how a marginalized immigrant group eventually gained a foothold in one of the most competitive cities in the world.

Tammany Hall began not as an Irish organization but as a fraternal society founded in 1786 called the Society of St. Tammany, also known as the Columbian Order. The name came from Tamanend, a leader of the Lenape people, and the organization’s founders used pseudo-Native American insignia and titles. It was incorporated formally in 1789 and by 1800 had become a significant political force in New York City. It established its headquarters in a building that became known as Tammany Hall, and over time the building’s name became the name of the political organization itself.

In its early years, Tammany actually excluded Irish immigrants. The Irish, who were not considered “native-born patriots” by the organization’s leadership, resented this. In April 1817, hundreds of Irish immigrants disrupted a general committee meeting of the Democratic Party in a public protest against Tammany’s nativist attitude. The confrontation forced Tammany’s leadership to reconsider. Within a few years, the organization began naturalizing immigrants and bringing them into its network in order to build a larger and more reliable voting base.

The shift accelerated after 1846, when mass immigration from Ireland began in earnest as a result of the famine. By the 1850s, Irish Catholics dominated Tammany’s district and precinct leadership structure. From 1872 onward, Tammany always had an Irish “boss.” After the mayoral victory of Fernando Wood in 1854, Tammany controlled Democratic Party nominations and political patronage in Manhattan for over a century.

The way Tammany worked for the Irish community was practical and personal. Tammany district leaders knew their constituents. They helped newly arrived immigrants find work, intervened with the courts when someone got into trouble, provided food and coal to families in need, and organized social events that gave people a sense of belonging. In exchange, they expected loyalty at the ballot box. For Irish immigrants who faced discrimination in the labor market and had few other sources of institutional support, the Tammany network offered something real.

The most famous and most corrupt of Tammany’s bosses was William M. Tweed, known as Boss Tweed, who controlled the organization in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Tweed was not Irish himself, but he built his political machine largely on Irish Catholic support and used his control over city contracting to enrich himself and his associates on an enormous scale. He was eventually convicted of fraud and died in jail in 1878.

After Tweed, Irish bosses ran Tammany more directly. Richard Croker, who was born in County Cork and came to the United States as a child, ruled Tammany from 1886 to 1902. Charles F. Murphy, who ran the organization from 1902 until his death in 1924, was another Irish American from the East Side of Manhattan. A large decorated flagpole base within Union Square Park is dedicated to Murphy’s memory today.

Tammany’s power translated into real political advancement for Irish Americans in New York. The organization helped elect Irish mayors, Irish district attorneys, and Irish judges. It helped Irish workers get jobs on the police force, the fire department, the transit system, and in city government more broadly. The connection between Irish New Yorkers and the uniformed services of New York City, which is still visible today in the demographics of those departments and in the way they march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, has its roots in the patronage networks that Tammany built during this period.

In 1928, Tammany’s greatest political success at the national level came when Al Smith, a product of the Irish Catholic Lower East Side community and a four-term governor of New York, won the Democratic presidential nomination. Smith lost the general election to Herbert Hoover, but his nomination represented how far the Irish community had come in American politics since the famine generation arrived with almost nothing.

Tammany’s influence began to decline in the early 20th century as reformers organized against it. Fiorello LaGuardia, who was elected mayor of New York in 1933 and served until 1945, ran explicitly against the machine and systematically dismantled much of its power over city hiring and contracting. Eleanor Roosevelt, working with Herbert Lehman and others, organized a group called the New York Committee for Democratic Voters in the early 1960s to fight the remaining Tammany leadership. By the mid-1960s, the organization had effectively ceased to exist. The last building that served as Tammany Hall’s headquarters, on Union Square, is now occupied by the New York Film Academy.

The legacy of Tammany’s relationship with the Irish community is complicated. The machine provided real services and real opportunities to people who had few other options. It also ran on corruption, vote fraud, and cronyism. What is clear is that the Irish community’s alliance with Tammany Hall shaped New York City’s political culture for more than a century and helped transform Irish immigrants from a despised underclass into one of the dominant forces in the city’s civic life.