Finding Home

By the 1930s, more people of Irish birth and descent were investing in real estate in ways large and small. Families scrimped to buy second lots and held onto their first houses as rental property. Managing that property was often a side job for married women, providing a way for women to contribute to their family’s financial well-being. The extra income earned by managing real estate became a lifeline for women who were widowed or whose husbands lacked steady employment. One widowed woman and real estate speculator, Celia McCafferty Carney, paved the way for her two sons, John and Jim Carney, to become major players in real estate and politics in Cleveland for many decades.

People of Irish birth and descent entered the medical professions earlier, but their numbers grew in the 1920s through the 1940s. The city's Catholic hospitals were founded in the 19th century by religious orders. The Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine organized St. Vincent Charity Hospital during the Civil War to care for wounded soldiers and set up a maternity hospital, St. Ann's, to care for unwed mothers and foundling babies. A German order, the Sisters of St. Francis, formed St. Alexis Hospital in Newburgh and St. John's on the west side (later yielding St. John's to the Sisters of Charity). Sons of 19th century immigrant families began studying to become doctors in the 1880s and 1890s and were chiefs of staff and surgery at the city's Catholic hospitals by the 1920s. By the early 20th century, women of Irish birth and descent were training at hospital nursing schools in the United States. Irish American doctors and nurses took on essential roles as the city's Catholic hospitals served a growing city.

Everyday run-ins with danger could pull policemen and firemen into newspaper stories and headlines. But famous cases and fires tended to be featured when careers were being summed up. Many firemen who were active in the 1920s and 1930s worked on the 1914 lumberyard fire in the flats that nearly destroyed the Central Viaduct, or the 1929 Cleveland Clinic Fire that killed 123 people and injured 92. Policemen were more likely than firemen to face moral quandaries. The 1930s were rife with such quandaries. Between the desperation of the Great Depression, the rise of gangsters, and labor unrest, policemen often found themselves in situations that pitted them against neighbors and friends or involved temptations and conflicted loyalties.

Priests and nuns were highly valued and essential Irish community members in every decade, but an exceptional generation came to the fore in the 1920s and 1930s. Men and women of Irish descent who were born in the 1870s and 1880s, who grew up in Cleveland and attended school here, were reaching their prime as clergy and religious at that time. Founding pastors, diocesan officials, and mother superiors of Irish descent all stepped into the limelight during the tenure of Bishop Joseph Schrembs, from 1921 through 1945. Thanks to their vision and dedication, Cleveland’s parishes and Catholic schools continued to flourish and kept pace with a thriving city.

Undertakers were valued and essential community members. Known as undertakers in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries they morphed into funeral directors by the 1930s. Whether in the 19th century, the 20th century, and even today, they ran small family businesses whose survival depended on the continuity of family generations and a clientele of their own ethnicity. The first generation of Irish undertakers came on the scene when undertaking was a new profession. The next generation of undertakers  emerged at the turn of the century, while a large cluster of Irish-owned funeral operations formed to serve the 1920s cohort of immigrants. The bond between Irish funeral directors and the Irish American community remains strong to this day.

Music featured prominently at Irish community events all the way back to the first St. Patrick's Day Banquet in 1842. But traditional Irish music and dance really came to the fore in Cleveland in the 1920s and 1930s. The immigrants of the 1920s were the first generation to experience the full impact of the late-nineteenth-century revival of interest in the Irish language and traditional Irish culture, including folklore, sports, music, and dance. Irish "folk dancing" was featured at the Theater of Nations circa 1930. Also in 1930, a weekly radio show featuring Irish music was launched, hosted by Mary K. Duffy and featuring tenor Dick O'Heren and the Irish Ensemble with accordion player Johnny McNea. The West Side Irish American Club also began a fife and drum band in the 1930s. Fiddler Tom Scott began teaching Irish dancing in Cleveland in the 1940s. The 1950s wave of immigration continued to boost the traditional Irish music and dance scene in Cleveland, and it's still going strong today.

Irish Americans found themselves on all sides of the law in the late 19th and 20th centuries. A life of crime tempted some who lived hardscrabble lives in the Angle and the near West Side. The Triangle, McCart Street, and Cheyenne Gangs stopped at petty crime, though the Cheyennes were caught up in the newspaper circulation wars of the 1910s, culminating in the death of a former newspaper boy in 1914. Legendary characters such as Blackjack McGinty and Shimmy Patton grew up in the same milieu but made their livelihoods and reputations in bootlegging and gambling. A few decades later, Danny Greene embroiled himself in a civil war between mob factions in Cleveland and "lived by the bomb and died by the bomb."

The children and grandchildren of earlier immigrants continued to identify with their Irish heritage in the 1920s and 1930s. But the second and third generations tended to become involved in a different set of Irish organizations—ones that were shaped more by circumstances in Cleveland and the US than in Ireland. The most prominent new Irish organization to emerge during this timeframe was the Irish American Civic Association—later shortened to the Irish Civic Association. In the 1930s, the Civic Association facilitated Irish involvement in large-scale civic projects such as fundraising for the Irish Cultural Garden, reinvigorating the summer picnic tradition, and reviving a downtown St. Patrick's Day Parade. But women--especially Adelia Christy and Mary Kay Duffy--also emerged as civic leaders during this decade, spearheading Irish participation in the Theater of Nations and bolstering the successful completion of the Irish Cultural Garden.

Irish immigrants were holding a wide array of jobs by the mid-to-late 19th century. However, no matter what the era, it seems that each newly arriving group of Irish immigrants first entered the workforce as manual laborers. Sample groups of Irish immigrants from the 1850s, 1880s, 1920s, and 1950s also show the same trend. More than half of them held laboring jobs during each given time period. At all of those time periods, Cleveland's growth provided laboring jobs--in manufacturing and construction. Irish immigrants were involved in building this city at each stage of its growth.

Many of the Irish immigrants who came to Cleveland in the 1910s and 1920s were young single men who were escaping conflict. They or their families wanted them to avoid conscription into the British Army during World War I or to avoid what seemed certain to be another failed rebellion in 1916. Others left in the later 1910s as rebellion spread in Ireland, and the British Black and Tans terrorized the countryside. Others had been enemy combatants during the Irish Civil War in 1922 and 1923. This cohort of immigrants swelled the ranks of organizations that promoted Irish freedom, including the secretive Clan na Gael. They also brought Gaelic football to Cleveland in the 1920s, and they helped to found the city’s most enduring Irish social club, the West Side Irish American Club. A new wave of immigration was already producing a new wave of Irish community leaders.