On a clear Sunday morning the bells of St. Joseph’s carry across Fifth Street, over the clipped lawns and the Tudor gables, and somewhere in that sound is the whole improbable story of the Irish in Garden City, New York. A village built by an Irish-born merchant prince, settled by the grandchildren of famine emigrants, now the address of choice for Irish Catholic professional families on Long Island. It is the most Irish thing about a place that, at first glance, looks the least Irish of all.
The Place
Garden City sits in the middle of Nassau County, about twenty miles east of Manhattan on the flat expanse once known as the Hempstead Plains. It is one of the oldest planned communities in America, laid out in 1869 with wide avenues, deep lots and a deliberate, English garden suburb calm. The 2020 census put its median household income at $186,607, among the highest in New York State.
It is leafy, expensive and quietly Catholic in a way that surprises newcomers. Of the roughly 23,000 residents, Irish is the single most commonly reported ancestry, claimed by about 29 per cent of the village. That figure, drawn from American Community Survey estimates, edges out Italian and dwarfs every other group.
How It Became Irish
The first irony is that Garden City owes its existence to an Irishman. Alexander Turney Stewart was born in Lisburn, in what is now Northern Ireland, in 1803. He emigrated to New York, built the largest department store in the world on Broadway, and became one of the richest men in America.
An Irishman’s vision, a Protestant town
In 1869 Stewart bought a vast tract of the Hempstead Plains and set out to build a model village. He died in 1876, and his widow, Cornelia, completed his ideas. She built the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation as his memorial and mausoleum, and endowed St. Paul’s School for boys and St. Mary’s School for girls.
This was a Protestant establishment town. Stewart, though Ulster-born, built for a genteel, largely Episcopalian clientele seeking refuge from the city. The Catholic Irish who would later define the village did not arrive as its founders. They arrived, at first, as the people who served it.
The masons, the maids and the first Mass
The earliest Catholic presence in the village was working class and, overwhelmingly, Irish. Among the men who built Stewart’s Gothic cathedral in the 1870s were Irish stonemasons and labourers, housed near the works. Across the genteel households, Irish women worked as cooks, maids and nursemaids, part of the great wave of domestic servants who passed through New York in the nineteenth century.
For decades these Catholics had no church of their own. That changed in October 1901, when the Diocese of Brooklyn created the parish of St. Joseph and named Father James E. Flynn its founding pastor. Eighty Catholics gathered for the first Mass in the Stewart Arms Casino, a building that had originally housed the artisans who built the cathedral. The symbolism was almost too neat: the descendants of the workmen, worshipping in the workmen’s old quarters.
From servants to settlers
The early parish moved from rented hall to rented hall, a hall on Hilton Avenue among them, before a permanent Romanesque church rose in 1905. Father Flynn was succeeded by a line of priests whose names tell their own story: McEnroe, Holran, Healy, McManus. The Irish surnames march down the parish history like a roll call.
The transformation from servant class to settled middle class took two or three generations, and it tracked the wider American Irish story. Children of domestic servants and labourers in Brooklyn and Queens went to parochial school, then into the priesthood, the police, the law, teaching and the civil service. By the mid twentieth century their grandchildren had the salaries to buy in a place like Garden City.
The post-war move east
The great influx came after the Second World War. As the Irish Catholic families of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx prospered, they followed the new parkways and the Long Island Rail Road eastward into Nassau County. Garden City, with its Catholic parish now well established and a parochial school of its own, was a natural destination for those who could afford it.
St. Joseph School had opened in September 1939 with 169 pupils, the project of Father Edward McManus during the Depression. After the war it strained at the seams. Between 1959 and 1962 the parish added twelve classrooms and a gymnasium at a cost exceeding a million dollars, building for the children of the new arrivals.
The old 1905 church could no longer hold the congregation either. It was demolished in 1953, and a far larger church seating 950 was built in its place, ready for the Easter Vigil of 1956. A village that had begun with eighty Catholics in a casino now needed a church for nearly a thousand at a single Mass.
This eastward Irish Catholic migration into the prosperous suburbs echoes patterns seen in older urban enclaves, from the Irish in Pennsport, Philadelphia to the Irish in the Mission District, San Francisco. The difference in Garden City is that the move ended not in a working class parish but in one of the wealthiest villages in the state.
The Landmarks
Church of St. Joseph, 130 Fifth Street. The spiritual centre of Irish Catholic Garden City. Founded in 1901, its present church dates from 1956 and seats 950. Generations of Irish American families have been baptised, married and buried here, and its parish school remains a fixture of village life.
Cathedral of the Incarnation, 36 Cathedral Avenue. The English Gothic cathedral Cornelia Stewart built in 1876 as a memorial to her Lisburn-born husband, who is interred beneath it. Now the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, it is the architectural heart of the village and a permanent reminder that an Irishman dreamed the whole place into being.
The Garden City Hotel, 45 Seventh Street. The grand hotel at the centre of Stewart’s plan. A McKim, Mead and White version opened in 1895, burned in 1899, was rebuilt, and the much-loved structure stood until 1973. The present hotel occupies the same storied site and remains the village’s traditional venue for weddings and christening lunches, many of them Irish Catholic affairs.
Roosevelt Field, eastern edge of the village. Once the airfield from which Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris on 20 May 1927, it is now the largest shopping mall on Long Island. The aviation field gave way to retail, but the name endures, woven into the everyday geography of local families.
Adelphi University, South Avenue. Long Island’s oldest private university, relocated from Brooklyn to Garden City in 1929. For many local Irish Catholic families it became a route into the professions, close enough to live at home, far enough to feel like a step up.
The Country Life Press district, Franklin Avenue. Doubleday, Page and Company moved here in 1910, building offices and even its own railroad station. The publishing presence gave the village an educated, white collar character that the upwardly mobile Irish Catholic middle class found congenial.
St. Paul’s School grounds, Stewart Avenue. Cornelia Stewart’s grand boys’ school closed in 1989 and was bought by the village in 1993 as parkland. Its sister, St. Mary’s, was demolished in 2002. The empty Gothic shell of St. Paul’s stands as the ghost of the Protestant village the Catholic Irish gently succeeded.
Where They Came From
The Irish of Garden City did not, for the most part, come straight from Ireland. They came one neighbourhood over, from the dense Catholic parishes of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, and behind that, a generation or two back, from the counties of the Irish south and west.
Cork was the single largest county of origin for New York’s Irish, followed by Kerry, Limerick, Clare and Mayo. Many of the families who eventually reached Garden City descended from famine-era and post-Civil War emigrants who landed in Manhattan and Brooklyn and worked their way up through domestic service, the building trades and the city payroll.
The chain was a familiar one. A young woman in service sent her wages home; in time a sibling followed, then a cousin. The money that built Irish New York flowed first in those small remittances, and the families it sustained spread outward across the boroughs and finally, in prosperity, onto Long Island. The journey from a Cork townland to a Garden City colonial took the better part of a century, and several generations made it without ever feeling they had arrived until they did.
Garden City Today
Garden City remains, by any measure, an Irish American stronghold, even as the word stronghold sits oddly against its manicured calm. Irish is still the most commonly claimed ancestry. St. Joseph’s parish is full on Sundays, and the parochial school still carries the children of doctors, lawyers and finance professionals whose great-grandparents kept other people’s houses.
The Irishness here is comfortable rather than insurgent. There is no Irish quarter, no row of pubs flying the tricolour. Instead there is the steady rhythm of parish life, a strong showing each March around the nearby Mineola St. Patrick’s Day parade that passes through the village, and the work of local Irish cultural organisations that keep the heritage in front of the young. It is identity as inheritance, worn lightly and held firmly.
The village’s affluence has changed the texture of that identity. The Irish American doctor’s daughter at Adelphi has little in common, materially, with the famine emigrant in a Brooklyn tenement. Yet the line runs unbroken through the same parish, the same surnames, the same instinct to do well and to stay close to the church. In Garden City, the Irish story did not end with assimilation. It ended, for now, with arrival.
For families with roots in this corner of Nassau County, the surrounding villages tell related stories, including the Italians in Garden City and the long-established Jewish community in Hewlett on the South Shore. And for those tracing the Irish thread across the country, the Irish in Savannah, Georgia and the Irish Channel in New Orleans show how differently the same migration could land.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Irish people live in Garden City, New York?
Irish is the most commonly reported ancestry in Garden City, claimed by roughly 29 per cent of the village’s approximately 23,000 residents, according to American Community Survey estimates. That makes the Irish in Garden City the largest single ancestry group, narrowly ahead of Italian Americans.
Why is Garden City so Irish Catholic?
The village drew prosperous Irish Catholic families moving east from Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx after the Second World War, attracted by its schools, its established parish and its leafy affluence. The Church of St. Joseph, founded in 1901, anchored that community and gave the Irish in Garden City a lasting religious centre.
Was Garden City founded by an Irishman?
Yes. Alexander Turney Stewart, who planned and financed Garden City in 1869, was born in Lisburn, in what is now Northern Ireland. He was a Protestant merchant who built America’s largest department store before turning to creating a model village on the Hempstead Plains of Long Island.
What is the main Irish Catholic church in Garden City?
The Church of St. Joseph at 130 Fifth Street is the principal Catholic parish. It was founded in 1901, when eighty Catholics gathered for the first Mass, and its current church, seating 950, was completed in 1956. Its parish school has served local families since 1939.
How did the Irish first come to Garden City?
The earliest Irish in the village were working class, the stonemasons who built the Cathedral of the Incarnation in the 1870s and the domestic servants in its wealthy households. Only later, as their descendants prospered, did Irish Catholic families return to Garden City as homeowners and professionals.
Where did Garden City’s Irish families originally come from in Ireland?
Most descend from emigrants from the south and west of Ireland, with County Cork the largest single source, followed by Kerry, Limerick, Clare and Mayo. These families typically settled first in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx before moving east to Long Island over several generations.
If your family’s story passed through Garden City, or any of the places the Irish have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Cork townland to a Brooklyn parish, to a Garden City colonial off Stewart Avenue, to wherever you are now.