They called it Irishtown. Not officially. You won’t see that on any subway map or any green street sign. But for most of the twentieth century, if you climbed off the 7 train at 61st Street and walked a block south, you were in Ireland. The crack of the elevated tracks overhead, the smell of corned beef from a pub kitchen on Roosevelt Avenue, the soft Donegal vowels from a stoop on 58th Street. By the 1930s, roughly four out of every five faces in Woodside were Irish.
The neighbourhood is still here. So are the pubs. So is the parish. The accents are different now, but the bones of an Irish New York are unmistakable.
The Place
Woodside sits in western Queens, wedged between Sunnyside to the west, Jackson Heights to the east, and Long Island City stretching toward the river. The elevated 7 train, the one writer John Rocco nicknamed the International Express for the languages spoken under it, runs the length of Roosevelt Avenue and casts the neighbourhood in long bars of shadow. The housing is mostly modest: brick rowhouses, two-family frame homes built between the wars, a scattering of small apartment buildings. The character is residential and working-class, the kind of place where everyone knows the bartender’s brother.
How It Became Irish
The First Wave
Woodside’s residential development began in earnest in the 1860s, and the Irish were there almost from the start. They came for the same reason everyone came: the housing was cheap, the train was new, and Manhattan was a short ride away. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the area had earned the nickname Irishtown, and the parish of St. Sebastian was founded in May 1894 by Bishop Charles McDonnell of Brooklyn to serve them.
By the early 1930s, the neighbourhood was roughly 80 percent Irish American. Men worked in construction, on the docks, in the transit system. Women worked as nannies, waitresses, and shop assistants. The parish was the spine of it all. The school followed in 1926, and within a generation, two and three generations of one family were sometimes filling the pews on a Sunday.
After the War
The story most people tell about Irish New York is a Manhattan story. Hell’s Kitchen, the Bronx, Inwood. But after the Second World War, as those neighbourhoods began to shift and as the subway made the outer boroughs more livable, families pushed east. They crossed the river to Queens. They bought small houses in Woodside that they could never have afforded in Manhattan. The neighbourhood was Irish, Italian, and Jewish through the postwar decades, and the Irish quarter held its ground longer than almost anywhere else in the city.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Woodside was the place a young couple from Mayo or Roscommon could afford a down payment. It was the place the boys from the building site went for a pint at six. It was where you sent your kids to a Catholic school that still had nuns teaching them.
The 1980s Wave
And then the country sent another generation. The 1980s were brutal in Ireland. Unemployment, emigration, a borrowing crisis, a stagnant economy. More than 200,000 people left Ireland in that decade alone, and a large share of them landed in New York. Many came on tourist visas, intending to stay. Many came on J-1 student visas and never went home. Estimates from 1990 put the undocumented Irish population in the United States somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000, and roughly a third of them were in the New York area.
They went where the others had gone before them. Woodside. The men found construction jobs that paid in cash. The women worked as nannies in Manhattan brownstones, as bar staff on Roosevelt Avenue, as office cleaners overnight. They organised. The Irish Immigration Reform Movement was founded by this generation, and the Emerald Isle Immigration Center opened on Woodside Avenue to help with everything from green-card lotteries to filing tax returns under an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number. The 1986 amnesty under President Reagan and the later Morrison and Donnelly visa lotteries pulled tens of thousands of them out of the shadows.
The Quiet Change
By the late 1990s, the Irish-born share of Woodside had begun to thin. The Celtic Tiger boom pulled people home. American immigration policy tightened. The neighbourhood started to layer: Dominicans had been arriving since the late 1960s, and Filipino, Bangladeshi, Korean, Thai, and Ecuadorian families followed through the 1990s and 2000s. A 1999 survey found Woodside residents came from 49 countries and spoke 34 languages. The Irish didn’t leave. They just stopped being the whole story.
The Landmarks
St. Sebastian Roman Catholic Church (39-63 58th Street). Founded in 1894, the current church building is one of the more unusual in the Brooklyn diocese. It was built in 1952 on the site of the old Loew’s Woodside Theatre, a 1926 movie palace designed by Herbert J. Krapp. Generations of Woodside Irish were baptised, confirmed, married, and waked here. The parish school, founded in 1926, still operates as St. Sebastian Catholic Academy.
Donovan’s Pub (57-24 Roosevelt Avenue). The patron saint of Queens hamburgers. In 1966, a New York City firefighter named Joe Donovan bought the old Clover Leaf Bar on the corner of 58th and Roosevelt with help from his father. It became the Irish-American hangout in Woodside almost immediately, and the half-pound burger has been on every short list of the best in New York for forty years. When Joe retired in 2013 after a 47-year run, a longtime bartender named Jimmy Jacobson and his brother-in-law Dan Connor bought the place rather than let it close. The dark wood and the regulars are still there.
The Emerald Isle Immigration Center (59-26 Woodside Avenue). The institution the 1980s built. Started by activists from the Irish Immigration Reform Movement, EIIC has been quietly helping immigrants of every nationality navigate American paperwork since 1988. It still runs out of Woodside, with a second office in Woodlawn in the Bronx.
The New York Irish Center (10-40 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City). A short ride or a long walk from Woodside, the NYIC is the cultural hub for the wider Queens Irish community. Founded by Belfast-born Father Colm Campbell and supported by community leaders including Cavan-born musician Paddy Reilly, it opened in 2005 in a renovated building on Jackson Avenue. It runs Irish-language classes, a senior lunch, a youth GAA programme, and a year-round arts calendar. In 2026, the intersection of 50th Avenue and Jackson Avenue was officially co-named New York Irish Center Place.
Woodside Plaza. The small triangle of asphalt under the elevated tracks near the 61st Street station. Nothing remarkable on first glance. But for decades, the older Irish men of the neighbourhood gathered here in the afternoons, leaning on the railings, watching the trains, talking horses and politics. Some still do.
Gaelic Park (West 240th Street and Broadway, the Bronx). Not in Woodside, technically. But for any Woodside man with a hurley or a football jersey, this is where the season was played. The Gaelic Athletic Association of Greater New York bought the field in 1926, and almost every county club in the city has played there since. Generations of Woodside Irish boys grew up on the 7 train heading north on Sunday mornings to play Cavan against Galway on a pitch in the shadow of the Major Deegan.
Where They Came From
The Irish in Woodside were never one Ireland. The pre-war families came largely from the west and the north: Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, Sligo, and Donegal, with smaller pockets from Cork and Kerry. The 1980s wave drew heavily from the same western and northern counties, with Donegal especially well represented in the bars and building sites of Roosevelt Avenue. The pattern was classic chain migration. One brother got a job. He sent for the next. A cousin slept on a sofa for six months until she found her own place. A pub on Roosevelt Avenue became a kind of unofficial post office where someone always knew someone who was hiring.
Many of the 1980s arrivals were the first in their families to hold a third-level qualification, and they took jobs they were grossly overqualified for because there was nothing else for them at home. They are the parents and grandparents of the Americans now searching for their place in the story.
Woodside Today
The bars are still there. Donovan’s still runs out of burgers on a Friday night. The 7:30 mass at St. Sebastian still has a soft brogue or two in the choir. The Emerald Isle Immigration Center is still on Woodside Avenue. The New York Irish Center is busier than it has been in years. But the neighbourhood is not the same neighbourhood, and that is the honest truth.
Walk a single block of Roosevelt Avenue today and you will pass a Filipino bakery, a Bangladeshi grocery, a Thai restaurant, a Tibetan momo counter, an Ecuadorian sandwich shop, and one of the old Irish pubs that has been there since the Kennedy administration. Woodside is, by some measures, one of the most ethnically diverse zip codes in the United States. The Irish are no longer the majority. They are simply the longest-standing neighbours, sharing a corner with everyone else who got off the train and decided to stay.
Many of the children of the 1980s wave have moved on. To Yonkers, to Rockaway, to the New Jersey suburbs. But Woodside is where the family story turned the corner. It is where their parents first slept on a borrowed sofa, where they took their first paycheque to the bank, where they were married in a church built on the site of an old movie theatre. It is, for an entire generation of Irish American families, the place the story began.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Irish settle in Woodside, Queens?
The Irish came to Woodside in the late nineteenth century for cheap housing, quick subway access to Manhattan jobs, and an anchor parish in St. Sebastian, founded in 1894. By the 1930s the neighbourhood was roughly 80 percent Irish American, and a second wave of arrivals in the 1980s came to Woodside because earlier immigrants had already built the pubs, churches, and networks that made it the easiest place in New York to land.
Is Woodside still Irish today?
Woodside is no longer majority Irish, but the community is still very much present. Irish pubs, the parish of St. Sebastian, the Emerald Isle Immigration Center, and a strong GAA tradition all continue to anchor a smaller but visible Irish New York. The neighbourhood today is one of the most ethnically diverse zip codes in the country, with large Filipino, Bangladeshi, Tibetan, Dominican, and Ecuadorian populations alongside the Irish.
What are the most famous Irish landmarks in Woodside?
The best-known Irish landmarks in and around Woodside are Donovan’s Pub at 57-24 Roosevelt Avenue, famous for its burger since 1966, the parish of St. Sebastian on 58th Street, the Emerald Isle Immigration Center on Woodside Avenue, and the New York Irish Center at 10-40 Jackson Avenue in nearby Long Island City. Gaelic Park in the Bronx, while not in Woodside itself, is where most of the neighbourhood’s GAA clubs play.
Where in Ireland did the Woodside Irish come from?
The Woodside Irish came overwhelmingly from the western and northern counties of Ireland, including Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, Sligo, Donegal, Cork, and Kerry. The 1980s wave drew particularly heavily from Donegal and the wider west, which is why those accents are the ones older Woodside residents most often remember from the pubs along Roosevelt Avenue.
When did the Irish first arrive in Woodside?
The Irish began settling in Woodside in significant numbers from the 1860s onward, when large-scale residential development opened the neighbourhood to working-class families. By the 1890s the area was already known as Irishtown, and the parish of St. Sebastian was founded in 1894 to serve the growing community.
What happened to the Irish community in Woodside in the 1980s?
The 1980s Irish recession sent more than 200,000 people out of Ireland, and many of them landed in Woodside. They worked construction, bar shifts, and childcare jobs while organising politically through the Irish Immigration Reform Movement, which helped secure the 1986 Reagan amnesty and the later Morrison and Donnelly visa lotteries that legalised tens of thousands of undocumented Irish.
If your family’s story passed through Woodside, or through any of the Queens, Bronx, and Manhattan neighbourhoods the Irish made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a townland in Donegal or Mayo to a pub on Roosevelt Avenue, to wherever you are now.