Walk the length of Third Avenue in Bay Ridge on a March afternoon and you will pass shamrock lights strung between the lamp posts, a granite stone honouring the dead of the 1916 Easter Rising, and a row of pubs whose names read like a roll call of Irish memory. The Irish in Bay Ridge are not a relic here. They are a living thread in one of Brooklyn’s most layered neighbourhoods, woven in alongside Norwegians, Italians, Greeks and the largest Arab community in New York City.
The Place
Bay Ridge sits at the south-western tip of Brooklyn, where the borough runs out of land and meets the Narrows. Its name comes from that geography: the bay on one side, the long glacial ridge that rises behind the shoreline. From the seawall promenade along Shore Road you look straight across the water to Staten Island, with the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge arcing overhead.
In the mid-19th century this was a summer resort, a place where well-off New Yorkers built villas to escape the heat of the city. The arrival of the Fourth Avenue subway, the modern R train, in 1916 changed everything, turning the resort into a residential neighbourhood of brick row houses and apartment blocks. It has stayed solidly residential and family-minded ever since. Today the neighbourhood is among the most ethnically mixed in Brooklyn.
How It Became Irish
The Irish came to Bay Ridge before most people think of Brooklyn as Irish at all. They had been arriving in the borough since the famine years of the 1840s, and as the neighbourhoods nearer the old Navy Yard filled, the community spread south and west toward Bay Ridge and the garrison at Fort Hamilton.
A Parish Before a Neighbourhood
The first marker of Irish Catholic life here predates the subway by more than half a century. According to parish history, the earliest masses in the area were said as far back as 1843, first in the Cummins family’s barn near what is now 99th Street and Shore Road, and later in Peter Murphy’s house near 95th Street.
St Patrick’s parish was formally founded in 1849, established to serve the soldiers stationed at Fort Hamilton and the Catholic families settling around them. It was among the earliest Catholic parishes in what is now the borough of Brooklyn. The first church at Fort Hamilton was dedicated in 1852, decades before the streetcars and the subway brought the rest of the city out to the ridge.
That sequence matters. In Bay Ridge the Irish church came first and the neighbourhood grew up around it, rather than the other way round.
The Donegal Years
The great wave came later, running from the late 1800s through the 1930s, with a final surge in the years just after the Second World War. What set Brooklyn’s Irish apart from Manhattan’s was where they came from. While Manhattan’s Irish leaned heavily toward Kerry and Cork, Brooklyn became a stronghold of County Donegal, the remote north-western county whose emigrants clustered together in the borough’s parishes. The same northern, working pull shaped the Irish enclaves up the city’s edges, from the Irish of Inwood in upper Manhattan to the Irish of Yonkers just over the city line.
That Donegal character carried into Bay Ridge’s social life. The Donegal Association ran dances and, most famously, a “Mary from Dungloe” contest, the New York counterpart to the festival held in the Donegal town of Dungloe. The Brooklyn contest was held in conjunction with events at St Anselm’s Church Hall in Bay Ridge, a quiet sign of how directly the neighbourhood’s institutions were tied to specific places back home.
Alongside the parish societies came fraternal and cultural bodies. The Commodore Barry Club of Brooklyn, founded in 1951, took its name from John Barry, the Wexford-born officer often called a father of the American navy, and kept alive interest in Irish-American history at a time when many of the immigrants were still arriving.
A Church Rebuilt
By the 1920s the community had outgrown its first church. The original St Patrick’s was demolished in April 1925, the cornerstone of the present building laid that October, and the new church dedicated by Bishop Thomas Molloy on 12 December 1926. The parish marked its 175th anniversary in 2024, an unusually long unbroken run for any institution in a city that rebuilds itself constantly.
The Bridge and the Turn
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, opened in 1964, cut through the neighbourhood in more ways than one. Its construction displaced some 7,500 residents and erased the old Fort Lafayette. It also made it easy to leave, and over the following decades many of Bay Ridge’s older European families, Norwegian and Irish alike, drifted out toward Staten Island and the suburbs. Some followed the familiar Irish road toward leafier ground, the kind of suburban Catholic enclaves seen in the Irish of Greenwich, Connecticut and the Irish of Milton, Massachusetts outside Boston.
The Irish thinned but did not disappear. Where the Norwegian presence faded to an annual parade and a handful of memories, the Irish kept their pubs, their parish and, eventually, a parade of their own.
A Parade of Their Own
In 1993 a local publican named Gene Reilly, who ran the Lief Erickson pub on Fifth Avenue, launched the Bay Ridge St Patrick’s Day Parade. He hoped it would draw business and rekindle interest in the neighbourhood’s Irish life. It did both. The march steps off at Marine Avenue and proceeds up Third Avenue, past a reviewing grandstand near 77th Street where dignitaries and grand marshals are introduced, and it now draws thousands of spectators each spring. Over the years its committee has raised tens of thousands of dollars for Catholic school scholarships.
The Landmarks
St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, 95th Street at Fourth Avenue. The spiritual anchor of Irish Bay Ridge and one of the oldest Catholic parishes in the borough, founded in 1849. The present church, dedicated in 1926, replaced the original built for the soldiers and families around Fort Hamilton. In 2024 it celebrated 175 years of continuous parish life.
Kitty Kiernan’s, Third Avenue. Opened in 1996, the pub is named for Kitty Kiernan, the fiancee of Michael Collins, the revolutionary leader of the Irish Free State. Behind its dark wooden bar and deep red walls, the name itself is a small lesson in Irish history poured over a pint.
The Wicked Monk, 9510 Third Avenue. A Gothic-styled Irish pub whose interior was assembled from woodwork and stained glass said to have been shipped from a monastery chapel in Ireland. It is one of the neighbourhood’s main rooms for live Irish music, with traditional seisiun sessions on warm-weather Sunday afternoons.
Skinflints, Third Avenue. More tavern than bar, Skinflints is loaded with shimmering stained glass salvaged from a 1915 ice cream parlour, a reminder that Third Avenue’s Irish pub culture often lives inside far older Bay Ridge buildings.
The Salty Dog, Third Avenue near 75th Street. A sprawling Third Avenue institution that once traded as the Brooklyn Dodger, until the Los Angeles Dodgers objected and forced the name change. It remains one of the larger gathering spots along the avenue’s pub run.
Shore Road and the Verrazzano view. The waterfront seawall promenade runs south toward the bridge, a stretch of open water and sky that has framed Bay Ridge life, Irish and otherwise, since the resort days. It is where generations have walked off a Sunday dinner with the Narrows in front of them.
Owl’s Head Park. A 24-acre green space at the northern edge of the neighbourhood, with sweeping views over the harbour. Long a gathering place for Bay Ridge families, it is one of the everyday landmarks that holds the community together away from the avenue.
Where They Came From
The Irish who built Bay Ridge were not a cross-section of Ireland. They were, overwhelmingly, people of the north-west, and above all of County Donegal, with smaller numbers from Derry, Antrim, Kerry and Cork. Chain migration did the rest: one family from a Donegal parish sent for the next, and an entire townland’s worth of cousins could end up within a few blocks of one another in Brooklyn.
This is why the neighbourhood’s Irish institutions named themselves so precisely, a Donegal Association, a Dungloe contest, parish societies tied to specific Irish places. It is the same pattern that produced dense Irish quarters elsewhere on the eastern seaboard, from the Irish of South Boston to the Irish of Woodside in Queens. For many, settling in Bay Ridge was less a move to an anonymous American city than a transplant of a known community onto new ground, close to the water and the work it offered.
Bay Ridge Today
Bay Ridge today is more crowded and more various than it has ever been. The 2020 census counted nearly 112,000 residents, and the neighbourhood is now one of Brooklyn’s most diverse, home to New York City’s largest Arab community alongside long-settled Italian, Greek and Chinese populations, layered over the Norwegian seafaring community that once made this the fourth-largest Norwegian city in the world. In the ancestry figures the Irish still rank near the very top, around 16.5 per cent, second only to Italians by the slimmest of margins.
The Irish presence reads differently than it did at mid-century. There are fewer recent immigrants and more third- and fourth-generation families who stayed, or who come back for the parade. The pubs along Third Avenue carry the weight of the heritage now: Kitty Kiernan’s, Skinflints, the Salty Dog and the Wicked Monk are as much keepers of memory as they are places to drink.
What endures is the calendar. Each March the shamrock lights go up, the parade fills Third Avenue, and the committee gathers at the Easter Rising stone installed in 2016 to remember those who died for Irish freedom. In a neighbourhood that has welcomed Norwegians, Lebanese, Russians and so many others, the Irish of Bay Ridge have managed the harder trick: not just arriving, but staying, and making a Brooklyn neighbourhood feel, for a few blocks and a few weeks a year, like home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there still Irish in Bay Ridge, New York?
Yes. The Irish in Bay Ridge remain one of the neighbourhood’s largest ancestry groups, around 16.5 per cent of residents, just behind Italians. The community is now largely later-generation Irish-American rather than recent immigrants, but it is highly visible around its parish and its pubs.
Why did Irish immigrants settle in Bay Ridge?
The Irish in Bay Ridge grew out of Brooklyn’s earlier Irish settlement near the Navy Yard and the garrison at Fort Hamilton. St Patrick’s parish was serving Catholic families and soldiers as early as the 1840s, and chain migration, especially from County Donegal, drew waves of newcomers from the late 1800s into the 1940s.
Where did the Irish in Bay Ridge come from in Ireland?
Overwhelmingly from County Donegal in Ireland’s north-west, with smaller numbers from Derry, Antrim, Kerry and Cork. Brooklyn became a Donegal stronghold, which is why local institutions like the Donegal Association and the “Mary from Dungloe” contest tied directly to that county.
What is the Bay Ridge St Patrick’s Day Parade?
It is an annual march up Third Avenue, founded in 1993 by publican Gene Reilly of the Lief Erickson pub. Stepping off at Marine Avenue, it draws thousands of spectators each spring and has raised significant funds for Catholic school scholarships.
What are the most Irish places in Bay Ridge?
St Patrick’s Church at 95th Street and Fourth Avenue is the historic anchor, founded in 1849. The pubs along Third Avenue, including Kitty Kiernan’s, Skinflints, the Salty Dog and the Wicked Monk, form the social heart of Irish Bay Ridge today.
How has Bay Ridge changed over the years?
From a 19th-century resort, Bay Ridge became a working- and middle-class neighbourhood after the subway arrived in 1916. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, opened in 1964, displaced thousands and accelerated suburban departures, but the neighbourhood has since grown more diverse and now counts New York City’s largest Arab community alongside its enduring Irish, Italian and Greek roots.
If your family’s story passed through Bay Ridge, or any of the places Irish families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a townland in County Donegal to a row house off Third Avenue, to wherever you are now.