The 1 train climbs out of the tunnel just south of Dyckman Street, the daylight hits the windows, and for one long second you can see the green hump of Inwood Hill across the rooftops. Up the steps and onto Broadway, the brick apartment houses run north in unbroken lines, the bell tower of Good Shepherd parish marks the sky, and the bar on the corner has a shamrock in the window. From the 1920s through the 1970s, this was the second-generation move-up neighbourhood for the Irish of Hell’s Kitchen and the West Side. They called it the Irish Riviera of upper Manhattan. The Irish are mostly gone now. The bricks and the bell tower remain.
The Place
Inwood is the northern tip of Manhattan, above Washington Heights, bounded by the Harlem River on the east, the Hudson on the west, Dyckman Street roughly at its southern edge, and the river at Spuyten Duyvil at its northern. The neighbourhood is shaped by Inwood Hill Park, the only natural forest left on the island, where Lenape caves and old-growth tulip trees still survive in the woods on the Hudson bluffs. Broadway runs the spine of the neighbourhood, lined with five and six storey brick prewar apartment houses, with Dyckman Street as the main commercial cross-street. The A train and the 1 train both terminate here at 207th Street and 215th Street, which made Inwood, even in the 1920s, a place a working family could reach from a Midtown job.
How It Became Irish
Before the Irish
The northern tip of Manhattan was Lenape land long before it was anything else. The boulder known as Shorakkopoch Rock, in Inwood Hill Park, marks the place where, by legend, Peter Minuit purchased the island in 1626 from the Lenape for trinkets worth about sixty guilders. The truth of that transaction is murkier than the plaque suggests. The Lenape lived on the land seasonally and almost certainly did not understand themselves to be selling it outright.
For most of the nineteenth century Inwood was farmland and country estates, too far from the city to develop. Dutch families like the Dyckmans, whose 1784 farmhouse still stands at Broadway and 204th Street, worked the orchards and meadows. Even by 1900 the neighbourhood was rural by Manhattan standards. Then the subway came.
The Subway and the First Wave
The IRT subway reached Dyckman Street in 1906. Within twenty years the farms were gone and the brick apartment houses had risen in their place, six storeys, courtyard plans, room for a working family at a rent that a Midtown wage could carry. The IND followed in the early 1930s, extending the A line up to 207th Street and 168 Street, and the Church of the Good Shepherd was rebuilt in 1935 on Broadway at Isham Street in heavy Fordham gneiss to serve the swelling Irish congregation.
The Irish who filled those new apartments were mostly second-generation, born in New York to parents who had landed on the West Side or in Hell’s Kitchen a generation earlier. Inwood was the move-up. You worked the docks or the railroad or the police force or the transit system, you got married at St. Malachy’s or Sacred Heart down on the West Side, and when the first child came you moved north on the A train to a two-bedroom in Inwood with a view of a courtyard tree.
The Riviera Years
By the late 1940s and through the 1960s Inwood was as Irish as any neighbourhood in the city outside of the Bronx. The phrase Irish Riviera attached itself, half affectionate, half ironic. Gaelic football was played in Inwood Hill Park on Sunday afternoons. The parochial schools were full. Good Shepherd’s First Communion processions filled Broadway. The bars between Dyckman and 215th Street ran into the dozens, by some counts close to a hundred, almost all of them Irish.
The chain migration that built the neighbourhood was domestic as much as transatlantic. Cousins followed cousins north out of the West Side. A brother got the lease on a railroad apartment and the next brother took the floor above. There was also a continuous trickle of arrivals direct from Ireland, particularly through the 1950s and 1960s, when emigration from the West of Ireland was still heavy and a Mayo girl could arrive in New York with the name of an aunt in Inwood pinned inside her coat.
The Change
The shift came in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s. The 1965 Hart-Celler immigration act had reopened the country to non-European migration, and the Dominican Republic, struggling under the Balaguer years, began sending people north in numbers. They landed first in Washington Heights, and as Heights rents and density pressed upward, families crossed Dyckman Street into Inwood.
At the same time the Irish were leaving on their own steam. The children of the Riviera generation had college degrees and city jobs they did not need to take the A train home from. They moved to Yonkers, to Pearl River, to Throgs Neck, to Rockaway, to Long Island. The parents followed the grandchildren. The bars on Broadway closed one by one or changed hands or kept the name and changed the clientele. By 1990 Inwood was majority Latino. By 2000 it had the highest concentration of residents of Dominican descent in New York City.
The Landmarks
The Church of the Good Shepherd, 4967 Broadway at Isham Street. Built in 1935 from Fordham gneiss quarried in the Bronx, Good Shepherd was the parish that made Irish Inwood Irish. The bell tower is still visible from blocks away on Broadway. The congregation today is largely Latino and the Capuchin Franciscan friars now run the parish, but the building remains the anchor of the old neighbourhood. A First Communion class in white still spills onto Broadway every spring.
Inwood Hill Park. The only natural forest left on Manhattan, with old-growth tulip trees, salt marsh on the Harlem River, and Lenape rock shelters in the bluffs above the Hudson. For three generations of Irish families the park was a Sunday afternoon. Gaelic football was played on the flat fields by the river. Shorakkopoch Rock, near the northern end of the park, marks the site where Peter Minuit is said to have bought the island in 1626.
The Piper’s Kilt, 4946 Broadway near 207th Street. Opened in 1988 on the site of an earlier Irish pub called McSherry’s, the Piper’s Kilt kept the original wooden mirror-backed bar, said to have come out of the old Waldorf-Astoria. For 28 years it was the burger-and-Guinness anchor of the Broadway bar strip. It closed in September 2016 when owner Carol McKenny retired. The space now operates as the Tubby Hook Tavern, but the brick facade and the layout are unchanged.
Dyckman Street. The east-west commercial cross-street that defines Inwood’s southern edge, anchored at its Broadway corner by the bus stops and the elevated subway line. In the Irish years it was the strip where you bought your meat, your fish on Friday, and where you waited for the bus to take you across to Riverdale or up to Yonkers. Today the same blocks pulse with Dominican restaurants, bachata bars, and the green-and-red of the DR flag.
The Dyckman Farmhouse, 4881 Broadway at 204th Street. Built in 1784 by a Dutch farming family, it is the last surviving farmhouse in Manhattan and the oldest residential building on the island. It was already a museum by the time the Irish arrived. To grow up Irish in Inwood was to walk past it twice a day on the way to school and not think much about the Dutch.
The Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park. Technically across the Dyckman line into Washington Heights, but for Inwood Irish families the medieval museum in the park on the Hudson bluffs was an extension of the parish. Brides were photographed on the lawns. Children were brought on slow Sunday walks past the unicorn tapestries. The view down to the Hudson from the parapet is the same view a tenement-born Irish kid would have grown up with as the closest thing to a country home.
Where They Came From
Most of Inwood’s Irish were second-generation Americans, the children of families that had landed in New York between the 1880s and the 1910s. The first migration was to the tenements of the West Side, particularly Hell’s Kitchen and the docks below 59th Street. Inwood was where their American-born children raised their own American-born children, one stop up the A line from the old ground.
Layered on top of that were the direct arrivals of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a smaller but steady stream out of the West of Ireland: County Mayo, County Galway, County Kerry, County Donegal, with smaller numbers from Cork, Roscommon, and Leitrim. A girl from Belmullet or a boy from Dingle would arrive into JFK with a number for a cousin in Inwood and a job lined up by the second week. Those direct arrivals kept the bars on Broadway authentically Irish well into the 1980s, even as the second and third generation had begun to leave.
Inwood Today
Inwood is, in 2026, a majority Dominican neighbourhood and has been for thirty years. The bachata on Dyckman, the bodegas on Broadway, the green-white-red flags on the lampposts in February for Dominican Independence Day, the Spanish on the playgrounds: this is the living culture of the place now. The Irish layer is a substrate beneath it, real but no longer dominant.
What remains of Irish Inwood is mostly the architecture and the parish. Good Shepherd still rings its bells. The brick apartment houses on Broadway and the cross streets still stand exactly as they did in 1955. A handful of old residents still come back for First Communions or for a wake at McKenna’s funeral home. The Piper’s Kilt is now the Tubby Hook Tavern but the burger is reportedly still good.
The Irish of Inwood themselves are mostly in Yonkers and Pearl River and Rockaway and Throgs Neck and out on Long Island. Their grandchildren are in New Jersey and Westchester and as often as not no longer Catholic and no longer particularly Irish. Inwood is for the Dominicans now, and that is, in the long arc of how New York neighbourhoods work, exactly what Inwood was always going to be next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Irish settle in Inwood, Manhattan?
The Irish moved to Inwood from the 1920s onward as a second-generation move-up from Hell’s Kitchen and the West Side. The IRT subway reached Dyckman Street in 1906 and the IND extended the A line up to 207th Street in the early 1930s, which made Inwood reachable from Midtown jobs. Cheap, new, six-storey brick apartment houses with courtyards and room for a family did the rest.
Is Inwood, Manhattan still Irish today?
No. Since the 1980s Inwood has been majority Dominican, and today it has the highest concentration of residents of Dominican descent in New York City. A small number of older Irish-American residents and institutions remain, and the Church of the Good Shepherd still stands as the visible anchor of the old community, but the living culture of the neighbourhood is Dominican.
What are the most famous Irish landmarks in Inwood, Manhattan?
The Church of the Good Shepherd at 4967 Broadway and Isham Street, built in 1935, is the great surviving Irish landmark. Inwood Hill Park, where Gaelic football was played on Sundays, is the other. The Piper’s Kilt at 4946 Broadway, an Irish bar from 1988, closed in 2016 and now operates as the Tubby Hook Tavern.
Where in Ireland did the Inwood Irish come from?
Most Inwood Irish were second-generation, born in New York to West Side and Hell’s Kitchen families whose own parents had emigrated from across Ireland in the late nineteenth century. Direct arrivals from the 1950s through the 1980s came largely from the West of Ireland: Mayo, Galway, Kerry, and Donegal, with smaller numbers from Cork, Roscommon, and Leitrim.
When did the Irish first arrive in Inwood?
The Irish began arriving in significant numbers in the 1920s, after the IRT subway opened the neighbourhood for residential development. The community peaked between roughly 1945 and the late 1960s, when Inwood was known informally as the Irish Riviera of upper Manhattan.
What happened to the Irish community in Inwood?
From the 1970s onward, second and third-generation Inwood Irish moved out to Yonkers, Pearl River, Throgs Neck, Rockaway, and Long Island as their children took white-collar jobs and the city’s outer suburbs grew. At the same time, Dominican families displaced from Washington Heights crossed Dyckman Street and filled the brick apartment houses. By 1990 the neighbourhood was majority Latino.
If your family’s story passed through Inwood, or through Hell’s Kitchen and the West Side before it, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Mayo townland to a six-storey brick walk-up on Broadway, to wherever you are now.