Walk down Wolfs Lane on a Sunday morning and the bells of St. Catharine’s still carry over the rooftops. The Irish in Pelham, New York, did not arrive with parades or fanfare. They came a few families at a time, on the wooden benches of the New Haven line, and they built a parish before they built much else. More than a century later, their grandchildren still fill the pews and coach the Little League teams in this small, walkable square mile just north of the Bronx.
The Place
Pelham is Westchester County’s oldest town, its land bought in 1654 by the Englishman Thomas Pell in a treaty with the Siwanoy and named for his tutor, Pelham Burton. For two centuries it stayed farmland and country estates. The railroad changed everything.
When the New Haven line laid track here in 1851, a small grid of building lots was platted around the new depot and called Pelhamville. Pelham grew up between roughly 1870 and 1930, before the car ruled, which is why it remains a community of sidewalks, front porches, and a downtown you can cross on foot.
Today the town is genuinely affluent, with a median household income above 184,000 dollars and a poverty rate under three per cent, yet it is small: fewer than 8,000 people in the village proper, packed into leafy streets where neighbours actually know one another.
How It Became Irish
The Irish story in Pelham is, more than anything, the story of a parish. To understand one you have to follow the other.
The first fifty families
By 1895 more than fifty Catholic families were living in the little hamlet of Pelhamville. Many were Irish, drawn out from the crowded tenements of Manhattan and the Bronx by the same railroad that built the town, and by the steady work the growing suburb offered.
There was no Catholic church yet. A priest from St. Gabriel’s in New Rochelle, Rev. John Anthony Kellner, came out on Sundays and holy days to say Mass so that Pelham’s Catholics would not have to travel to Mount Vernon or New Rochelle. The arrangement was makeshift, but the families kept coming, and they wanted a church of their own.
A gift of land, a parish of their own
The turning point came from one of their own. Patrick Farrell, whose name marks him plainly as part of this Irish wave, gave a lot of one hundred feet by one hundred feet for a church, near the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Blessed Redeemer.
The community raised five hundred dollars towards the building and supplied the crosses and the stained glass themselves. The first church, a Gothic structure thirty-five feet by seventy-six, seating 350, was dedicated on 5 July 1896. It began as a mission of St. Gabriel’s that January.
On 8 December 1897 Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan made Pelham a separate parish in its own right. Its first pastor was Rev. Francis P. McNichol, born in Kingston, New York, in 1859 and ordained in 1883. He would lead St. Catharine’s for three decades.
Building the institutions
A parish needs more than a church. Father McNichol bought land and put up a rectory in 1899. The present school building was erected in 1903, and on 8 December 1906 the Sisters of St. Francis arrived to staff it. St. Catharine’s School opened its doors in February 1907.
For the Irish families of Pelham this was the whole architecture of belonging: Mass on Sunday, the sisters teaching the children during the week, the sacraments marking out a life from baptism to burial. The parish was where you became a Pelhamite and stayed an Irish Catholic at the same time.
From hamlet to commuter village
As Pelham incorporated its villages and the New Haven line ran ever more trains to Grand Central, the town filled with the families of men who worked in the city and came home each evening. Pelham has been called New York City’s first true bedroom community, made possible by the railroad.
The Irish were woven into that commuting middle class. Some were tradesmen and clerks, some climbed into the professions, and over generations the simple equation held: the train carried the breadwinner to Manhattan and back, and the parish held the family together at home.
A Catholic education corridor
Pelham sits inside one of the densest concentrations of Irish Catholic schooling in the country. Just over the line in New Rochelle, the Christian Brothers founded Iona Preparatory School in 1916, naming it for the Scottish island where St. Columba brought Gaelic monasticism in AD 563. To the south, in the Bronx near the Westchester border, the Marist Brothers opened Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1926.
For a Pelham family raising Catholic children, the path was clear: St. Catharine’s grammar school in the village, then Iona or Mount Saint Michael, then often a Catholic college. Generations of Irish Pelhamites followed that route without ever leaving Westchester.
The Landmarks
Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help-St. Catharine, 25 Second Avenue, Pelham. This is the heart of Irish Pelham. Founded as a separate parish in 1897 on land given by Patrick Farrell, St. Catharine’s grew from a 350-seat Gothic mission into the spiritual centre of the town’s Catholic families. It is now joined with Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Pelham Manor as a single parish.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 559 Pelham Manor Road, Pelham Manor. The parish’s main church today, administering the merged community of OLPH-St. Catharine. Daily and weekend Masses are still said at both churches, a rhythm Pelham’s Catholic families have kept for well over a century.
St. Catharine’s School, Pelham. Built in 1903 and opened in February 1907 under the Sisters of St. Francis, the parish school educated the children of the first Irish families and many who followed. For decades it was where Pelham’s Catholic children learned their catechism alongside their arithmetic.
The Picture House, 175 Wolfs Lane, Pelham. Built in 1921 in the Spanish Revival style at the corner of Wolfs Lane and Brookside Avenue, this single-screen cinema is the town’s most beloved landmark. When it was threatened with demolition in 2003, Pelham residents formed a non-profit and bought it. It now runs as the Picture House Regional Film Center.
Pelham station, the New Haven line. The depot that made the town. Opened in 1851 as Pelhamville and renamed Pelham in 1896, it is the artery that carried the Irish out from the city and carries their descendants to Grand Central still. Commuters have sat on its wooden benches for well over a century.
Wolfs Lane Park, Village of Pelham. A five-acre green buffer between the shops of Wolfs Lane and the houses of Pelham Heights, completed when the village bought the last parcel in 1950. The hollow that now holds the Woodland Playground was a stone quarry worked during the WPA years. It is the village’s common back garden.
The Four Corners, Pelham Manor. The old crossroads neighbourhood that anchors Pelham Manor’s everyday life, with its pizzeria, pub, and shops. Four Corners Pizzeria has fed Pelham since 1969. This is where the town does its ordinary business, the kind of corner every commuter village keeps.
Where They Came From
Pelham’s Irish did not arrive directly off the boat. They came from the immigrant strongholds of New York City: the Irish quarters of Manhattan and the Bronx, where families had landed first and worked their way up. Pelham was a step out and a step up, reachable on the same New Haven line that ran south into the city.
That two-stage migration was common across the Irish diaspora of greater New York. Families who first crowded into neighbourhoods like Inwood in upper Manhattan or the Irish enclaves of the Bronx near Woodlawn eventually pushed north into Westchester as their fortunes allowed.
The wider pattern is one Atlas readers will recognise from the affluent suburbs that ring American cities. The same instinct that drew Irish families to Milton outside Boston or to Greenwich in Connecticut brought them to Pelham: a good parish, good schools, and a commuter rail line back to the work.
Pelham also sits within a constellation of Westchester Irish communities. Just to the north, the Irish presence in Yonkers and the famously Irish village of Pearl River across the county line tell the same story of families moving outward from the city, parish by parish.
Pelham Today
Pelham is more diverse now than it was when the first fifty Catholic families gathered to hear Mass. Italian and Irish ancestry remain the two largest at around eleven per cent each, but the town also counts substantial English, Jamaican, and Brazilian communities, and its population is more than a third non-white.
The Italian story here is strong enough to stand on its own, and Pelham’s Italians have their own deep roots in these streets. The Irish thread, though, runs through the institutions that still define the town: the parish, the schools, the volunteer leagues, the small-town civic life.
You feel the continuity most on a Sunday, when families walk to Mass at St. Catharine’s or Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and on weeknights at the Picture House, where neighbours who might be three or four generations Pelham settle into the same seats their grandparents knew. The Irish in Pelham are no longer a separate community to be counted. They are simply part of what the town is, woven so completely into its fabric that the seam has disappeared.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Irish first settle in Pelham, New York?
The Irish came to Pelham mainly in the late nineteenth century, as the New Haven railroad drew families out of Manhattan and the Bronx. By 1895 more than fifty Catholic families, many of them Irish, were living in the hamlet of Pelhamville, and they founded St. Catharine’s parish soon after.
What is the main Irish Catholic church in Pelham?
St. Catharine’s, at 25 Second Avenue, was founded as a separate parish on 8 December 1897 and is the historic heart of the Irish in Pelham, New York. It is now part of the merged Parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help-St. Catharine, with Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Pelham Manor as the main church.
Why did Irish families move to Pelham?
Pelham offered Irish Catholic families a step up from the crowded city: a walkable suburb with its own parish and schools, and a commuter rail line straight to Grand Central. It was close enough to keep city jobs but green enough to raise children, which made it a natural destination as families prospered.
Is Pelham, New York an affluent town?
Yes. Pelham has a median household income above 184,000 dollars and a poverty rate under three per cent. It grew between the 1870s and 1930s as one of New York City’s earliest commuter suburbs and remains a small, prosperous, sidewalk-lined town in southern Westchester County.
What Catholic schools served Pelham’s Irish families?
St. Catharine’s School in Pelham, opened in 1907 under the Sisters of St. Francis, educated the parish’s children. For high school, families often sent children to Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle, founded by the Christian Brothers in 1916, or Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx, opened by the Marist Brothers in 1926.
What is the Picture House in Pelham?
The Picture House on Wolfs Lane is a single-screen cinema built in 1921 in the Spanish Revival style and is Pelham’s most cherished landmark. When demolition threatened it in 2003, residents formed a preservation non-profit and bought it. It now operates as the Picture House Regional Film Center.
If your family’s story passed through Pelham, or any of the places Irish families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the tenements of Manhattan and the Bronx to a lot of land given for a church on Second Avenue, to wherever you are now.