They call it the Emerald Mile. Get off the 4 train at Woodlawn, walk one block north past the cemetery wall, cross 233rd Street, and the city of New York becomes the city of Yonkers. The pubs change name. The accents do not. From McKeon’s down to the Aisling Center at 990, this single avenue holds one of the largest concentrations of Irish-born immigrants left in the United States.
The Place
Yonkers is Westchester County’s largest city, sitting on the Hudson River just above the Bronx line, with a population of roughly 211,000. The Irish story does not run through the whole city. It runs along its southern edge.
McLean Avenue is the spine. It runs east to west for about a mile along the Yonkers-Bronx border, with the city of New York on one side of the street and Westchester on the other. The 4 train ends at Woodlawn a short walk south. The Bee-Line buses thread north into the rest of Yonkers, into Park Hill, Highland Park, and beyond. The housing is mostly two- and three-family frame homes and small apartment buildings, walked-up, lived-in, not gentrified.
How It Became Irish
The Hudson industries, 1850s onward
The first Irish came to Yonkers for work, and they came in the years after the Great Hunger. The Hudson Valley in the 1850s was a riot of industry. Yonkers had elevator works, hat factories, sugar refineries, and the New York Central Railroad running through it.
Then in 1865 Alexander Smith moved his carpet operation to Yonkers, and the city’s centre of gravity moved with it. By the 1870s the Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Company at Palisade Avenue and Elm Street had grown from a single building into an industrial park. At its peak after the Second World War it covered more than 56 acres of floor space and employed 7,000 workers, the largest comprehensive carpet factory in the world.
The mill was a magnet. The first generations of workers’ housing, the rows of brick tenements known as Moquette Row, filled with immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. Later waves brought Poles, Slovaks, and Ukrainians, but the Irish were there from the start. They stayed.
The Bronx Irish move north
The second wave was internal. By the middle of the twentieth century, the South Bronx had been the great Irish stronghold of New York, neighbourhoods like Highbridge and Fordham and Kingsbridge thick with parishes named after Irish saints. From the 1960s onward, that began to come apart.
Families moved north. Some went to the suburbs of Westchester proper. Many crossed only as far as McLean Avenue, where they could still get to a job in the city on the 4 train and still walk to mass at a parish that felt like the one they had left. Woodlawn Heights, the small Bronx neighbourhood directly south of McLean Avenue, filled up with the same families. The Irish community now straddles the city line and treats it as a technicality.
The 1980s wave
The third wave was new immigration. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Ireland was haemorrhaging young people. Unemployment in Ireland in the late 1980s was roughly three times the American rate, and the people leaving were younger and better educated than the famine generations had been.
They came on tourist visas, on student visas, and many overstayed. Yonkers had an existing Irish scaffolding waiting for them: pubs to drink in, parishes to be married in, builders and electricians and plumbers who would put them on the books, and the GAA grounds at Gaelic Park in the Bronx a few stops south.
By the 1990s a network of chaplains sent over from Ireland was working out of Woodlawn and Yonkers to help the newly arrived. Sister Edna McNicholas and Father Tom Flynn ran an immigrant centre called Tír na nÓg out of a parish in the Bronx in the early 1990s. In 1996 a committee of Irish immigrants rented space at 990 McLean Avenue and renamed it the Aisling Irish Community Center. It is still there. The community bought the building outright in 2018.
The Landmarks
McLean Avenue, the Emerald Mile. A roughly one-mile stretch of road on the Yonkers-Bronx border, lined with Irish pubs, Irish butchers, Irish gift shops, Irish travel agents, and an Irish coffee shop. It is the most concentrated Irish-American business strip in the country today.
The Aisling Irish Community Center, 990 McLean Avenue. The cultural anchor of the community, founded in 1996 by Irish chaplains who had been sent over from Ireland in the 1980s to help immigrants. It runs Irish dancing classes, Irish language courses, immigration advice, senior services, and a J-1 student programme that brings young Irish people over each summer.
McKeon’s, 760 McLean Avenue. The oldest pub on the Emerald Mile, in business close to fifty years and still going. Rory Dolan’s, also on McLean, is the other long-standing anchor pub and the one you are most likely to be photographed in front of on parade day.
The Yonkers St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The parade has roots in nineteenth-century Yonkers, was interrupted by both world wars, and was revived in 1956. About a decade ago it merged with the McLean Avenue Merchants Association’s parade and moved onto McLean itself. It now draws 20,000 to 30,000 spectators and around 6,000 marchers, with bands, county associations from across Ireland’s 32 counties, and the emerald societies of Westchester’s police and fire departments. It is widely described as the largest St. Patrick’s parade in the state outside the Fifth Avenue parade in Manhattan.
Sacred Heart Monastery Church, 40 Shonnard Place. Up the hill from McLean Avenue in the Highland Park section of Yonkers, founded in the early 1890s by Capuchin Franciscans and serving the Irish working-class families of the carpet-mill era. The neighbourhood around it became one of the densest Irish quarters in Westchester.
The Yonkers Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The AOH, the oldest Irish-Catholic fraternal organisation in the United States, has been active in Yonkers for over a century. Its members march at the front of the McLean Avenue parade and run scholarships, charity drives, and the local Irish history programme.
Where They Came From
The earliest Yonkers Irish were famine-era and post-famine, drawn mostly from the west and south of Ireland: Connacht counties like Mayo and Galway, Munster counties like Cork and Kerry, and a heavy thread from the midlands. They came for the mills and the railroad and the docks down the Hudson in New York.
The 1980s and 1990s wave, the one that still defines McLean Avenue today, was more heavily weighted toward the West of Ireland. Galway, Mayo, Donegal, Leitrim, and Sligo show up again and again in the parish books and on the rosters of the GAA clubs that play out of Gaelic Park. Many of those families now have American-born children and Irish-born parents living within a few blocks of each other.
The pull was rarely abstract. A cousin already in Yonkers, an uncle on the building sites, a sister working in a McLean Avenue bar. Whole sections of small Connacht parishes effectively pulled themselves over, one phone call at a time, into the same six or seven blocks of southern Westchester. The chain stayed unbroken because each link kept reaching back.
Yonkers Today
McLean Avenue is one of the few streets in New York where you can still hear Irish accents in a normal weekday queue at the coffee shop. New arrivals are still coming, on J-1 student visas in the summer, on H-1B work visas year-round, and on the family connections that have been pulling people across the Atlantic since 1865.
The Irish character of greater Yonkers feeds into other parts of the city’s institutional life. The NYPD and FDNY emerald societies draw heavily from Yonkers families. The Westchester County police and fire emerald societies do the same. The GAA culture is strong: Galway, Mayo, and Donegal county clubs all field teams that practise and play with players living within a mile of McLean.
The wider city of Yonkers is not, of course, only Irish. It is one of New York’s most ethnically mixed cities, with substantial Italian-American, Slovak, Latino, and Black communities living north and east of the Irish corridor. The Emerald Mile is a corner of Yonkers, not all of it. But it is a corner that has held its shape for 160 years, and the gravitational pull is still working.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Irish settle in Yonkers?
The first Irish came in the 1850s and 1860s for industrial jobs, especially at the Alexander Smith Carpet Mills, which by the early twentieth century was the largest comprehensive carpet factory in the world. Later waves came north from the South Bronx in the mid-twentieth century, and a new immigration wave arrived through the 1980s and 1990s, drawn by an existing Irish community on the McLean Avenue corridor.
Is Yonkers still Irish today?
Parts of it very much are. The McLean Avenue corridor on the southern edge of Yonkers, also known as the Emerald Mile, remains one of the most concentrated Irish-American neighbourhoods in the United States. Irish-born immigrants still arrive each year on student and work visas, and the pubs, parish, and Aisling Irish Community Center are still active.
What are the most famous Irish landmarks in Yonkers?
McLean Avenue itself, the Aisling Irish Community Center at 990 McLean, McKeon’s pub, Rory Dolan’s pub, Sacred Heart Monastery Church up the hill in Highland Park, and the Yonkers St. Patrick’s Day Parade that runs the length of McLean each March.
Where in Ireland did the Yonkers Irish come from?
The famine-era and post-famine arrivals came largely from Connacht and Munster, especially Mayo, Galway, Cork, and Kerry. The 1980s and 1990s wave that defines McLean Avenue today is heavily weighted toward the West of Ireland: Galway, Mayo, Donegal, Leitrim, and Sligo.
When did Irish immigrants first arrive in Yonkers?
Irish workers began arriving in significant numbers in the 1850s, drawn to industrial jobs along the Hudson and the new carpet mills. Alexander Smith & Sons opened in Yonkers in 1865, and by the 1870s its workers’ housing on Moquette Row was filled with Irish and Scottish immigrant families.
What is the Emerald Mile in Yonkers?
The Emerald Mile is the nickname for McLean Avenue, the roughly one-mile stretch of road along the Yonkers-Bronx border lined with Irish pubs, butchers, gift shops, travel agents, and the Aisling Irish Community Center. It is widely regarded as the densest Irish-American business strip in the country today.
If your family’s story passed through Yonkers, or Woodlawn, or any of the corners of the Bronx where the Irish made a home before climbing the line into Westchester, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a townland in Mayo or Galway or Donegal, to a tenement on Moquette Row, to a house on McLean, to wherever you are now.