The Remarkable Life of Kitty McInerney
How a Poor Irish Immigrant Raised 17 Children in Great Depression New York
by Christopher Prince
Copyright © 2009 by Christopher Prince
Published by Christopher Prince at Smashwords.
This book is also available in print at Amazon.com.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This book is dedicated to all the courageous men and women who made the long journey, to the Irish for their unbreakable spirit, to Kitty who forever watches over us, and to the McInerney children who keep the memories alive. May we never forget the sacrifices of those who came before us.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Knocks
American Wake
Greenhorn
Bull’em McInerney
Crash
Nomads
I Have Children For Those Who Can’t
Life on a Stoop
Faith
Time of Transition
Awakenings
Number 17
Death of a City
A Fortuitous Trip
Paving the Way
I Thought I’d Never See You Again
Finding Peace
Bibliography
About the Author
Acknowledgements
I am tremendously grateful to the children of Kitty McInerney for all the time and support they generously provided me during the writing of this book. I am particularly thankful for Helen’s unfailing memory and for the opportunity to interview Jim and Bonnie before their untimely passing. I greatly appreciate the generosity of my Irish cousins who provided such a wonderful perspective and introduced me to their great country: Anne Cadden, Hubert Kearns, Paddy O’Malley and Gerald O’Malley. I thank John Payne for his thorough and poetic recounting of Bronx history and for being a dear family friend all these years. I thank my wife, Jessica, for forever changing my life and my mother, Ginny, for truly being her mother’s daughter, offering her unwavering faith and support every step of the way.
Expression
A tree can’t sing when its arms are bare
But it finds its songs when the birds nest there
As a mother does when she sighs in vain
For a way to express her soul’s refrain
God plants a seedling with tender care
Near a mother’s heart and it blossoms there
So it isn’t strange when a child, it seems,
Can express its mother’s secret dreams
And many a mother on High today
Smiles down in a proud and gentle way
When she hears her child sing a song
That she carried locked in her heart so long.
by Kitty McInerney’s Favorite Poet, Nick Kenny
Originally published in the New York Mirror
Knocks
The small village of Scotshouse nestles quietly on the north-central boundary of what is today the Republic of Ireland, just a few kilometers from the border of Northern Ireland. The town’s soft, rolling hills and quiet air mask the turbulent history of the region, as political oppression, famine, and mass emigration plagued Irish society for centuries.
While the English maintained control over Irish society for nearly three centuries, the Irish Catholic majority toiled mostly as farmhands on land owned by their English masters. Despite many efforts at political reform, Irish farm laborers remained poor, overworked, and powerless.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the potato crops on which the Irish economy and diet so heavily relied suffered a catastrophic fungal disease transmitted from imported Peruvian crops. The disease spread swiftly throughout Europe. In Ireland alone, as 75% of the potato crop was destroyed, one million Irishmen died, and another two million emigrated within fifteen years. In the span of only two generations, the Irish population was cut in half.
At the depths of the Great Famine, Mary Frances “Fanny” Gibson of Scotshouse was raised Protestant Irish in nineteenth century English tradition—reserved, solemn and above all, proper. Serving as a maid, Fanny’s refined manners earned her social access to the English gentry, rare for someone of her status. Her English breeding could have brought her further social advantages over her Catholic neighbors, but Fanny Gibson contradicted her very nature and violated a cardinal rule of English society: she fell in love with a Catholic. When Fanny married a Catholic farmer from nearby Cavan, she knowingly sacrificed her social status and her family, who immediately disowned her.
Unable to purchase land, Fanny Gibson and her groom, James Smith, rented a farm house on Drumbure, a townland of Scotshouse. At Drumbure, the Smiths lived the modest life of a farmer and midwife and raised a family of their own.
Patrick Smith became the oldest of Fanny and James’ six children. Unlike his siblings, whom he often spoke of as uppity and snobbish, Patrick Smith was down-to-earth and displayed a vibrant sense of humor. He was also well-mannered and hard working, qualities that served him as a farmer on the nearby estate of Hilton Park, where he tended to horses and cattle.
In his early twenties, Patrick Smith married Mary Anne McCaul, a midwife and herbalist whose family owned a small farm called Knocks on the outskirts of Scotshouse. In addition to tending to farm duties on Knocks, Mary Anne delivered a number of the town’s children from the parish priest’s house and treated sickness with tonics she created from plants and herbs gathered along streams and rivers.
On April 26th, 1908, Patrick and Mary Anne Smith gave birth to their first child, Catherine Ellen. Kitty, as she came to be known, would never have a memory of being raised by her parents. After the birth of the Smith’s second child, Minnie, and as the demands of farm life proved too great, Kitty was sent to Knocks to be raised by her maternal grandparents.
Although Kitty regularly visited her parents in town, Kitty’s life with her grandparents in Knocks would define her childhood. Life on the farm was demanding. Food was scarce and everyone, including children, toiled from the break of dawn. Even schooling was a challenge. Kitty walked miles every day through the hills of Scotshouse to attend elementary school. After the sixth grade, twelve-year old Kitty was forced to abandon school and tend to Knocks full time. But she rarely complained, because beyond her love for her grandparents and devotion to her duties, Kitty found great inspiration from farm life. She often roamed the farm freely, developing a love for the outdoors and a deep fondness for animals. Even as a young girl, Kitty often defied her grandparents by sneaking eggs or skimmed milk to a hungry dog. When the day’s labor was complete, Kitty recited poetry and played the accordion for her wearied uncles and grandparents. On Sundays she hiked into town to attend Catholic mass with her family, which grew to five siblings. Despite their separation, Kitty was quite fond of her parents and had assumed many of their qualities... her mother’s calm, affable nature and spiritualism, her father’s sense of humor and impeccable manners.
Kitty would always cherish her idyllic childhood in Knocks. But as was the inevitable fate of so many young Irishmen before her, Kitty would have no future in her beloved Ireland.
American Wake
In the early part of the twentieth century, Ireland suffered great bloodshed as Irish Catholics made a concerted push for self rule. In 1919, a secret organization was formed with one primary objective in mind: unequivocal independence from Great Britain. The Irish Republican Army, financed heavily by Irish Americans, fought a protracted guerilla war against British forces in Ireland, bombing police stations, convoys, and any outposts of British control. In a brutal and desperate effort to suppress the rebellion, British auxiliary forces known as the Black & Tans burned villages, executed rebels, and murdered civilians. A brief cease-fire was extinguished by months of bloody civil war. In 1922, England finally established the Irish Free State among the twenty-six counties of the South, granting financial, judicial, political and educational independence to Ireland.
Yet centuries-old problems continued to plague Ireland as a majority of its people lived and died with agriculture. As agricultural exports sagged, many young Irishmen flocked to the cities for work, but low industrial wages and the condition of urban slums made life unbearable. In the 1920s, over 20% of the population lived in inadequate, overcrowded housing. Facing little opportunity on the farms and squalid conditions in the cities, the young people of Ireland continued their mass exodus to other lands of opportunity.
For seventeen year-old Kitty Smith, circumstances were no less bleak. So when her Aunt Nelly visited from America and offered to sponsor her citizenship, Kitty reluctantly accepted. For most Irish emigrants, departure for America would be preceded by a gathering of friends and family. It was called the American wake, because so often those left behind would be saying their final goodbyes. But for Kitty, there was no American wake. Her travel plans were hastened, and neither her mother nor father was told ahead of time of her impending departure. Mary Anne hurried to Knocks just in time to say goodbye to her daughter. But Patrick, the father that Kitty so adored, was too late. By the time he got word and hurried his way down the narrow lanes to Knocks, Kitty was gone. Denied even a moment of farewell with his departing daughter, Patrick was left to weep for days.
Kitty had boarded a train for the port city of Derry on the north coast of Ireland. On December 19th, 1925, she and dozens of other poor Irish embarked the steamship Caledonia to follow generations of Irishmen across the Atlantic. As Kitty watched the Irish coast fade, her thoughts were not of her long journey or uncertain future, but of the modest life and people she was leaving behind in Scotshouse. She knew quite well, at age seventeen, she would not likely see her mother, father, or dearest grandparents ever again.
Greenhorn
The Irish began sailing to America in significant numbers by the eighteenth century. Hamstrung by English trade restrictions, mostly Protestant Irish from the North boarded ships in search of greater opportunity on the other side of the Atlantic. By the time of the American Revolution, one quarter of a million Irishmen had already immigrated to America.
After nineteenth century industrialism took hold, legions of agrarian laborers abandoned American farms in favor of factory work in the cities. Cities grew rapidly, and the mode of connecting cities and expanding trade routes became a priority. The Irish who landed on American soil found ample opportunity in factories and along canals and railroads. Irish enclaves were formed across an ever-expanding America, with Irish concentration on the Eastern seaboard in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York.
But after the Great Famine struck the potato fields of Ireland in the 1840s, Irish immigration to America took on a strikingly different character. The famine Irish were not the Protestant, relatively well-to-do immigrants who had assimilated seamlessly into American society for nearly a century. The new Irish immigrants were largely poor, unskilled, unfamiliar with urban life, and Catholic. These Irishmen were not welcome. Contrary to America’s renown for liberty and tolerance, the famine Irish were met widely with bigotry and hatred. Many Americans came to believe that an excess of foreigners and Catholics would destroy the fabric of a blossoming democracy. Anti-foreign and anti-Catholic mobs attacked convents and Catholic schools throughout the Northeast. Riots erupted in Philadelphia and New York. Irish Catholics were shunned by landlords and shop owners and denied work in the factories.
An unfavorable reception, coupled with immigrant loneliness and yearning for Ireland, intensified the growth of Irish slums. Filth, disease, crime, and alcoholism prevailed in the Irish ghettos. Ex-peasant Irishmen battled a debilitating sense of inferiority and yearned for respectability. But from the depths of despair, Irish immigrants found salvation in their only political capital: their escalating numbers, their unbreakable unity, and their irrevocable right to vote.
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, in cities across the Northeast, Irish immigrants banded together in support of political leaders who championed their causes. Labor unions became inundated with Irishmen who ensured good paying jobs for immigrants. Numerous social groups and organizations sprang up and gave Irish immigrants a sense of belonging. The Catholic Church expanded to become a major force in representing Irish values socially and politically. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish had permeated American culture. Songs like “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and “My Wild Irish Rose” became genuinely American. Irishmen like John L. Sullivan, Paddy Ryan and Gentlemen Jim Corbett dominated the vastly popular sport of boxing. In America’s pastime, John McGraw and Charles A. Comiskey built baseball empires in New York and Chicago, respectively. And the “Fighting Irish” were fast becoming the preeminent name in football.
Nowhere was the influence of the Irish immigrant more pronounced than in America’s most powerful city, New York. 75% of the famine Irish landed in New York harbor, and by 1860 a quarter of New York City’s population was Irish. Within a few decades, the Irish held firm control over Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that controlled much of New York politics. The rise of the Irish in New York culminated when Al Smith, the grandson of Irish immigrants, rose from the tenements of the Lower East Side to become governor of New York in the 1920s.
For the Irish immigrant who anchored in New York Harbor in the first decades of the twentieth century, no longer were prejudice, hatred and aggression there to spurn them. In their place was a new Irish-American identity, confident, proud, and irrepressible, ready to be assumed by the next greenhorn to step down from the deck of an Irish steamship.
This was the America that greeted Kitty Smith after she completed her long journey from Derry, Ireland to New York Harbor on December 28, 1925. Her life in the new country, however, had anything but an auspicious beginning. Her name had been misspelled by a crewman on the Caledonia’s ship manifest. She was listed as Katie instead of Kitty, and her last name, Smith, was misspelled with a “y.” As a result, she could not be properly identified by relatives. The shy, 105-pound newcomer was claimed by a Traveler’s Aid and sent to the Leo Home on 23rd Street in Manhattan. The Home was supervised by an order of nuns who spoke only German. For two days, Kitty’s only companion in her new country was a cat. Finally, after considerable effort, Kitty’s Aunt Nellie was permitted to claim her. Nellie took Kitty to her home at 61 Bryant Street in Newark, New Jersey, and Kitty’s life in America officially began.
Kitty worked for a short time as a child’s nurse in Newark. Before long, she was making her way around Manhattan, assisting at a hospital and working as a maid for well-to-do families. In 1927 she began working as a domestic for the Woolseys, the family of an English doctor who resided on East 36th Street. She labored six days a week as a maid, but she was treated well and grew very fond of the family. During the summer, Kitty traveled with the Woolseys to their summer home in Cornwall, Connecticut. The rustic setting, roaming fields, kerosene lamps, and coal stove all reminded Kitty of home.
Back in the city, Kitty did everything she could to remain connected with her Irish roots. She visited family often, which now included her sister, Minnie, who immigrated in 1927. Minnie was the second-oldest Smith child. Despite their closeness in age, Kitty and Minnie were very different people. Minnie was sent as a young girl to live on Drumbure with her paternal grandmother, Fanny Gibson. Fanny’s traditional English household was strict and proper, and many of Minnie’s aunts who remained there were uppity and aloof. While Kitty enjoyed a childhood of roaming, laughter and warmth on Knocks, Minnie’s life on Drumbure was comparatively cold and restrained. The two sisters whose lives converged thousands of miles from home had long since assumed very different personalities. Minnie would always struggle to understand her sister, especially as the circumstances of Kitty’s life became increasingly complicated.
In addition to family, Kitty sought familiarity in Irish dance halls. All over New York City Irish immigrants gathered every weekend to celebrate with song and dance from the old country. Each hall hosted a dance in honor of a particular Irish county, allowing immigrants to reunite with familiar faces or meet new ones.
On one such night in 1927, a festive, nineteen year-old Kitty Smith looked across the room and locked eyes with a handsome, charming, and brash young man from County Clare. He had a rapturous look, spoke with a delightful wit, sung beautifully, and was an elegant dancer. As Kitty would come to discover, he was also... trouble.
Bull’em McInerney
Michael Joseph McInerney grew up in Kilrush, County Clare, a picturesque coastal village that sits near the mouth of the River Shannon in the southwest of Ireland. With the arrival of a railway in the late nineteenth century, combined with shipping from the Atlantic, Kilrush quickly developed into a bustling seaport and market town.
Michael was one of seven children and the son of an Irish laborer who fought for the English in the South African Boer War. From an early age, Michael McInerney displayed abundant charm and ingratiated himself throughout the village. He was a star football player, known widely as “Bull’em McInerney” for his toughness on the soccer field. He sported a reckless streak, stealing boats docked from Scattery Island and sailing around the Atlantic coast. He often found trouble in town, which led on numerous occasions to his being jailed. Much of Michael McInerney’s reprobate behavior was fueled by an affliction that would plague him throughout his life: a consuming and unrelenting addiction to alcohol.
With opportunity in the villages becoming as dismal as life on the farms, Michael set out for Limerick Station and boarded a train for the port of Cobh in the South of Ireland. Years later, when he was asked the details of his trip to America, Michael would only answer, “I swam the Atlantic.” In reality, Michael McInerney set sail for America on the steamship Carinthia in August of 1926 at the age of nineteen. He was received by his brother Pat at the Port of New York and taken to 113th Street in Manhattan.
With his charm and knack for song and dance, Michael easily got work in the Irish dance halls as a waiter or bus boy. He was beloved by employers and patrons alike, but the free liquor he received as a perk of his profession would be his undoing, sending him on benders and costing him job after job.
But for one evening in 1927, Michael’s intoxication was fueled not by alcohol but by the presence of a fair and engaging young woman from the Irish countryside. Kitty Smith was everything Michael McInerney yearned for: genuine, maternal and stable. As for Kitty, she could only see Michael’s charm and wit through the lens of her own honest and genuine upbringing. She did not comprehend the depths of his troubles.
So the country girl from Scotshouse fell in love with the city boy from Kilrush. Before Kitty left for another trip to the Woolsey home in Connecticut, Michael, fearing the separation would doom their relationship, proposed to marry Kitty before she left. Michael McInerney and Kitty Smith married at St. Michael Church in Manhattan on January 26, 1928. Kitty didn’t even tell her sister, Minnie, knowing that Minnie did not like Michael and would disapprove.
After the wedding, Kitty continued to live with the Woolseys for another year, honoring her commitment to the family. In the meantime, Michael lived with his brother John and bounced from job to job in the dance halls. Despite Prohibition, Michael was regularly getting drunk and testing his brother’s patience.
In early 1929, the young couple learned that Kitty was pregnant with their first child. Shortly after, Kitty said goodbye to the Woolseys and she and Michael finally took an apartment together on 102nd Street in Manhattan. During this time, Michael settled down and took a job as a shipping clerk at Wannamakers Department Store, a position he would hold for two years—the longest tenure he would ever have at one job. Michael was here on the morning of October 19th, 1929, when Kitty went into labor. With no one around to assist her, Kitty headed for the hospital by herself, but not before dropping off laundry at the cleaners despite labor pains. She made her way to Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital on the West Side, but was turned away and told to go to her own doctor miles away in The Bronx. Kitty boarded a subway train and headed to the northern borough. Upon exiting the train, Kitty, now in advanced labor, ascended a hundred steps to reach the sidewalk, then walked a mile before reaching her doctor. Within an hour, she gave birth to a daughter, Helen Patricia McInerney.
With the birth of Helen, the McInerney family shared the optimism of an entire nation. The 1920s had been very good to America. Peace and economic expansion had fostered goodwill everywhere. The marketplace was booming. The night clubs were jostling with a roaring new sound. A burgeoning art form, motion pictures, came of age with its own kind of sound. As the nation seemed to have shed its troubled past and looked forward with boundless zeal, the McInerneys embraced a promising future with a new family in a country that was fast becoming home.
But on October 29th, 1929, just ten days after the birth of Helen McInerney, the irrepressible exuberance that defined an age came to a dramatic and conclusive halt, and the fate of the McInerneys, along with the rest of America, would be changed forever.
Crash
By the late 1920s, New York City had grown to become the world’s financial capital. The New York Stock Exchange was the largest stock market in the world. During the decade, American manufacturing reached record levels and corporate profits soared, sparking furious investor speculation. In the five years leading up to October of 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased five-fold. Stock prices ballooned as average working men and women dumped their life savings in the pursuit of overnight wealth. When investors lacked their own money to invest, banks freely loaned them money. With the market entrenched in a perpetual climb, no investment seemed too risky.
On October 29, 1929, after five days of extreme volatility and trepidation, the New York Stock Exchange plunged in an historic, dramatic fashion. The market dropped $14 billion in one day, almost five times the annual budget of the federal government. Stocks lost 89% of their peak value in three years. Over the next decade, more than 9,000 banks failed, costing Americans $140 billion in deposits. Prices and incomes were slashed in half, while unemployment rose to over 25%.
The panic and hysteria of the stock market crash was slowly replaced by the languor of wide scale poverty and depression. Men thronged the streets in search of scant jobs while their wives endured interminable lines for government-supplied food rations. Makeshift, squalid villages of the homeless poor, pejoratively named “Hooverville” (after the U.S. president), cropped up in cities across America. Millions of Americans battled hunger and starvation on a daily basis. Suicide was all too common. While civic leaders desperately tried to get a handle on the growing humanitarian crisis, average Americans were left to fend for themselves.
The young McInerney family began its life together in these most turbulent of times. Shortly after Helen was born, Michael lost his job at Wannamaker’s. Although jobs were scarce, Michael’s charm and sense of humor always seemed to open the door for work, though his alcoholism affected Michael’s willingness and ability to sustain work for very long. On many occasions, he spent his paycheck on liquor and left Kitty with nothing. Before long, the family could no longer afford to live in Manhattan. The McInerneys were forced to move to a northern borough, a former rustic backcountry that was fast becoming the seat of culture, diversity and opportunity for the working class American immigrant.
Nomads
The Bronx is the only borough of New York City situated on the American mainland. Formerly a wilderness of forests, meadows, and streams inhabited by various Indian tribes, The Bronx was settled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Marginally separated from upper Manhattan by the narrow Harlem River, The Bronx quickly became a convenient destination for migrants seeking to escape the overcrowding and high costs of Manhattan.
The Irish first came to the Bronx in the mid nineteenth century as gangs of laborers who constructed the New York and Harlem Railroad, the Hudson River Railroad and the High Bridge. Their back-breaking and highly dangerous work inspired the saying that American railroads had “an Irishman buried under every tie.” Later, Irish migrants filled the newly-built Bronx factories or commuted to jobs in Manhattan. They settled their families in neat wooden frame houses within the Bronx neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, and Highbridge, where they tended to pigs, cows and chickens and cultivated vegetable gardens in the backyards.
Other waves of immigration in the early twentieth century brought Italians, Germans, and Eastern European Jews to the Bronx. At the same time, Manhattan subway lines extended north and attracted furious development. Brick walk-ups sprouted seemingly overnight, lining street after street, providing rental housing to the mostly working class residents and transforming the Bronx into its own city. By the late 1920s, the Bronx was booming with over 1.2 million people, mostly first- and second-generation immigrants who worked as carpenters, brick masons, house painters, tailors, garment makers, store clerks, small shop owners, and salesmen.
The Bronx community of the 1930s was self-sustaining for a majority of its residents, complete with new apartment houses, tree-lined streets, spacious public parks, good schools and ample shops. Social life blossomed on stoops and in apartment courtyards, weaving a tight fabric of community life. Millions of Americans came to know the Bronx through “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” a popular radio and, later, television show depicting the lives of a Jewish family from the Bronx.
The Bronx that greeted Michael, Kitty and Helen McInerney in 1930 was a hopeful place, but one that could not escape the growing despair of the age. Despite its charms, The Bronx was hit hard by the Depression. A Hooverville emerged on the Harlem River near Highbridge. New construction dropped 75% from its 1920s highs. Evictions tripled throughout the city. In such an environment, the McInerneys home life was anything but stable. After initially moving to 137th Street in the Irish neighborhood of Mott Haven, poverty, a growing family, and Michael’s alcoholism forced the family to uproot time after time.
After a short, unpleasant stay at 137th Street, the family moved to the top floor at 140th. Despite Prohibition, an illegal “still” was run across the hall. The men drank all day and Michael gladly joined them. Mary was born in April of 1931 and the family moved to 141st Street.
By the time Anna was born in March in 1933, the nation had reached the depths of depression. There was no work. Kitty was lucky to get milk from Gold Medal Farms and bread from a Jewish bakery. Welfare coupons helped to put food on the table, but barely enough to feed a growing family. Due to complications in delivering Anna, Kitty was forced to stay in the hospital for a number of days. Her sister Minnie checked in on the children at home and found Michael drunk with his friends and thirty-two small bottles of liquor on the fire escape. The utilities had been shut off. Minnie gave Michael the money to pay the utilities, but he used it for liquor. So she took Helen and Mary to Maggie McNamara’s, a relative of Michael’s through marriage. When Kitty arrived home, the utilities were still off, forcing her to heat Anna’s bottle on the radiator.
Shortly after, Kitty took a janitor’s job just to survive. The family moved to a Jackson Avenue basement apartment with no bathroom, only a shared toilet in the coal bin. Kitty shoveled coal and cleaned the apartment house, all with very little help from Michael.
Kitty delivered her first son, Jackie, in June of 1934 while Michael and a few drinking buddies gathered around the radio in the next room to listen to a boxing match. It was at this time that Kitty befriended a neighboring Irish family, the McEntees, who for many years provided desperately needed support to the McInerneys in the form of money, food, and help during child labor.
The McInerneys moved again in July of 1935 to a Dawson Street apartment with two small bedrooms and only one dresser for all the children to share. To earn free rent and ten dollars a month, Kitty cleaned the entire two-building property, polishing doorknobs, scrubbing the stoop, and shoveling coal into the furnaces—a job that began at five a.m. daily. At the same time, Kitty cared for all her children and washed clothes and linens by hand. By the time Kitty finished her household chores, she was lucky to get to bed by one or two in the morning. Neighbors were often awakened by the sound of the laundry line pulley squeaking during the wee hours of the morning, inspiring one neighbor to offer Kitty a gift of oil to halt the noise.
Despite the cramped space, Kitty regularly took in Michael’s homeless drinking buddies for the night and let them sleep in the basement. If Kitty had food, she would feed them. She always showed Michael’s alcoholic friends care and kindness and never spoke unkindly about them.
Theresa was born in October of 1935. Shortly afterwards, Michael had an affair with an Irish neighbor woman who lived with her husband and children on the top floor. Kitty scolded Michael and never spoke to the woman again. Michael, however, remained close friends with the woman’s husband.
Eileen was born a year later, in January of 1937. The neighbors became intolerant of Kitty’s growing family and Michael’s binge drinking, and the Board of Health came and forced the family to move in the January cold and snow. After a few days’ search, the McInerneys landed an apartment at 160th and Tinton Avenue, but that was soon demolished to make way for a new building.
It was on to 158th Street, where, in May of 1938, Kitty went into labor and walked a mile to get help. She delivered Paddy as Michael got drunk in a local bar. The following day, seven year-old Mary returned home and reported that Helen, Kitty’s oldest child, had died. After several minutes of panic, it was discovered that Helen had been struck by a car on Westchester Avenue and thrown into a pillar. Despite injuries that restricted her to bed for four days, Helen actually lived.
When the owner of the 158th street building claimed the apartment for himself, the McInerneys moved to Avenue St. John. A moving foundation forced them to East 152nd Street, where Eugene was born in October of 1939. Before his first birthday, Gene battled pneumonia twice and suffered a case of measles. Doctors were forced to treat Gene with sulfur, which would save his life but limit him mentally as he got older. Climbing four floors at East 152nd proved to be unbearable, so after a few short moves the family landed at Trinity Avenue, where Margaret was born in December of 1940. Kitty’s condition was deteriorating, having suffered a bout of heart palpitations during pregnancy. She was advised by doctors not to have any more children.
Late one Christmas Eve, Helen, hearing the familiar sound of a squeaking laundry pulley, stepped into the cold midnight air. As the new Christmas morning approached, Helen found Kitty hanging laundry in the darkness. It didn’t take long for Helen to discover that her mother was crying. News had just come in from Ireland. Ellen McCaul, the woman who raised Kitty on the small farm in Knocks, the loving grandmother Kitty hadn’t seen since leaving for the train to Derry, had died. Time would soon claim Kitty’s mother and father too. It was here, in the dark Christmas morning, wet clothes hanging on a drooping line, where Kitty finally understood everything she had sacrificed in coming to America.
I Have Children for Those Who Can’t
In the first decade of the Great Depression, Kitty McInerney had given birth to nine children. She had moved her family fifteen times in a desperate pilgrimage of survival while working herself to exhaustion twenty hours a day. Kitty’s struggle would have been brutal enough even with a supportive husband. But Michael was anything but supportive, and his worsening alcoholism plagued Kitty at every turn. Michael rarely worked, and when he did, he horded his paychecks to buy liquor. During drunken rages, Michael was verbally abusive towards Kitty. When short on money and in need of a fix, Michael stole virtually anything with resale value: coal from the furnace Kitty fed every morning, a pair of drapes from Kitty’s window, shoes and pants from a drunk, unconscious friend, a chair from a funeral parlor, a neighbor’s cat. “I wish I went down with the Caledonia,” Kitty would say, referring to the steamship that had brought her to America and later sank.
As 1940 came to a close, the family was extremely poor and welfare was limited. With the holidays approaching, they were unable to afford a Christmas tree. The McInerney children scoured through tree lots and gathered broken branches in order to build their own makeshift tree. If it weren’t for the McEntees, who arrived on Christmas morning with small gifts of jacks and balls, there would have been no Christmas.
Yet Kitty persisted through the turmoil and chaos. Despite doctors’ warnings, she continued to have children. With the nation was now at war and many of the country’s mothers losing their children in battle, Kitty seemed ordained to bring forth new life. A move to Cauldwell Avenue was followed by the birth of two more children, Bonnie in 1942 and Tommy in 1943. Rarely did Kitty announce a pregnancy. The children learned to expect a new member of the family when they saw Kitty converting a dresser drawer into a baby bed. Furthermore, Kitty never discussed sexuality with any of her children, including daughters. On one occasion Helen asked Kitty where babies came from. Kitty responded tersely, “There’s a place,” then stormed out of the room.
By this point, neighbors were shocked and in some cases disdainful of Kitty for having more children. Even Kitty’s own sister, Minnie, seldom visited because she could not understand why Kitty remained with Michael and had so many children. Kitty’s only response: “I have children for those who can’t.” In truth, Kitty was a devout Catholic and did not believe in divorcing a man to whom she had committed her life, regardless of his sickness, nor did she believe in artificially preventing what she believed God had planned for her. Despite the burdens, Kitty was never happier than when she was pregnant or caring for an infant.
But having so many children came with an emotional price. Kitty had neither the time nor resources to adequately address Michael’s alcoholism. Her growing battles with Michael during his drunken rages was a source of horror and conflict for the children. Once the victim of Michael’s verbal abuse, Kitty gradually became more empowered, responding to his apathy or aggression with blows of her own. One night, she threw him down a flight of stairs. On another, she doused him with kerosene and stormed the house in search of a match. But she always forgave him and catered to him during hangovers, and never did she allow the children to criticize him. What’s more, Kitty did not tolerate conflict among any of her children, going so far as tearing a blouse in half once it became the object of dispute. Kitty’s policy of peace was necessary to maintain order in an overburdened, impoverished home, but it cost her children the valuable experience of resolving disputes.
In August of 1944, after a decade and a half of tumultuous, nomadic instability, the McInerneys took residence at a railroad-style apartment on Tinton Avenue near the corner of 152nd Street. Tinton Avenue, named after Tintern Abbey in Wales, was a street not unlike many others winding through the Bronx: a nearby grocery and Jewish deli on the corner, a Catholic Church and school next door, and scores of the working poor chatting on stoops all throughout the neighborhood. Neither was the Tinton apartment exceptional in any way. At four and half bedrooms and one bathroom, it was no more adequate to accommodate the expanding McInerney clan that the numerous flats that preceded it. Nonetheless, 663 Tinton Avenue brought with it an unprecedented stability. Over the next year, thousands of soldiers returned home, filling up available housing and making apartment hopping in the landlocked Bronx much more difficult. As a result, Tinton Avenue would become home to the McInerneys for the next fifteen years.
Life on a Stoop
After the move to Tinton Avenue, the McInerney family functioned with strict order and discipline. Kitty continued to manage a mountain of chores with the efficiency of a small army. Helen helped care for the children while Mary mastered the art of housecleaning. From the age of eight, John worked stocking shelves at Hoffman’s Grocery to help put food on the table. The other children performed their roles dutifully. Everyone knew their routine, from dressing, to eating, to bathing, to going to bed. Remarkably, Kitty maintained order not by pounding an iron fist but through a calm, quiet conviction. Kitty inspired in her children a commitment to family and to the cause of survival. Visitors often remarked how impeccably clean, ordered and quiet the McInerney home was, especially considering their family size and dire poverty.
The pride Kitty took in maintaining a home extended to how her children presented themselves in public. Kitty and the children regularly tended to cleaning and ironing clothes and polishing shoes. Even if they were poor, Kitty always labored to preserve her children’s dignity. In return, every one of Kitty’s children shared a grand fear of causing their mother anguish. For that reason, the McInerney children rarely caused trouble.
Despite her own ample responsibilities, Kitty maintained a profound sense of grace and courtesy. She always took time to welcome visitors with a cup of tea and a sympathetic ear. Minnie visited from time to time, delighting the children with pastries and cake from Cushman’s Bakery. Kitty was appreciated by so many because of her willingness to unburden others of their troubles without casting judgment on them.
Having settled for the first time as a family, the McInerneys were able to immerse themselves in the rich community life of the 1940s Bronx. The only bearable aspect of poverty was that neighbors were poor too and knowing that everyone shared their pain. The social bonds that formed out of collective despair united the community in a mission of survival. The communal expression that arose from those bonds evinced the resiliency and spirit of the Bronx people.
Community life for most of the neighborhood revolved around the Catholic Church. St. Anselm’s Church and School resided next door to the McInerneys, and most of the McInerney children attended school there. Children daily descended from apartment stoops around the neighborhood and paraded up Tinton Avenue to the school grounds, filling the morning air with shouts and laughter. Mobs of parishioners filed through the church doors for mass on Sundays and holy days, or to celebrate a wedding or bid farewell to a loved one. The highlight of spring featured a First Communion procession down Tinton Avenue, followed by graduating eighth-graders in the early summer. Boys played pool, ping pong or boxing in the school recreation room and joined girls at church dances on Friday nights. Priests walked the neighborhood, mingling with parishioners and keeping the children out of trouble. Nuns sold carnations outside the church every May to celebrate motherhood.
Beyond the church grounds boys played in the streets—games like stick ball, hand ball, kick the can, pitching pennies, Johnny on the pony, and marbles. Girls played jacks, hopscotch and jump rope. Kids raised pigeons or flew kites on rooftops and raced gleefully through alleys and courtyards. Adults congregated and watched over the neighborhood from stoops and fire escapes. In the summer, kids opened fire hydrants or flocked to the sprinklers and wading ponds of nearby St. Mary’s Park for relief from the sweltering heat. They rented bikes for 25 cents, jumped on a mobile merry-go-round for a few pennies, and sat on blanketed fire escapes after sundown to unwind in the cool night air. Villagers traversed the borough on trolleys for a nickel and children hitched on the back for a free ride. The downtrodden sang in courtyards and alleys for coins and bottle caps.
Saturdays were scored by sounds of the Metropolitan Opera streaming from radios and reverberating through windows and alleyways. Holidays lured block parties and parades to crowd the Bronx thoroughfares. The carnival set up once or twice a year by Jackson Avenue station, casting a nightly glow over the South Bronx. Small shops lined the sidewalks and thrived on abundant foot traffic. Westchester Avenue from Wales to 152nd featured Dolan’s Irish Food Store, Olympia Florist, Cushman’s Bakery, an ice cream parlor, a drugstore, a Jewish baker, a candy store and two newsstands.
Many shop owners offered store credit to poor families like the McInerneys in need of bread, milk or meat for their children. Other neighbors and friends offered support when they could, providing small loans or passing along used clothing to needy families. On many occasions, Kitty and the McInerney children were the recipients of such generosity.
For a few weeks every summer, thousands of New York’s poor children, including many McInerneys, were given a respite from the strains of poverty and city life through the New York Herald-Tribune Fresh Air Fund. Wealthy families welcomed poor children into their summer homes in Upstate New York and Connecticut, providing the underprivileged a rare experience to roam the rolling mountains and lush fields outside the Great City.
The daughter of one Fresh Air family from Maine took a liking to Mary McInerney and arranged to have a washing machine delivered to Kitty for Christmas in 1943. Kitty was overcome. If not for the compassion and generosity of the Bronx community, it’s hard to imagine how families like the McInerneys would have survived. And with each passing year, it became harder to imagine the South Bronx without the McInerneys. In a span of four and a half years, Kitty brought four more children into the family: Gerry in 1945, Ginny in 1946, Jimmy in 1948, and Gerard in 1949. Kitty, Michael and fifteen children now lived under one roof. And after Gene and Tommy accidentally caused a small fire in the storage room in 1948, the Tinton apartment was without two front rooms.
Due to Michael’s inability to maintain a job, the welfare office was now making regular visits to Tinton Avenue. Michael was summoned to court, and when he failed to sway the judge with his usual charm, Michael was sentenced to six months in Riker’s Island Jail just off the east coast of the Bronx. Michael worked for five months in prison, earning one dollar a day, and was released a month early for good behavior. On the day of his release, he returned home to Tinton Avenue singing. He took a bath, dressed himself neatly, then disappeared for three days on a drunken bender, blowing the entire $150 he earned in jail. Shortly after, Michael was sentenced to another six months in Rockland State Mental Hospital for alcohol rehab.
With the number of children now ballooning into the teens and Michael debilitated by alcoholism, Kitty’s unbreakable determination succumbed to fear and uncertainty. She continued to suffer from a chronic nervous condition that had plagued her for years. Little did anyone realize, Kitty was quietly suffering a nervous breakdown.
Faith
With her husband confined to a mental hospital and barely enough money to put food on the table, Kitty McInerney walked a familiar path to visit an old friend. St. Gerard at Immaculate Conception Church had comforted Kitty during many times of trouble. She prayed for guidance, for intervention, for the strength to spare her children of utter despair and hopelessness.