New York with a brogue

The view many of our ancestors had upon arrival at Ellis Island.

I hadn’t meant for our New York City honeymoon to turn into an Irish heritage tour; it just happened.

The first day we took the ferry to Liberty Island to see the statue and Ellis Island. You wait in a manageable queue at Castle Clinton in Battery Park to buy your tickets, but when you line up to get on the ferry, you find that the line of people snakes through the park. We couldn’t even see the dock from where we were.

I wanted to get a sense of what happened when my ancestors immigrated, but I really didn’t need to recreate the complete experience. We were herded like cattle onto the ferry, shoulder to shoulder and contained inside metal fences, then off again at Liberty Island, and the whole process started again to get to Ellis Island.

We were like better-smelling refugees. Our ancestors lined up to get deloused and get physical exams; we waited forever to get through the security checkpoint.

The terrorists have won, by the way, when we have bomb-sniffing dogs and guards with machine guns making us take off every scrap of metal to go through the scanner. For the first time, I had to take off even my wire-rimmed glasses to pass.

The new ferry building on Ellis Island, an Art Deco wonder built in the 1930s.

The trip to Ellis was inspiring and educational. The xenophobia we are experiencing today in this country is nothing new, and some of the displays depict anti-immigrant rallies (with torches, no doubt), and relics of the Ku Klux Klan. It seems every generation of immigrants wants the door to America slammed shut as soon as they arrive.

The Great Hall on Ellis Island.

The Great Hall was where hopeful soon-to-be-Americans were processed: given medical exams and housed until they could be certified healthy enough to enter the country. Now there are wonderful exhibits that illustrate the gender, ethnic background, and country of origin of the immigrants.

The Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park. This is the side that faces the water.

After Ellis Island, we walked Battery Park up to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which is very close to Ground Zero. It is a very moving monument to the time of the 1846 to 1850 Potato Famine in Ireland, when 1.5 million people starved to death.

The memorial is a half-acre of serenity in the madness of Manhattan, with a roofless stone cottage imported from Ireland, and a garden featuring native plants, flowers and grasses imported from Auld Sod. There are 32 rocks engraved with the name of the Irish county they came from.

The tunnel to the rest of the memorial has first-person accounts of the Potato Famine on light-up strips along the walls.

After you pass through the hallway with strips of text about the hunger, you come into the cottage. Beyond those imported stone walls are places where you can block out the city entirely and it seems like you are back in Ireland. The reason the memorial is on a half-acre is symbolic: the Poor Laws stated that anyone with a half-acre of land couldn't apply for relief, so people were walking away from their land rather than starve to death.

The inside of the Irish Hunger Memorial features a rebuilt stone hut, plants native to Ireland, and large stones from each of the counties.

The next day we hit Central Park in search of the Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Anderson statues. As we walked through the park, I heard a lilting Irish brogue wafting on the breeze — a horse carriage driver explaining the sights of Central Park. I decided that I had to have an Irish driver, too.

Talk about racial profiling.... I wasn't sure how to go about finding one when we stumbled across carriages lined up near Columbus Circle. We sashayed down the line, pretending to be interested in the horses and buggies, but I was really listening intently.

As we passed three drivers talking on the street-corner, I heard what I had been searching for, a beautiful brogue. I stood there like an idiot, trying to find some good way to ask: which one was he? One of the drivers approached us, but his accent was pure Noo Yawrk.

Molly the horse, me, and our Irish carriage driver, who was from Tipperary.

"You want a carriage ride?" he said.
"Actually, we're looking for an Irish driver," my husband said, and the three men laughed uproariously.
"Drunk? Or sober?" they asked.
It turns out that two of the three were Irish; and furthermore, that Irish cab drivers are not in short supply.

What?? It was our honeymoon; we had to have a carriage ride in Central Park!

The day was glorious, but I underestimated how conspicuous one is when riding in a horse-drawn carriage, especially on city streets used to get in and out of the park.

I used my smart phone to find us a place to eat, and twice it returned Irish pubs. So I drank Harp on tap, and my favorite pub food: shepherd's pie. In fact, I ate it three nights out of the five we were there: at Mulligan's, O'Reilly's, and Muldoon's.

I called it research into the perfect pie, but it actually was just fattening. I can't wait to go back and do it again.

Next week: New York: the literary tour