97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman

typhus, and other deadly infections were commonplace, and mortality rates were higher in the Five Points than most other city neighborhoods.) Over the next ten years, Bridget gave birth to seven more children: Jane, Agnes, Cecilia, Theresa, Veronica, Josephine, and Elizabeth. Only four survived childhood.

Jane Moore Hanrahan, circa 1900, daughter of Bridget and Joseph Moore.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum

Roger Joseph Hanrahan, a baggage clerk, and Jane Moore were married in New York in 1895.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
    After Mott Street, they lived at 150 Forsyth Street and remained there for a relatively extended stay, from 1866 to 1869. With three young daughters, they picked up again and moved into 97 Orchard Street in the heart of German Kleindeutschland .
    Immigrants who arrived in the United States with no family to meet them spent their first days or weeks in a boardinghouse. To help new arrivals find a reputable establishment (many were not), an area had been set aside within Castle Garden, where licensed boardinghouse-keepers could solicit potential customers. Just beyond Castle Garden, immigrants met up with a much shadier class of boardinghouse representative. Known as “runners,” they were scam artists of the first order, regularly vilified in the local press. To rope in customers, runners employed a handful of standard ploys: they would snatch the immigrants’ baggage and offer to cart it—free of charge—anywhere in the city, delivering it to a local boardinghouse where it was immediately “put into storage.” With his baggage held hostage, the immigrant was forced to spend the night, paying any fee the owner demanded. Or they would abscond with one of the immigrants’ children, forcing the parents to follow. More insidious runners played on feelings of national kinship to establish a rapport with their marks and win their trust. Then they fleeced them.
    In 1867, the Irish politician and newspaperman John Francis Maguire toured the United States to see how his countrymen were faring in their new home, and published his observations in a book called The Irish in America . To illustrate the depravity of boardinghouse runners, he included the following story, told to him by a great, broad-shouldered Irishman “over six feet in his stocking vamps.” On landing in New York, the strapping Irishman was
[p]ounced upon by two runners, one seizing the box of tools, and the other confiscating the clothes. The future American citizen assured his obliging friends that he was quite capable of carrying his own luggage; but no, they should relieve him—this stranger, and guest of the republic—of that trouble…He remembered that the two gentlemen wore very pronounced green neckties, and spoke with a richness of accent that denoted special if not conscientious cultivation; and on his arrival at the boardinghouse, he was cheered with the announcement that its proprietor was from “the ould counthry, and loved every sod of it, God bless!” 15
    A two-night stay at the boardinghouse cost the Irishman a small fortune, more than he would have paid for a sumptuous dinner at the Astor Hotel.
    Immigrant boardinghouses were scattered through Lower Manhattan, but were concentrated near the wharves. They were especially thick along Hudson, Washington, and Greenwich Streets, because of their proximity to Castle Garden. Here, one could find boardinghouses with owners of every nationality, each patronized by their respective countrymen. No group, however, was better represented than the Irish. Not just in New York, but throughout urban America, Irish entrepreneurs opened boardinghouses and hotels, a business they had no particular background in but which answered a pressing demand for immigrant housing and which they learned “on the job.”
    In 1848, during the height of the Irish exodus, a self-promoting but charming Irishman named Jeremiah O’Donovan conducted a rambling tour of the eastern United States. The