There were no Corinthian columns in here when my great-great-grandfather James O’Day and his wife, Ellen Shea, lived here on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan. They lived on the street for decades—from around 1875 to 1910, and at 497 Pearl Street from 1884 until around 1910. I believe the house was small, as there were only four apartments, unlike the many big brick tenements around the area. It appears on the 1900 census that they owned their house (and rented out to the other occupiers), which was quite an accomplishment for this immigrant couple. James is described as a “clothes dyer,” but through the years, he had been described on forms as first a porter, then a tailor, then a “dealer of clothes.”
James O’Dea (he later changed the spelling) had come from Ireland in 1865, and was an American success story. His wife, Ellen, had come over in 1851, as a nine-year-old, escaping dire poverty that claimed the lives of almost her whole family in the Great Famine. The success the O’Days achieved however, was relative. They still lived on the edge of the notorious Five Points slum. In March, 1882, reporters and an illustrator from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper investigated a house across the street from the O’Days at 508 Pearl Street. What they revealed was a basement boarding house filled with immigrants who shared a filthy, damp, crowded space for pennies a week. They described such dwellings as “dens of disease.”
Where the O’Days’s house was is now the monumental Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in southern Manhattan, completed in 1936. It is surrounded by other grand civic buildings which replaced what New York considered the remnants of a slum. To draw this view, I sat at the side entrance to the New York County Supreme Court which is pictured often on many crime shows, like Law & Order. Where the poorest immigrants stepped down into soggy cellars then, is where the most filmed staircase in New York City is now.
Visiting the Relatives 