Visiting the Relatives

Two Worlds

14 Groton Street, West End Neighborhood, Providence, Rhode Island

In 1914, not long after her immigrant husband Michael died, Theresa (O’Day) Lynch (my great-grandmother) lived here, on a small lane on the West Side of Providence. Manhattan-born Theresa resided on this thin backstreet for ten years (1905-15) at four different addresses, but this is the only house that remains. She was a 47 years old widow with five kids, including a two year old. The oldest, my grandfather, had left school at 16 to help support the family by working in a jewelry manufacturing job. His brother, 15, probably did the same.

This neighborhood is slowly gentrifying now, with a complete social, economic, and ethnic mix, varying from block to block, or even house to house. As I drew this tired old structure, a neighbor pulled out of her garage in a nice new car and, lowering her window, asked what I was up to. It turns out, she too, taught at Rhode Island School of Design. I know a number of artists and designers in this area. After sketching, I went two blocks for a burrito at a local stand, which sits behind a high chain link fence covered with big colorful posters of Mexican meals. I was the only English speaker in the place.

1912 Death of Michael Lynch of Groton Street, Providence, RI

Tenant to Tenement

85 Mechanic Street, Pawcatuck, Stonington, Connecticut

This was the first home of my Lynch ancestors in America. In 1884, John Lynch and his wife, Mary Sullivan, along with their six surviving children abandoned Cahersiveen in Kerry, Ireland, and joined relatives and neighbors who had settled in Southeastern Connecticut. They switched from tenant farming to tenement living, leaving behind a tiny windswept seaside plot of land, and starting new lives as textile workers in a big cotton mill in Pawcatuck, a village adjoining Westerly, Rhode Island. The Lynches lived right across the street from the mill in housing owned by the manufacturer, The Crefeld Mills Corporation, producers of bedding quilts.

The 1885 Rhode Island Census described the family this way: John Lynch 47, laborer, Mary 43, wife, John Jr 20, picker tender, Michael 18, cotton weaver, Mary 17, frame spinner, Jerry 11, frame spinner, Margaret 10, daughter, and Ted (Timothy) 7, son. Life changed, but remained hard. The mill building in this drawing is empty now; and judging from maps, I would guess it was a later addition to the industrial complex. The house remains a multi-family residence with Irish names on the mailbox .

Looking for Patrick

In the top left apartment of this house in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, in 1885, lived the recently-arrived John Patrick Lynch and Mary Sullivan along with their six children. They were recent immigrants, but Lynches and Sullivans had been in the area for years—some for decades. John and Mary had nine children, but two died at young ages back in County Kerry. Their first child, Patrick, named for his grandfather, might have died at a young age too, or perhaps he came to the US ahead of them. I haven’t figured that out yet. There are a few Patrick Lynches in the area, who may be “mine,” or cousins of the same age. Actually, finding connections between all the Lynches is easy and distinguishing them is hard—for the same reason: the repetition of the same few names. John, Patrick, Jeremiah, and Michael for boys; Mary, Ellen, Catherine, and Margaret for girls. Over and over and over. My middle name is John.

Towering Over Pearl Street

Verizon Building, 373 Pearl Street, New York, NY

The Verizon Building at 375 Pearl Street, NYC, was once referred to as the ugliest tower in Manhattan. At 32 stories tall, it’s a dramatic change from when James O’Day and Ellen Shea, along with their three adult children, lived here in 1905. The O’Days’s residence was a two-story, two-family house, which remarkably, I found a 1940 photo of. It was taken by the city of New York as part of a big documentation of structures for tax purposes. Not long after, it was destroyed along with the rest of the neighborhood. The O’Days were my great-great-grandparents—both immigrants who lived in this neighborhood since the 1850s and ‘60s. These Potato Famine survivors witnessed so much change around them. Just a couple of blocks away, the enormous Brooklyn Bridge was erected over them from 1869 to 1883. Thomas Edison built his first electric power station further down Pearl Street in 1882. So much research precedes and follows these drawings—which I start on site and finish back in the studio. So much light is shined upon my family’s long hidden past .

391 Pearl Street New York, NY, circa 1912

Lost Pearl

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.”

1882 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

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.

Ann & Hope

Ann & Hope has so many connections to me. It’s probably the first place that I saw Santa Claus in the flesh. It’s definitely where I bought my first record: The Doobie Brothers Greatest Hits. My brother Tim worked at Ann & Hope for a while. My father grew up around the corner. What Ann & Hope is, is a huge red brick building in my hometown of Cumberland, Rhode Island. It was built in 1886 as one of the biggest textiles mills in the country by the Lonsdale Company. The Company owned a sprawling village of brick, called Lonsdale, which spilled over both sides of the Blackstone River—part of America’s Industrial Revolution. The Lonsdale Company was founded in Providence by the Browns (of Brown University fame and slave-trading infamy) and Ives families. They operated a collection of textile mills here and further up the river from 1833 to the 1920s. This was the last and grandest of their mills. The name of the factory came from the wives of the two Lonsdale Company founders—Ann Brown and Hope Ives. Records show that in 1900, my great-grandmother gave birth to her fourth child in a Lonsdale Company mill house a short walk from here. This leads me to believe that my great-grandfather Michael Lynch (an Irish immigrant) may have been working in one of the mills at the time. After the company closed, the properties were sold off. My grandparents bought a Lonsdale superintendent’s house and lived their whole lives there.

In 1946, the big Ann & Hope mill was bought by Martin Chase, an immigrant from Ukraine, who ended up turning part of the building into a discount store, keeping the Ann & Hope name. The business grew from selling ribbon left behind from previous tenants into a discount retail department store that sold nearly everything one could need for a home or family. Marty Chase was innovative. The Ann & Hope store was one of the first to offer big shopping carts to its customers and a generous return policy for purchases. They were also one of the first retailers to allow shoppers to roam and shop without sales clerks controlling the merchandise, and they pioneered centralized checkouts as well. The store ended up filling two floors of this enormous mill building. When I was young, my family shopped there all the time, for everything. In 1961, a man named Sam Walton visited from Arkansas to check out the operation and took many ideas back home for the start of his new discount retail store: Walmart. Harry Cunningham came here too, influencing the launch of his discount chain, Kmart. Now, sadly, the Ann & Hope store is only a shell of its former self—a small outlet for curtains and bath items. And in the last few weeks, we’ve learned that even this will close, leaving the 450,000 square foot building awaiting what’s next.

1902 Lynch birth in Cumberland, Rhode Island

Vintage Postcard, Ann & Hope Mill, Lonsdale, Cumberland, RI

Ann & Hope Mill, Lonsdale, Cumberland, Rhode Island

Old Church, New Church

St. Andrew Church, Lower East Side, New York, New York

The Church of St. Andrew in Lower Manhattan has changed dramatically over the years. It was originally built in 1818 as a Unitarian Church. In 1842, it was converted to a Catholic church. The ceiling collapsed in 1875 during a Lenten service when a storm caused the building next door to come crashing down. Many worshippers inside the building were killed or injured. St. Andrew was completely remodeled 1939, at a time when the entire neighborhood was being transformed from a busy immigrant neighborhood (considered a slum by some), to a civic center of government buildings. The church, like the rest of the neighborhood, left the past behind and looked forward.

Old St. Andrew’s Church, Manhattan, New York

The old St. Andrew was a church of my immigrant ancestors. James O’Day and Ellen Shea, my great-great-grandparents, lived around the corner from the Church for decades and I’ve found records of their children being baptized there. I assume they were very active parishioners because records in the 1898 and 1900 Brooklyn Eagle Directories of Charities list James as both the president and treasurer of The Church of St. Andrews parish. James had come to America in 1865 (presumably poor), and had slowly made a business for himself as a tailor and seller of clothes in this area known as the Five Points. In 1894, his oldest daughter Theresa, brought home from Connecticut a recent Irish immigrant named Michael Lynch (my great-grandfather), and as the story goes, the family did not approve. How they met, I have no idea. However, they were married very soon after, not in the family church of St. Andrews, but rather, in the nearby Church of the Transfiguration. It would not be the last time James O’Day didn’t approve of a daughter’s choice of an Irish immigrant husband. Perhaps he was anxious to leave the immigrant experience behind, expecting something more for his American-born children.

1898 Private Charities Listings for New York State

Urban Renewal

Alfred E. Smith Housing Development, St. James Place, New York, New York

The Alfred E. Smith Houses were built in the early 1950s. They replaced an entire neighborhood that housed my immigrant ancestors a century before. The area now known as “Two Bridges” in the Lower East Side of Manhattan had no bridges back then (neither the Brooklyn Bridge nor the Williamsburg Bridges had been built yet). The entire neighborhood was demolished as part of an urban renewal; it had long been considered a slum. This public housing development consists of 12 big apartment buildings, 15-17 stories high, and hold over 4000 people. It’s named in honor of Alfred E. Smith, a four-term New York governor who grew up in the area. He was the first Catholic to run for president, nominated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920. He lost to Herbert Hoover.

I drew from where I believe Batavia Street would have been. In 1868, my immigrant ancestors James O’Dea and Ellen Shea (my g-g-g grandparents) were starting a family there. Both had survived Ireland’s Great Famine, but had lost a number of family members. Coming from rural life in Ireland to city life in New York was their urban renewal.

Map of old New York City (O’Day address, 7 Batavia Street, marked)

Mistakes and Beginnings

93 Water Street, Stonington Borough, Stonington, Connecticut

This was the last residence of my immigrant ancestor Timothy Lynch. He and his wife, Elizabeth, lived in an apartment on the left-hand side of this big house on Water Street in Stonington, Connecticut. As I drew, well-dressed retirees walked by and waved to me, as if an artist on this street was normal. Back when the Lynches were here, it was a factory town. Like many of my immigrant ancestors, Timothy died pretty young, at age 53. (His wife, however lived to be 99 years old!) On census forms, Timothy lists himself as American, not Irish born. The fact that he had no memory of his birthplace, County Kerry, or his family’s great journey across the ocean to America in 1884 at the age of six, is striking to me. Perhaps he chose to forget. Either way, the fact that he listed Rhode Island as his home led to a research breakthrough for me this week. It helped me to discover that Rhode Island is where the Lynches first settled in the United States. An 1885 state census shows that many members of the family (including children as young as 11) worked in a textile mill in Westerly. I see other Lynches there, too. Now comes more research and, hopefully, new places to draw!

1930 Census, Stonington Borough, Connecticut

Uncertainties

6 Omega Street, Stonington Borough, Stonington, Connecticut

Was this where Timothy J. Lynch and his young family lived in Stonington Borough, Connecticut in 1910? I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. It was either here or the house next door. More research is needed. Census records can be tough to read and they can be filled with mistakes. For instance, the 1910 census says Timothy and his wife Elizabeth (Galligan) were both born in the USA. Well, maybe she was, but he definitely wasn’t. I’ve found his birth record. Timothy was an immigrant, born in County Kerry, Ireland. On the street where they lived were many other immigrants, from Germany, Portugal and Ireland, most working at the seaside factory nearby.