They came seeking what was unattainable at home. They found something else, but they lost something in the process. And while we celebrate how successful the Irish have been - the O'Neills, the O'Dwyers, the Quills and the Kennedys; the list is long - let us also spare a thought for the unknown and unsung. Those who lost.
New York took them all in. But the city is as cold and impersonal as the statue in the harbour. She has an insatiable appetite for different backgrounds: she swallows whole people steeped in their particular cultures, and she swallows the cultures as well. While the parents mixed only with other Irish, New York stole their children and made them her own. The children mixed with Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Puerto Ricans and black Americans. But always Americans. Even the other Irish children were American too - whether or not their parents thought so.
The New York which greeted the Irish immigrant in the 1940s and 1950s was a mixed blessing of bars and ballrooms. Sundays always meant Mass followed by the trip to Gaelic Park in the Bronx, for hurling and football. From the GAA dinner dances in Queens, to feiseanna ceoil in Fordham, more dances in Manhattan and an endless line of Irish bars in between, the Irish knew where to find their own. And they always had a good time. To be Irish meant to drink.
The tough business types saw the writing on the wall. They worked and saved and got their families out of the city and into the more leafy and prosperous Americanised suburbs. They successfully adopted the "Protestant work ethic". Those not-so-tough stayed and enjoyed themselves. Perhaps, it is said, a little too much - but who could blame them? Money was something they were not used to being in control of. New York proved a tough teacher in the end, destroying any half-held hopes. As for the Irish children brought up under the flashing neon Budweiser and Miller signs on New York City streets, you rarely hear about them - the children who eventually drifted into the bars themselves or else into easily available drugs. Their parents had celebrated their Irishness in all the right ways - with plenty of parties, music, sports and craic. But alcohol abuse hovered too close and struck too often. New York doesn't cradle or defend its children. It is stark and brutal to its unprotected.
We often hear the Italian stories, the Jewish stories, but what of the Irish stories? Maybe it was just my neighbourhood in the Bronx where the line of apartment blocks was broken only by the Irish bars and the odd shop. Only a small percentage of all the families living there were not touched by some affliction, mostly alcohol or drug-related. So many tragedies.
The neighbourhood was mixed, butit was first and foremost an Irish one. Our survival odds weren't so good.
I'm still acquainted with a few who were left intact. We never really leave the place. Maybe it never leaves us.
Patricia Leahy is the daughter of Terry and Patricia Leahy from, respectively, Urlingford and Dublin. Terry played hurling for Kilkenny and won all-Ireland medals in 1939 and 1947 before emigrating with his wife to New York in 1949. Patricia was born in the Bronx in 1953 but came home to Ireland in 1981.