Eamon Loingsigh's Blog, page 13
January 27, 2017
The Girl Queen, Anna Lonergan
[image error]Men are animals. There’s no use in romanticizing it.
All he wants is territory, whether that be dominating his place of work, or a woman’s body.
Put it on my gravestone, I don’t care: Men are animals.
Well, I’m eighteen now and I can stand up for myself. And I don’t have to do things the way my mother Mary did.
I mean just look at her, the picture of a defeated woman: scarred from head to toe by a man’s abuse.
My father threw a pan of hot grease on my mother when I was a four years-old.
Now, after giving birth to fifteen of his children, she carries the wounds of man’s ownership like a branded cow.
I will not follow her lead.
From the beginning I was a religious girl.
I prayed to God that he would save us from the poverty of Brooklyn’s Irishtown and I spent almost as much time at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church as I did caring for my younger siblings.
My older brother Richie though, he is going to be a great man.
When I was seven years old, he was run over by a Brooklyn trolley.
Bill Lovett was there. He pulled off his tie and wrapped it around Richie’s leg so he
[image error]
Mugshot: Richie “Pegleg” Lonergan
didn’t bleed to death.
Richie just stared between the trolley tracks where the bottom part of his leg laid there, motionless.
Richie was never the same after that, but he owed his life to Lovett.
One day when I was fifteen, my mother made Richie go see Dinny at the headquarters of the gang that dominated labor on the Brooklyn waterfront, the White Hand, they were called.
I was in the alley with her and my siblings, since women aren’t allowed in there.
When Red Donnelly, the dockboss of the Navy Yard made fun of Richie, Richie beat him into submission in front of everybody.
It was then and there that Dinny and Lovett decided that Richie was the future, and promptly began a war between each other to win him.
Meehan struck first: he opened a bike shop for my mother, but with terms: Richie would work for the gang.
And kill for it, too.
Right around the same time the Easter Rising occurred in Ireland, great changes came to the Brooklyn waterfront as well.
The International Longshoreman’s Association tried recruiting us Irish laborers in the north and the Italians of the south to work together.
In response, Jonathan G. Wolcott from the New York Dock Company hired the White Hand to kill the recruiter, Thos Carmody.
The fact was, however, that the White Hand Gang was losing power.
So Dinny Meehan took control.
He had Richie kill some worthless piece of garbage.
Mick Gilligan was his name.
Gilligan had stepped between Lovett and Meehan and broke the code of silence.
Not only was Meehan taking back control within the gang, but he was also showing everyone that my big brother Richie was loyal to him, along with all the other teenagers that followed him and the many boys in the Lonergan family.
All hell broke lose after that.
Dinny Meehan’s Irish bhoys ran through the old dock neighborhoods beating anyone that was loyal to the Italians or the ILA or the NY Dock Co.
Lovett even helped him do it.
It came to be known as “A Day for Legends,” when the Irish took back the docks.
But Meehan set up Lovett’s righthand man for all the damage that was done.
Non Connors, an old and very loyal friend of Lovett, was jailed.
Although Lovett was weakened, he vowed revenge on Meehan.
As the dockboss of Red Hook, Lovett organized a revolt and proclaimed sovereignty there.
But Meehan is a powerful man, and he manipulated the waterfront winds in his
[image error]
Red Hook, Brooklyn
favor.
By making a deal with the Italians (that lived in the Red Hook neighborhood) and the ILA, Meehan allowed an Italian hit man to kill Lovett.
But Lovett is a gamey fellow, and he turned the tables on Sammy de Angelo.
Though Lovett was charged for murder, he plead out by joining the army and heading “over there” to the war in Europe.
With Lovett gone, we Lonergans had no choice but to declare our loyalty to Meehan and the White Hand.
Eventually we learned Lovett was killed in battle.
Meehan then sent a suitor for me to marry our family to the White Hand, but I sent Liam Garrity away against my mother’s wishes.
“Why not consider it, Anna?” My mother pleaded. “They feed us, you know. And times are bad for our like.”
“I won’t marry that Liam Garrity boy because we ain’t gypsies, that’s why,” I said.
The winters were harsh back then, and two of my younger siblings died.
When the men came back from the war, they brought with them some terrible disease that swept through Irishtown and beyond.
With the war over, the waterfront had less shipping contracts and poverty reared its ugly face.
My mother again begged me to consider marrying the Garrity boy. [image error]
Although times were tough, it was burying babies that broke me once and for all.
Especially Tiny Thomas, who had clung to me as if I was his mother.
All of this drove me back to St. Ann’s where I spent many hours inside the candlelit church praying for my family.
Father Larkin promised to help and talked me through my tears.
More importantly, he cried for me when I said I wanted to kill Meehan with my own hands, which swayed me from doing it.
I had never seen a man cry before.
And then a miracle happened: Bill Lovett rose from the dead.
The man who saved my brother Richie’s life and fought against Meehan had suddenly appeared like a spirit, although he was damaged from the celestial journey.
Right away Lovett wanted Red Hook again and had Richie show him his loyalty by killing Meehan’s cousin, Mickey Kane, who had taken over as dockboss there.
I know that Bill Lovett cares for my family, and although he’s an animal like all other men, I see fate in him. Kindness even. [image error]
Well, maybe there isn’t much kindness in him, but at least I know he’ll care for us and he has God on his side, too.
I can feel it.
I’m going right now down to Red Hook to see him. I’m eighteen now and I know what a man likes, and I’ll give it to him too.
I’ll give him what a queen has, her temple.
After he marries me, of course. I am Catholic after all.
January 14, 2017
FanFiction: The Angles of Thos Carmody
February, 1919
In 1894 my mother said I was born in a place called Dungarvan where the waterfront borders the neighborhoods and the ships bring in goods, just as they do in New York.
Well, I don’t remember any of that.
On the ship manifest they shortened my name from Thomas, to Thos.
Now I’m Thos Carmody, Treasurer, New York. [image error]
Like other kids on the Chelsea docks, I had to fight to get noticed. But by the time I was ten, I was running envelopes for the Tammany and letting Dick Butler and King Joe Ryan fight over me.
Seems I had a brain that worked good.
Thing is, you don’t really have to fight if you have strong eyes and established men backing you.
On top of that, I had twenty kids on my pay that walked with me throughout the day, from pier to dock giving orders for Silent Charlie of Tammany and King Joe of the longshoremen union.
I was apparently so well-liked that those two big shots weren’t willing to risk the chance of fighting over me.
I sat smiling between them.
One day Owney Madden himself sent a tough named Tanner Smith to get me to pay tribute in his neighborhood.
Two weeks later, Owney was sent up Sing Sing way and I told Tanner Smith to fuck off.
Tanner didn’t like that much.
And I sent my mother to Poughkeepsie for good, just in case.
In the Hudson street saloons, I heard stories about Red Shay Meehan.
The Potashes, they called themselves. Greenwich Village bhoys. A motley bunch o’ West Ireland micks.
A big family, the Meehans, until they weren’t.
The Hudson Dusters had it out for the Meehans and within a year the whole gallop of’em died off except an eleven year-old cousin named Dinny, who crossed the ferry to Brooklyn on a stormy day with his dying father.
Landed on Bridge Street.
Times had changed on’em. And for some, time is a curse.
But what’s the difference between a curse and a prayer anyway?
Depends on the angle, if you ask me.
That’s what I’m good at, angles.
You see, things change and you gotta change with’em to stay on top.
What’s right one day, might be wrong the next.
The truth is a moveable feast in New York.
As long as you remember that.
[image error]
ILA men
Eventually I traded up from King Joe to T.V. O’Connor, President of the International Longshoremen’s Association. O’Connor noticed me and took me under his wing, showered me with promises.
Promises, that is, that were connected to his big plans for expansion of the ILA.
“I want you to take over Brooklyn, turn them hayseeds into red-blooded, card-holdin’ ILA men,” O’Connor said in his old country burr.
That was 1914, after the war started in Europe, but by the looks of them Brooklyn Irish bhoys, you’d think it was 1714. [image error]
Not a damn one of them had ever seen a lightbulb in his span, damn bunch of diddicoy mucks that named themselves the White Hand.
The Meehan child had grown up and re-appeared as leader of the Irish in the north Brooklyn docks, while Il Maschio, an Italian with a white streak in his hair, who worked for Frankie Yale, ran the Black Hand guinnea south.
I didn’t know where to start, so I went to Red Hook, right in the middle of them both.
Wasn’t long before Jonathan G. Wolcott himself put some big numbers on my head for trying to recruit longshoremen into the ILA.
$500 I heard, impressive.
But the New York Dock Co. has unlimited funds for keeping the union out of their territories.
No different than the gangs, really.
I saw the hit as a compliment. You know you’re important when the bid’s that high.
But I admit, I was still learning about how they did things in Brooklyn.
In Manhattan where I dragged up, it was a bit more civilized.
In Brooklyn, the past informed the Irish in the north docks under the bridges, and their ways came from the old world.
I heard from an old fellow known as The Gas Drip Bard that Dinny Meehan was summoned by the prayers of the old famine survivors of Irishtown.
Well I don’t believe much in curses and prayers, as I mentioned, but the old timers in Irishtown sure do.
And to look in Dinny Meehan’s stone-green eyes, you’d know there was something of the ancient in him.
Apparently Wolcott paid Dinny to kill me.
But Dinny passed the job off to one of my old enemies, Tanner Smith.
Owney Madden, Tanner’s old boss, got sent up by then, so Tanner tapped Dinny for a way back in the game.
But it was the ILA Tanner was gaming for.
You see, Tanner knew what it took to move up, but at heart he was a laborer and success always eluded him.
Instead of killing me, Tanner asked me to put in a good word for him at the ILA and told me to disappear for six months.
But I knew that by backstabbing the gypsy leader Dinny Meehan, Tanner and I would tangle, if you look close enough at the angle.
Only one of us will survive.
In the meantime, I high-tailed it up to Poughkeepsie to visit my Ma, then up to Buffalo where my boss T.V. O’Connor was.
But after my six month banishment, O’Connor sent me back to Brooklyn.
I hated him for that.
O’Connor wanted nothing to do with Tanner Smith, of course, and now I was being sent back down into the afray.
For the first time in my life I hadn’t succeeded in what I’d set out to do. If I couldn’t turn Brooklyn to ILA, no one could.
And now O’Connor was rubbing my nose in it.
I showed up in Brooklyn again like an angry ghost. They all thought Tanner had killed me, so I put the fear of death in superstitious fools like The Swede, one of Dinny’s larrikins.
In the Navy Yard I planted one of my guys named Henry Browne to get on the good side of the White Hand’s dockboss there, Red Donnelly.
That was my way in.
But when Bill Lovett, backed by Wolcott and the NY Dock Co., killed one of Dinny’s
[image error]
Red Hook and the NY Dock Co
enforcers and proclaimed sovereignty in Red Hook, the game changed suddenly.
In chaos, I look for opportunity.
It’s the Stoics said that, if you were wondering.
Fuel to feed the fire.
I read that once.
I was determined to make the angles come together for me in Brooklyn this time. And so Brooklyn finally turned at my demand.
Here’s how I did it.
The Adonis Social Club is owned by father and son Jack and Sixto Stabile, associates of the Prince o’ Pals, Frankie Yale. I told them we needed to make Vincent Maher, an enforcer for the White Hand who frequents the bawdyhouse females, help us send an offer to Dinny Meehan to make a trinity (the Irish love references to God):
White Hand plus Black Hand plus ILA.
Together, we’d war against Lovett and his backer, Wolcott and the NY Dock Co.
You see, you don’t go to people with an offer, you go to them with a resolution.
But things don’t turn easy in Brooklyn.
And violence ruptured the waterfront labor racket.
Under my suggestion, so to have the Italian and the Irish to work together, Dinny Meehan allowed a dago hitman to kill Lovett in Red Hook.
When that didn’t work and Lovett survived, we got a deal done with the District Attorney to charge Lovett with the murder of Sammy de Angelo (the failed hitman).
Lovett bargained out though, and was sent to the French trenches and an assured death in the Great War.
By hook or by crook, Lovett was supplanted.
And to prove myself to both the Irish and the Italian, I set up a gimmick with Maher (in the Italian side of Gowanus) to kill some kike thug of Wolcott’s.
Silverman was his name. The third confirmed man I ever had to kill, at that point.
Wolcott resigned from the NY Dock Co. not long afterward.
And so, the angles came back in my favor.
Times were good after that, except they went bad.
I got sent to the war too, and upped my confirmed kills to sixty-eight.
I was winning against life, sixty-eight to nothing.
Makes you nervous, thinking of it that way.
[image error]
Wild Bill Lovett
Well, guess who I met in the blood trenches?
Wild Bill Lovett.
You’d think he’d try to kill me right then and there, but no, we were battle brothers, in the thick.
I watched that man butcher and cut Huns in half with a machine gun. Never saw a man so elated by the rush of murdering another.
No mortal man keeping count could tally Lovett’s confirmed kills.
Them Brooklyn bhoys, I’m telling you.
A shell or a grenade burst right next to me in the trench one day.
Next thing I knew I was back in the USA just as a great fever was breaking out.
An influenza that we veterans brought home with us, so it’s said.
What a life.
They brought me back among the living in a Carolina hospital, and once I got my bearings I craved the chaos of war again.
So I moved back to Brooklyn.
I found that T.V. O’Connor’s popularity was suffering.
O’Connor had made black-handed criminal Paul Vaccarelli a VP of the ILA.
That was dumb, the ILA was mostly Irish back then.
You can guess what the reaction was.
This made King Joe, one of my old mentors, eyeball the presidency.
Well he couldn’t do it alone, of course.
With bandages only recently removed, I stormed into King Joe’s office and told him that Bill Lovett was the future of Brooklyn labor.
He listened.
I’d almost been killed twice, but I was still on the fucking job.
And the Irish always shut their mouths and open their ears when you speak of how the dead will influence the living.
“Bill Lovett ain’t dead,” I assured King Joe. “I don’t care what the Army says. He’s going right now to kill Mickey Kane in Red Hook and take it over again. He’s a crazy fuck.”
“Mickey Kane he’s gonna kill?” King Joe asked, standing up. “Dinny Meehan’s cousin?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Right now?” King Joe hoarse-coughed.
[image error]
King Joe Ryan
I nodded my scarred face at him, “In chaos you will find opportunity. Fuel to feed the fire.”
He sat down, then smiled at me, “Treasurer, New York?”
Yeah, I’ve earned it.
Treasurer, New York.
But before I kick back behind a desk, there’s only one last thing to settle.
I need to get Tanner Smith.
Before Tanner Smith gets me.
The Angles of Thos Carmody
Spoilers! If you have not read Light of the Diddicoy and Exile on Bridge Street, the first two books in the Auld Irishtown trilogy, you will find out all kinds of secrets below.
In 1894 my mother said I was born in a place called Dungarvan where the waterfront borders the neighborhoods and the ships bring in goods, just as they do in New York.
Well, I don’t remember any of that.
On the ship manifest they shortened my name from Thomas, to Thos.
Now I’m Thos Carmody, Treasurer, New York. [image error]
Like other kids on the Chelsea docks, I had to fight to get noticed. But by the time I was ten, I was running envelopes for the Tammany and letting Dick Butler and King Joe Ryan fight over me.
Seems I had a brain that worked good.
Thing is, you don’t really have to fight if you have strong eyes and established men backing you.
On top of that, I had twenty kids on my pay that walked with me throughout the day, from pier to dock giving orders for Silent Charlie of Tammany and King Joe of the longshoremen union.
I was apparently so well-liked that those two big shots weren’t willing to risk the chance of fighting over me.
I sat smiling between them.
One day Owney Madden himself sent a tough named Tanner Smith to get me to pay tribute in his neighborhood.
Two weeks later, Owney was sent up Sing Sing way and I told Tanner Smith to fuck off.
Tanner didn’t like that much.
And I sent my mother to Poughkeepsie for good, just in case.
In the Hudson street saloons, I heard stories about Red Shay Meehan.
The Potashes, they called themselves. Greenwich Village bhoys. A motley bunch o’ West Ireland micks.
A big family, the Meehans, until they weren’t.
The Hudson Dusters had it out for the Meehans and within a year the whole gallop of’em died off except an eleven year-old cousin named Dinny, who crossed the ferry to Brooklyn on a stormy day with his dying father.
Landed on Bridge Street.
Times had changed on’em. And for some, time is a curse.
But what’s the difference between a curse and a prayer anyway?
Depends on the angle, if you ask me.
That’s what I’m good at, angles.
You see, things change and you gotta change with’em to stay on top.
What’s right one day, might be wrong the next.
The truth is a moveable feast in New York.
As long as you remember that.
[image error]
ILA men
Eventually I traded up from King Joe to T.V. O’Connor, President of the International Longshoremen’s Association. O’Connor noticed me and took me under his wing, showered me with promises.
Promises, that is, that were connected to his big plans for expansion of the ILA.
“I want you to take over Brooklyn, turn them hayseeds into red-blooded, card-holdin’ ILA men,” O’Connor said in his old country burr.
That was 1914, after the war started in Europe, but by the looks of them Brooklyn Irish bhoys, you’d think it was 1714. [image error]
Not a damn one of them had ever seen a lightbulb in his span, damn bunch of diddicoy mucks that named themselves the White Hand.
The Meehan child had grown up and re-appeared as leader of the Irish in the north Brooklyn docks, while Il Maschio, an Italian with a white streak in his hair, who worked for Frankie Yale, ran the Black Hand guinnea south.
I didn’t know where to start, so I went to Red Hook, right in the middle of them both.
Wasn’t long before Jonathan G. Wolcott himself put some big numbers on my head for trying to recruit longshoremen into the ILA.
$500 I heard, impressive.
But the New York Dock Co. has unlimited funds for keeping the union out of their territories.
No different than the gangs, really.
I saw the hit as a compliment. You know you’re important when the bid’s that high.
But I admit, I was still learning about how they did things in Brooklyn.
In Manhattan where I dragged up, it was a bit more civilized.
In Brooklyn, the past informed the Irish in the north docks under the bridges, and their ways came from the old world.
I heard from an old fellow known as The Gas Drip Bard that Dinny Meehan was summoned by the prayers of the old famine survivors of Irishtown.
Well I don’t believe much in curses and prayers, as I mentioned, but the old timers in Irishtown sure do.
And to look in Dinny Meehan’s stone-green eyes, you’d know there was something of the ancient in him.
Apparently Wolcott paid Dinny to kill me.
But Dinny passed the job off to one of my old enemies, Tanner Smith.
Owney Madden, Tanner’s old boss, got sent up by then, so Tanner tapped Dinny for a way back in the game.
But it was the ILA Tanner was gaming for.
You see, Tanner knew what it took to move up, but at heart he was a laborer and success always eluded him.
Instead of killing me, Tanner asked me to put in a good word for him at the ILA and told me to disappear for six months.
But I knew that by backstabbing the gypsy leader Dinny Meehan, Tanner and I would tangle, if you look close enough at the angle.
Only one of us will survive.
In the meantime, I high-tailed it up to Poughkeepsie to visit my Ma, then up to Buffalo where my boss T.V. O’Connor was.
But after my six month banishment, O’Connor sent me back to Brooklyn.
I hated him for that.
O’Connor wanted nothing to do with Tanner Smith, of course, and now I was being sent back down into the afray.
For the first time in my life I hadn’t succeeded in what I’d set out to do. If I couldn’t turn Brooklyn to ILA, no one could.
And now O’Connor was rubbing my nose in it.
I showed up in Brooklyn again like an angry ghost. They all thought Tanner had killed me, so I put the fear of death in superstitious fools like The Swede, one of Dinny’s larrikins.
In the Navy Yard I planted one of my guys named Henry Browne to get on the good side of the White Hand’s dockboss there, Red Donnelly.
That was my way in.
But when Bill Lovett, backed by Wolcott and the NY Dock Co., killed one of Dinny’s
[image error]
Red Hook and the NY Dock Co
enforcers and proclaimed sovereignty in Red Hook, the game changed suddenly.
In chaos, I look for opportunity.
It’s the Stoics said that, if you were wondering.
Fuel to feed the fire.
I read that once.
I was determined to make the angles come together for me in Brooklyn this time. And so Brooklyn finally turned at my demand.
Here’s how I did it.
The Adonis Social Club is owned by father and son Jack and Sixto Stabile, associates of the Prince o’ Pals, Frankie Yale. I told them we needed to make Vincent Maher, an enforcer for the White Hand who frequents the bawdyhouse females, help us send an offer to Dinny Meehan to make a trinity (the Irish love references to God):
White Hand plus Black Hand plus ILA.
Together, we’d war against Lovett and his backer, Wolcott and the NY Dock Co.
You see, you don’t go to people with an offer, you go to them with a resolution.
But things don’t turn easy in Brooklyn.
And violence ruptured the waterfront labor racket.
Under my suggestion, so to have the Italian and the Irish to work together, Dinny Meehan allowed a dago hitman to kill Lovett in Red Hook.
When that didn’t work and Lovett survived, we got a deal done with the District Attorney to charge Lovett with the murder of Sammy de Angelo (the failed hitman).
Lovett bargained out though, and was sent to the French trenches and an assured death in the Great War.
By hook or by crook, Lovett was supplanted.
And to prove myself to both the Irish and the Italian, I set up a gimmick with Maher (in the Italian side of Gowanus) to kill some kike thug of Wolcott’s.
Silverman was his name. The third confirmed man I ever had to kill, at that point.
Wolcott resigned from the NY Dock Co. not long afterward.
And so, the angles came back in my favor.
Times were good after that, except they went bad.
I got sent to the war too, and upped my confirmed kills to sixty-eight.
I was winning against life, sixty-eight to nothing.
Makes you nervous, thinking of it that way.
[image error]
Wild Bill Lovett
Well, guess who I met in the blood trenches?
Wild Bill Lovett.
You’d think he’d try to kill me right then and there, but no, we were battle brothers, in the thick.
I watched that man butcher and cut Huns in half with a machine gun. Never saw a man so elated by the rush of murdering another.
No mortal man keeping count could tally Lovett’s confirmed kills.
Them Brooklyn bhoys, I’m telling you.
A shell or a grenade burst right next to me in the trench one day.
Next thing I knew I was back in the USA just as a great fever was breaking out.
An influenza that we veterans brought home with us, so it’s said.
What a life.
They brought me back among the living in a Carolina hospital, and once I got my bearings I craved the chaos of war again.
So I moved back to Brooklyn.
I found that T.V. O’Connor’s popularity was suffering.
O’Connor had made black-handed criminal Paul Vaccarelli a VP of the ILA.
That was dumb, the ILA was mostly Irish back then.
You can guess what the reaction was.
This made King Joe, one of my old mentors, eyeball the presidency.
Well he couldn’t do it alone, of course.
With bandages only recently removed, I stormed into King Joe’s office and told him that Bill Lovett was the future of Brooklyn labor.
He listened.
I’d almost been killed twice, but I was still on the fucking job.
And the Irish always shut their mouths and open their ears when you speak of how the dead will influence the living.
“Bill Lovett ain’t dead,” I assured King Joe. “I don’t care what the Army says. He’s going right now to kill Mickey Kane in Red Hook and take it over again. He’s a crazy fuck.”
“Mickey Kane he’s gonna kill?” King Joe asked, standing up. “Dinny Meehan’s cousin?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Right now?” King Joe hoarse-coughed.
[image error]
King Joe Ryan
I nodded my scarred face at him, “In chaos you will find opportunity. Fuel to feed the fire.”
He sat down, then smiled at me, “Treasurer, New York?”
Yeah, I’ve earned it.
Treasurer, New York.
But before I kick back behind a desk, there’s only one last thing to settle.
I need to get Tanner Smith.
Before Tanner Smith gets me.
December 31, 2016
Brooklyn, 2017
Like many folks, I’m ready for 2016 to end. Unfortunately, I don’t see things getting all that better for the evolution of humankind. We’re going to take a step backward
[image error]
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn
in time from some of the progress we made. But as some have pointed out, it’ll probably be good for punk rock, at least. Let’s hope it’ll be good for books about Brooklyn! Particularly those connected to the Auld Irishtown trilogy.
I’m very lucky to live in the same place I write about. Although I’m working on a different book between the Exile on Bridge Street (2016) and Divide the Dawn, which we are expecting to release in Fall 2018.
Living close to Green-Wood Cemetery, Prospect Park, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Gowanus Canal (haha) and only a few blocks away from where one of my characters (three actually) was murdered in 1925. It’s true, Richie “Pegleg” Lonergan was murdered by Al Capone and other Italians on the corner of 4th Avenue and 20th Street, a five minute walk.
[image error]
Adonis Social Club circa 1925 at 4th Ave & 20th St
The Adonis Social Club was a rundown brothel run by the Stabile family, who were associates of Capone and the Prince o’ Pals, Frankie Yale.
The building, shown in the photo, was made of wood and is gone now, obviously, but the old neighborhood is still quite working class. Yes there are lots of hipsters, but also a very large Puerto Rican, Mexican, Arabic and Asian population as well.
Immigrants. What all Americans were at some point or other. I happen to appreciate them more than your average fellow. Luckily I speak Spanish too, so I can talk to them if I like. Most of the time I’m too shy though, so I just listen to their conversations at the grocery store and on the R, N and D trains.
I don’t pray to any Gods, but I do hope for their safety in the coming year. I understand that they have limited opportunities. That they often come from violent
[image error]
al-Noor is dedicated to teaching Islamic culture and religion on 4th Avenue
countries and that those circumstances are not their fault. I also understand that they are conflicted here. Even in New York there are a lot of people here who don’t care that they value the culture of which they were born.
On my street, we have an Islamic school and Mosque, a Spanish church and funeral home, a Turkish restaurant next to a Peruvian restaurant and a busy body shop across the street owned by a Polish family as well as a Jewish bakery. I feel honored to be around them. I appreciate them and I know they are good, solid Americans.
This year I’d like to ask you something. Talk to a person of a different culture. Find out what is important to them and compare those concerns with your own. And most of all, welcome them. Tell them about your immigrant story and where your family originally came from and the trouble that caused them to come to America.
Go one then
December 29, 2016
Blurbs
Two days left to enter @Goodreads #Giveaway of EXILE ON BRIDGE STREET @eamonLoi's classic #histfic #Irish #Brooklyn https://t.co/ZuYYxMseAO pic.twitter.com/EJRGl84pj5
— Three Rooms Press (@threeroomspress) December 28, 2016
Two days left to enter @Goodreads #Giveaway of EXILE ON ...
Two days left to enter @Goodreads #Giveaway of EXILE ON BRIDGE STREET @eamonLoi's classic #histfic #Irish #Brooklyn https://t.co/ZuYYxMseAO pic.twitter.com/EJRGl84pj5
— Three Rooms Press (@threeroomspress) December 28, 2016
November 30, 2016
EXILE ON BRIDGE STREET: A book with heart
Since the beginning, the historical Exile on Bridge Street was dependent on readers to spread the word. Without much of an advertising or marketing budget, like most successful books that are pushed in front of eyeballs online, we have relied solely on merit and word-of-mouth.
Thanks to so many people in the US, Ireland and UK that have felt strongly about this book, we have been able to inspire reviewers to take a look at it. But we need more help. If you know someone who may enjoy a book about a teenage Irishman who is sent to work in Brooklyn one hundred years ago, get it for her/him. Tell your friends, post it on social media, order it online or at your local bookstore. 
Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association, recently included it
in its widely distributed newsletter. This is a huge win for Exile on Bridge Street. The thousands of libraries and bookstores in the US now know about it and can consider purchasing.
Here’s what Booklist said: “Loingsigh brings the time and place to life with rough action and dialogue in Irish brogue, but he doesn’t just glorify the violence of the gang rivalries. Instead, he portrays the families that struggle with the cold realities of a city more interested in money than the value of human lives.”
Also, Washington Independent Review of Books, a highly respected national reviewer ran a wonderful piece here.
“An intimate look at criminals whose lives have been hardened by oppression and weathered by storms, while inside their rough shells they hide soft hearts.”
There have been many other reviews as well. On top of the excellent reviews, there have been readings to packed houses in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Below are some photo highlights.
Cranford, NJ library Nov. 14, 2016. Sold every copy we brought!
Cambridge, MA, Nov. 4
Exile on Bridge Street continues to sell extraordinarily well in both Ireland and the United Kingdom. You can find copies at http://amazon.co.uk and search for the book title.
At the Artists Without Walls Showcase, The Cell Theatre Nov. 22. Sold out! photo by Mitch Traphagen
Mysterious Bookshop, Warren Street in Manhattan, Nov. 1.
Famous non-fiction writer TJ English introducing Eamon Loingsigh at Mysterious Bookshop.
November 17, 2016
November, 2016
November, 2016
by Eamon Loingsigh
We sang notes of love or die,
And now look embarrassed, naive
At our lack of vigilance
Chorus lines for the choir;
Meaningless as polite words,
Cruelty now has its vote of confidence.
On the threshold of moral despair
Boredom reigns
But lady liberty’s body stands unchanged.
A character summoned from the soul of all men
The beast who dominated
In the first book ever written about politics
We cannot feed him, we cried
Angry and righteous, America is transformed:
A repulsive delight is born.
He looks her up and down,
“Sadly, she’s no longer a 10.”
I felt angry, but anger feeds him
She can answer for her self, sure
“Nasty woman,” he called her.
I’m neutral no more.
At a party, other men find it funny too
“The prostitutes uptown must be getting expensive.”
I felt angry, but anger feeds him
She can answer for her self, sure
“I musta had jet lag,” he explained.
I’m neutral no more.
Writing from the dizzy clubs of New York
I left her in the harbor
For a vacation in Newport.
Now I see the men pushing strollers
With subdued anger, vindicated
Mothers pragmatic, stern.
I am struck by the calm,
Nauseated by restraint:
Gift shops at every corner
The armory is now a giant antiques store
Boutiques for flavored olive oils
Someone bought Python Jerky at the jerky store
A thousand channels offering options
Bookstores overflowing with titles
No one’s tired, but Starbucks is packed
They only let the boys play flag football now
You can’t ride a bike without a helmet
To our own feelings, we are a stranger
The love of peace is equaled by a lust for danger.
Yellow leaves falling by the Claiborne Bridge
Winter’s night is ahead
Fertile seeds wither
Brown in the hard ground
Barren branches like dry veins reaching
Frozen on the New England portrait, stillness abounds.
On the threshold of moral despair
Boredom reigns
But lady liberty’s face stands unchanged.
“How do you feel about going to a protest,”
she asks me.
“I’m up for it,” I say.
On the ride back to New York,
We dare not speak to our elders;
The family is split, quiet before an atom explodes.
He looks her up and down,
“If she can’t satisfy her husband, how’s she gonna satisfy you?”
I felt angry, but anger feeds him
She can answer for her self, sure
“If she wasn’t my daughter I might date her,” he smirks.
I’m neutral no more.
We take the D-Train from Brooklyn
Holding hands in sulking silence
Emerging from underground, we smile
The moon holds firm to the east
An amber sunset to the west
As his towers grope the night sky.
On the threshold of moral despair
Boredom reigns
But lady liberty’s eyes stand unchanged.
We can see her from the train too
Distant, on the horizon she assembles
Small and pragmatic, stern
Yet inside, she trembles.
America is transformed:
A repulsive delight is born.
But I hear a voice from the colors of the mind
A voice gentle and kind:
“Stay, lady stay,
Stay while the night is still ahead.”
October 10, 2016
Early Praise for EXILE
Available now for pre-order Exile on Bridge Street, due for release in the middle of this month, is already being talked about all over the place.
Irish Central, the hugely popular New York City based Irish-American magazine said,
“On the surface, Loingsigh’s book mines Brooklyn’s gory and glorious Irish past.
But it is also the quintessential read for 21st century Brooklyn.”
Brooklyn Rail, a very popular culture magazine in New York City, raved about Exile on Bridge Street saying;
“Loingsigh has an urgent story to tell. And he tells it well. This is a street-level history of how the other half has always lived, the kind of story rarely worried over in classrooms or political campaigns. Loingsigh’s great strength is his unsentimental take on the immigrant experience.”
Goodreads, a website dedicated to books and moderated by librarians and top reviewers, Exile on Bridge Street is very popular with over 600 people scheduled to read the book when it is released.
There are many reviews there already, however, due to some librarians and top reviewers having access to advance reader and digital copies. Here’s what they are saying;
“From the very first pages I was taken back to this time, fully immersed in this time period. . . extremely well written. . . so authentically portrayed and covered a period I hadn’t read before, and I quite liked Liam.”
~Diane S
“At once poetic and gritty, the docks and streets in Irishtown are depicted. . . It’s a
coming of age story as well as a wonderful piece of historical fiction, written beautifully.”
~Angela M.
“This is an astonishing story of the Irish Immigrant families arriving trying to bring their families over and living in New York City. A well-researched, thought out book – with a heart wrenching sad accounting of life in the early 1900’s.”
~Lynn Demsky
