66th to 75th Streets, was a pleasure ground for New Yorkers fleeing their tenement traps. It had beer gardens, games of chance and strength, amusements and oddities, picnic tables. On this Sunday, it was transformed into the largest rally of Irish yet on the continent. The festival was ostensibly a benefit to help the widows and families of those killed at Bull Run—admission, 25 cents a person. But it became a recruitment drive for an Irish brigade that would be formed out of the New York 69th, with units from other parts of the Northeast. Meagher on Slievenamon Mountain in 1848 was a boy
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