About this listing
Sports arena and gathering place enjoyed by Irish immigrants
Place Details
Borough : Bronx
Neighborhood : Kingsbridge
Place Matters Profile
By Deenah Vollmer
Gaelic Park ties Irish Americans to their cultural history. Located in the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the northeast Bronx, Gaelic Park is a gathering place for Irish immigrants and Irish Americans. Serving as the Bronx home for the Gaelic Athletic Association of Greater New York (NY-GAA), the park still hosts Irish football and hurling matches every weekend. West of Broadway on the north side of 240th Street, near Manhattan College, the park features a playing field, dance hall, pub and restaurant, and for over 70 years has held sporting events, dances, weddings, meetings, political rallies, and concerts featuring both old and new Irish music.
"When you enter Gaelic Park you are neither in Ireland or America, but somewhere in between," writes doctoral student Sarah Ellen Brady. Brady, who is writing her thesis at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts on Gaelic Park's cultural significance to the Irish community in New York, is quoted in Cahi O'Doherty’s article "Getting Inside the
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By Deenah Vollmer
Gaelic Park ties Irish Americans to their cultural history. Located in the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the northeast Bronx, Gaelic Park is a gathering place for Irish immigrants and Irish Americans. Serving as the Bronx home for the Gaelic Athletic Association of Greater New York (NY-GAA), the park still hosts Irish football and hurling matches every weekend. West of Broadway on the north side of 240th Street, near Manhattan College, the park features a playing field, dance hall, pub and restaurant, and for over 70 years has held sporting events, dances, weddings, meetings, political rallies, and concerts featuring both old and new Irish music.
"When you enter Gaelic Park you are neither in Ireland or America, but somewhere in between," writes doctoral student Sarah Ellen Brady. Brady, who is writing her thesis at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts on Gaelic Park's cultural significance to the Irish community in New York, is quoted in Cahi O'Doherty’s article "Getting Inside the GAA" (The Irish Echo, 26 July 2006) as saying, "Because it's in the Bronx--and in a way, it’s not in the Bronx--it creates a space where things can happen. I mean, yes it was just a pub, and a field, but it was also a theater pit, and an arena--it can become all of these things, depending on the need and the occasion. No other ethnicity in New York has a cultural space that is anything remotely like it."
The elevated rail line that encloses the field on the north side creates a distinctly New York backdrop to a field that could otherwise be anywhere. The arena mimics a traditional Irish stadium with a pub and restaurant directly adjacent to the playing field. For years, families have traveled from New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey to attend the weekend festivities and sports games at the park. "Every single Sunday from June to October, my parents carried, dragged or pushed their seven children to the Irish football games in Gaelic Park," Julie White wrote in the Riverdale Press on October 18, 1984.
"If you were visiting Irish from 'home,' first you saw Gaelic Park, then St. Patrick's and, if you had time, the Empire State Building,” White also wrote. Gaelic Park was New York's biggest cultural meeting point and place to socialize. The park is one of the only places in the United States for traditional Irish games.
The land was purchased in 1926 by the NY-GAA and first opened in 1928. The NY-GAA ran the park for 10 years until it was forced into bankruptcy and the city took over. It used to be called Innisfail Park, but has been called Gaelic Park since the 1950s. In 1941 it was leased again to John "Kerry" O'Donnell, who ran the park with his family and friends. By 1960, more than 50 percent of the Irish in New York lived in the Bronx or Queens. In the '70s the park was famous for outdoor concerts. In 1991 Manhattan College took over the park and made the official name The Gaelic Park Sports Center. The NY-GAA, who still operate the park, renovated the well-worn field in 2007, adding turf and new dressing rooms.
For more than 70 years, the park has hosted Ireland's national sport, hurling, which is the second fastest field game in the world. Played on a grassy field, the game involves two teams of 15 players who use a hurley, a curved stick, and sliotar, the leather ball, to score goals against the other team. Hurling season lasts from Easter through late September, and games are still held every weekend. Irish football games are also played. In fact, the Irish Lavey ladies football team recently traveled to Gaelic Park from Ireland to take part in the 12th annual Budweiser 7-a-side football tournament.
As of 2011, girls still put on their Sunday best to go to the park and boys still come to look for jobs--and girls of course. According to John Phelan, the NY-GAA's Treasurer, Gaelic Park remains a landmark location crucially linked to Irish American heritage.
