![]() There were once nine movie houses a short distance from each other between Windsor Terrace and Park Slope. Some worked as gravediggers at Greenwood Cemetery over on 20th Street and 9th Avenue. Others worked as sandhogs and ironworkers. “Red Mike” Quill (the founder of the Transport Workers Union) represented them. Men with names like Towey, Welsh, Walsh, and Maloney worked as trolley car operators on the McDonald Avenue line that ran out of the car barns on 19th Street and 9th Avenue. ![]() The Irish of the Windsor Terrace that I grew up in during the ’40s and ’50s made their livings working the docks of nearby Red Hook. They were places to ease the pain of mourning at a time when neighborhood wakes lasted as long as three days, and places to find out who was hiring. What kept most of them open for so long, all through World War II and into the ’50s and early ’60s, was simply a celebration of Irish working-class life in their back rooms, celebrating first holy communions and confirmations. The owners had an exact replica made of it, and they hung the old sign on a wall in the back of the bar. The original “Farrell’s” sign was blown down during a blizzard in 2011. Once within a five-block area there was one on almost every corner: Langton’s, McCauley’s, Val’s, McNulty’s, Kerrigan’s, O’Neill’s, Lanahan’s, Devaney’s, and Connie’s Corner. It’s the last Irish saloon left in a neighborhood where gentrification has moved rapidly. The writer Pete Hamill once said: “Of all the bars of the neighborhood my father might stop into, Farrell’s was the one he kept returning to until the end of his life.” It was the very first bar to open in New York after Prohibition. An old-time bar in Brooklyn, Farrell’s has served as a community center since the 1930s, and is the last marker of what was once a thriving Irish neighborhood.įarrell’s Bar, on the corner of 16th Street and 9th Avenue in Brooklyn, has been in the same location in Windsor Terrace since 1933.
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