Emmigration: From Tipperary to Philadelphia

It's not an action-packed video, but the song "Off to Philadelphia" is interesting. It's the tale of an Irish lothario who has broken the hearts of too many girls in Tipperary, so he must leave for Philadelphia. Our protagonist Paddy O'Leary shows false bravado. He claims there is 'no man bolder', but at the end of the song he doesn't want to leave Ireland. It must be hard to be forced from your home -- he's a sympathetic cad.

I like the video -- the setting looks right for the Depression. I imagine this record being played on old Victrolas in Germantown parlors. And I can almost hear a rowdier version being sung by a boisterous bunch in a local Irish pub. It's also easy to imagine Paddy disembarking at Ellis Island, however, Philadelphia was an important immigrant port from the eighteenth century right up to the 1980s.

It's unlikely that he emigrated during the Depression. Matthew O' Brien wrote in Erie-Ireland: a Journal of Irish Studies "...the Immigration Restriction Acts has often been exaggerated to provide an explanation for the decline in transatlantic migration between Ireland and the United States...However, the new criteria for admission would eventually be overshadowed by long-term assimilative pressures and the calamitous event of the Great Depression."

Where did Paddy disembark in Philadelphia? That depends on when he traveled. According to Fredric M. Miller, who wrote for the Balch Institute Online, "From the 1870s through the early 1920s the waterfront was a bustling place, especially around the Washington Avenue wharves where the American and Red Star Lines docked. This was an area of warehouses, factories, sugar refineries, freight depots and grain elevators, all connected to the vast yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad...Shortly before World War I the surging immigrant traffic spread to other Philadelphia piers. By 1912, the Red Star Line had a pier on Reed Street in South Philadelphia; the North German Lloyd landed north of Washington Avenue at Fitzwater Street; and the Allan Line docked at Callowhill Street."

I think Paddy was a Washington Avenue type. He wanted to be near the action, despite his dirge at song's end. He probably ends up in Germantown, even though most immigrants who entered the U.S. in Philadelphia left the city for elsewhere. He never gets back to Tipperary.

It is a long way, after all.

Lyrics:
"Off to Philadelphia"