The Tip: Shoe Shops, American Dreams, and the Ultimate Irish-American Hard Luck Story

Abstract

The One of the most colourful neighbourhoods in the great Shoe City of Brockton, Massachusetts, the Tip was home to Irish Americans who lived, dreamed, and ultimately prospered. They worked to ensure a more comfortable life for their children, and their success can be measured by the versions of the American dream lived by their descendants south of Boston and across the country; for the most part, happily ignorant of how those dreams came to be. This irony frames the story of a neighbourhood populated by successive generations of IrishAmericans, and the larger narrative of Irish-American history. We are well-versed in the major themes anchoring the Irish-American historical narrative-the story of an immigrant people who rose on the cornerstones of church, labour, education and politics to acceptability and assimilation. We are familiar with Irish-American progress in Boston, New York, and Chicago, and in the other major centres of immigrant settlement. Persistent attention to the Irish experience in these cities has produced a venerable ethnic narrative populated by prominent churchmen, journalists, labour activists and politicians. But what of smaller centres of Irish settlement? Should places like Brockton, Massachusetts, and its Irish neighbourhood The Tip be considered microcosms of large metropolitan areas like New York or Boston? While twentieth-century records allow us to track the progress of the Irish through