its poor haven" (Nichols 2003). Poor and having few marketable skills, many Irish settled in the North End neighborhood and along the waterfront there, ravaged by disease and living in "one-room decrepit apartments and run-down boarding houses-all in a neighborhood comprising less than 70 acres traditionally used for housing (the remaining 30 acres comprised waterfront warehouses and wharves)" (Nichols 2003). Worse, natives of Boston were not happy to see the Irish paupers come to America, so they were not well received and became the victims of "incessant suffering and discrimination" (Nichols 2003). Later generations of immigrants such as the Portuguese, European Jews, and Italians were to have greater resources and competitive skills that would enable them to adjust more readily to life in the North End, but the Irish had none of these (Nichols 2003). Thus, life for the immigrant Irish population of the North End was unrelievedly hard.
Possibly because of their difficult struggles, the Irish worked hard to change conditions for their kind in the North End. As a result, Irishmen soon grew to be powerful in politics. By 1880, Boston claimed over 70,000 Irish within its boundaries, and by 1890, Boston had the distinction of becoming "the only city in the United States (with populations in excess of 200,000) where the Irish represented more than half of the foreign-born population" (Nichols 2003). The Irish had begun to take over. Soon there was a flurry of elections in which Irishmen were elected to office. Patrick Collins was in 1882 elected the first Irish-born Congressman from Boston, followed by Hugh O'Brien two years later who was the city's first Irish-Catholic mayor and later John F. Fitzgerald, a resident of the North End (Nichols 2003). In 1914, the first Irish-Catholic Governor of Massachusetts, David Ignatius Walsh, was elected, and then "there began a succession of Irish-American mayors that would span t...