Bronx Irish Catholic By Peter Quinn, Contributor
In the 1950s, the Bronx was a melting pot of immigrants and first-generation families: Jewish, Italian, and Irish alike. Peter Quinn shares his story of what it was like to be a Bronx Irish Catholic, commonly referred to as a B.I.C.
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“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land! / Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, / As home his footsteps he hath turn’d…”
– Sir Walter Scott
Native land means different things to different people. To some it’s a nation with well-defined borders, like France or Sweden; to others, it transcends borders, à la Ireland or Korea. For many, I think, the term native land invokes something more intimate and parochial: a patch of earth that, no matter where life takes us, stays synonymous with home. For me, that place is the Bronx of the ’50s and ’60s, a lower-middle- / middle-middle-class agglomeration o