ABSTRACT
For one thing, devout and indifferent alike lived surrounded by the symbols of their Catholicism. Irish districts, like the Middle West Side of Manhattan, were thickly filled with churches, some fitting neatly into the rows of tenements, others towering above the adjoining buildings. On the West Side in 1901 there were eleven Catholic churches in the two miles from 23rd Street to 60th Street, one every three or four streets. And a study, published in 1905, of West Side working-class life claimed that all the Irish Catholic homes visited by the author were decorated with pictures of Christ and the saints.4
