The Fal of St. Brigid's Hall

The Fall of St. Brigid’s Hall

 The December 29, 2015 Buffalo News article was prosaic enough. It denoted the razing of St. Brigid’s Community Center which sat across the street from St. Brigid’s Church, on Fulton and Louisiana Streets, in Buffalo’s Old First Ward section.

The article described the meeting hall as a place where neighborhood people held union and political meetings. It also served as a site for planning the many St. Patrick’s Day Parades in years past. One could only wonder at the fiery oratory that must have been tossed back and forth in meetings here, during the Scooper’s Strike of the early 1900’s. It was serious stuff. Men died during that strike, before some ease was achieved from the death grip that Ward and Waterfront Boss Fingy Conners held on the area.

 And the host of Parades planned there would elicit a smile and the telling of many often told tales of the “creature” and how some of the lads fell under her grip during this most Irish of all holidays. The list of nicknames of those who met there, is still legendary, names like "Diapers Reardon" and "Harbor lights O’Brien." The Irish always had a sense of humor, tragic humor maybe, but humor still the same

 Like most sons of the First Ward, I didn’t really know much about the center. I had grown up a few miles away in nearby South Buffalo. But, the address alone triggered a wash of memories for me. Two of the Martin family’s homesteads, from another century, one on Louisiana St. and one at Fulton and Marvin had stood nearby. Scores and hundreds of relatives of the Martin clan had attended many of those meetings talked about in the News article. Unfortunately, like most working class families, we have no written record of the life and times of the four generations before me that wandered hither and yon in these storied ethnic environs. Whispers of memories, from the older relatives, occasionally crossed my consciousness at wakes and weddings long past. The Tevingtstons, The Martins, the Driscolls and a rota of others ancestors had once lived and interacted here. How I wish the walls of that storied hall could talk and tell me of their life and times, now but unknown except for the fading surfaces of slate and marble tombstones in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Lackawanna.

What colorful tales of men and women struggling to make it through the day would emerge, stories of Irish immigrants learning to read and write their own language and carve out a trade with which to make their living in the new land. It would be a saga of laughter and the tears of the various inequities that faced all such people who lived on the margins of prosperity when their own first came to America. God Bless the land for taking all of us in.

 The much-respected Memories Museum, in the nearby Valley section, is now the only real repository of who and what we were as a people for those early generations of Irish Immigrants. Bless the souls of its proprietors who steadfastly refused to let slip away the trace of our own during those early years.

Many have labored diligently to translate those ancestral whispers into print. Two of my own books and a dozen or so interesting accounts, by other sons and daughters of the First Ward, have tried to relate a tale or two and give meaning to a people who came to a great land with nothing. They rose through the ranks, with the help of the religious, like the sainted Nuns who worked and taught at St. Brigid’s.

 Our Thanks to the Buffalo News for featuring this routine workaday event. Those of us, who live very far from home, might not have known that another part of our heritage had slipped beneath the wrecking ball. It is now but another story to be recorded and kept faithfully at the Memory’s Museum, for those future sons and daughters, of the Old First Ward, to come back and read with interest, the tale of who they are and were.

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                         Joseph Xavier Martin