Historic Photos and Prints Gallery

Map of NYC and Its Wards in 1855

A Five Points Funeral

Exterior of the Emigrant Savings Bank

Interior of the Emigrant Savings Bank in New York

The deposit ledger for Mary Mulvey, a customer of the EISB

The test book used by the Emigrant Savings Bank to verify customers

The interior of a boarding house owned and operated by Emigrant Savings Bank depositors Sandy and Kate Sullivan

Notice of retirement of Timothy Golden, a New York City police officer and Emigrant Savings Bank depositor

photo of Emigrant Savings Bank customer Matthew Brennan

Dividend Day at the the Bowery Savings Bank in 1870

depiction of famine victims by Cork artist James Mahony (1810–1879), commissioned by The Illustrated London News, 1847

Steerage compartment of ship, 1851

Interior of ship, steerage compartment

Tenement house fire in 1860

The Montezuma, a ship that carried many Emigrant Savings Bank depositors to the United States

Baxter Street tenements where many Emigrant Savings Bank customers lived

Alderman Barry's Saloon on Pearl St., New York City

The Bowery Boy Riot of 1857 

This block of Worth Street west of Baxter in the Sixth Ward housed hundreds of Famine immigrants, especially those from the Lansdowne estate on southwest Kerry. 

This Berenice Abbott photo shows the hulking gas tanks that stored the gas from the New York Gas Works (The buildings in the foreground of the photo were built after the Famine immigrants arrived.).

Many Irish immigrants, especially those from Castlegregory in Kerry, took jobs shoveling coal into these huge "retorts" at the New York Gas Works.

Although this image of the Five Points neighborhood was painted twenty years before the Famine Irish arrived, the image conveys a sense of why the neighborhood was so notorious.

This replica of a Famine-era cabin sits in Gleninchiquin Park in the parish of Tuosist in southwest County Kerry.  Hundreds of the parish's residents emigrated to New York in the 1850s.

This image of Faithful Place in central Dublin dates from about 1900, but it would not have looked very different fifty years earlier when the Famine emigrants left Ireland for America.

This image of Cornmarket Street in the city of Cork dates from about 1900, but the square would not have looked very different fifty years earlier.

Ireland's County Cavan, which sent many emigrants to New York, is a lake-filled region of north-central Ireland.  

Corlears Hook as it looked around 1875 from a tower of the still incomplete Brooklyn Bridge.