Is the journalism that covers New York City's Irish working-class neighborhoods fading away with the very communities it highlighted? Pat Fenton has a great piece about the tabloid journalism of Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, and Windsor Terrace in the Irish Echo Online today. He describes the first time he read a column by Hamill in the Post, sitting in Kerrigan’s bar:
I remember holding up the Post, a liberal newspaper at that time and hated in our conservative neighborhood, and asking the bartender if he knew who this guy Pete Hamill was. And I remember what he said to me. ”He’s that effing Communist from down on 7th Avenue. And he went to Holy Name School, too,” he said, shaking his head, as he mentioned the parochial school we all went to. He said more, but I don’t remember it.
All that stuck in my mind was that he was writing about us. Our world. And I knew then for the first time that I wanted to be a writer.
He goes on to talk about how the coverage of the "daily ruck" of Irish-American lives is disappearing, but he doesn't go into why it is, exactly. With the spreading out of families, and the rapid gentrification of previously insular neighborhoods, it's difficult to expect the same daily ruck to go on. Not that Fenton expects it--he's just writing it a beautiful eulogy, perhaps.
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