The Tip: Shoe Shops, American Dreams, and the Ultimate Irish-American Hard Luck Story

Abstract

The Brockton-Irish story may, in many respects, be representative of Irish-American neighborhoods located in large urban centers of immigrant Irish settlement, but we need to know more about life in the smaller ethnic Irish neighborhoods to be sure of this assertion. We also need to record personal recollections of life in The Tip and other such locales from the children of the immigrant generations while we still can. This is an attempt to record the remembrances of one of The Tip’s own and frame them within an evolving Irish-American historical narrative. The story of the Tip, as we will see, presents a case-study of the Irish-American experience that fills in some of the enduring gaps in the historical narrative while revealing one of the enduring ironies within its familiar historical course.