At Least They Can’t Blame Robert Moses For The Subways . . .

Free association: With the dollar what it is, and foreclosures what they are, maybe it’s time to put the Irish back in Irishtown:

On Sunday, a little more than 200 people gathered in the Knights of Columbus hall on Beach 90th Street in the Rockaways to dance, have a drink and travel back in time to Irish Town, a cluster of bars and bungalows that served as a summer refuge for Irish New Yorkers until it was razed 50 years ago to make way for high-rise apartments.

To hear the recollections, one would think Irish Town was a piece of heaven in Queens that had dropped out of the sky and nestled along the boardwalk from Beach 116th Street to Rockaways Playland. (Not to be confused with the Irishtown in Woodside, Queens.)

. . .

Like many visitors to Irish Town, George Lang, 67, lived in a railroad apartment on the West Side of Manhattan — his family paid $38 a month — and worked on the waterfront. Mr. Lang, whose father was a tugboat captain, became a longshoreman.

“My relatives were sea people from County Wicklow, and in New York they gravitated to the piers, the waterfront,” he said. “All my friends met their wives down in Irish Town. Back then, all the families seemed to know each other. The mothers would tell each other, ‘If my kid needs a smack, you give it to him.’ You don’t have that today.”

Beers were a nickel, he said, and since the bars, like the Dublin House, Flynn & McLoughlin’s, Gildeas, Leitrim Castle, the Shamrock, O’Gara’s and O’Donnell’s, stocked the same-size glasses, customers could roam from one bar to another to buy discounted refills.

At another table at the Knights of Columbus on Sunday, Patrick McGrath, 80, told of how he grew up, one of 12 children, on a farm in the County Mayo town of Cong, where the movie “The Quiet Man” was filmed. He came to New York as a teenager, and he met his wife, Margaret, in Irish Town.

“If you got arrested for fighting, we had a police captain who was very religious,” Mr. McGrath explained. “He’d take you to Mass the next morning and then let you go without a ticket.”

The Rockaways, which was known as the Irish Riviera, “was a paradise for the Irish,” he said, “but the subway ruined that.”

Sister Peggy Tully and her identical twin, Mary Kelly, both 64, emphasized that Irish Town was not all about drinking. “It was good, clean fun,” she said. “I would see people on the boardwalk saying the rosary.”

Location Scout: The Rockaways.