In Search of the Lace Curtain: Residential Mobility, Class Transformation, and Everyday Practice among Buffalo’s Irish, 1880—1910

Abstract

This article addresses social and spatial aspects of intraethnic identity transitions within an American city between 1880 and 1910. Set within a theoretical framework that views urban spaces as social and cultural creations that in turn affect the construction of identities, it focuses on Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants in Buffalo, New York. Evidence is initially presented on their intergenerational residential movements within the city at a time of widening social distinctions and occupational mobility. This is then supplemented by material from more qualitative sources, chiefly a diocesan newspaper and an “urban-ethnic novel.” While Irish American popular culture drew broad lines between working-class “shanty” lifestyles and those of a more respectable “lace-curtain” middle class during this era, the Buffalo evidence demonstrates these categories to be overdrawn and of almost caricature quality. In bringing the upwardly mobile portion of the group into focus, however, the article considers not simply the occupational characteristics of moving households and their destinations but also the sources and effects of place-based imaginations within the city and the relatively neglected roles of homes as sites of socialization and identity negotiation within Catholic parishes. Pursuing these latter lines of inquiry also enriches understandings of the place of women in the process of Irish American social mobility.