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of fever, and a report that as many as fifty persons had died during a single crossing was no surprise. The lucky arrivals were the healthy ones. A healthy male could find work as a laborer for seventy-five cents a day, and a healthy girl could work as a housemaid for room and board and a dollar a week. The sick were another matter.
    All ships entering the port of New York were inspected by a port physician, and any passenger or crew member found ailing was sent to the hospital at the Quarantine Station on Staten Island. The Station, on the northeastern tip of the island, was located on thirty acres of ground and consisted of two hospitals, built to accommodate four hundred patients, plus a special smallpox hospital which could handle fifty cases at a time, and a workhouse for the destitute. By 1847, with as many as a hundred sick persons per arriving shipload, the hospitals were hopelessly overcrowded, and shanty outbuildings were thrown together to house the overflow. Inside, conditions were, at best, deplorable. Patients were placed on iron beds upon which a thin layer of straw was spread. The hospitals were understaffed, and doctors were cruel or indifferent; male nurses abused and beat patients for minor infractions. The kitchens were filthy, the food uneatable, and the sanitary arrangements hopelessly primitive. Even the officials of the hospital admitted that things were in “a bad state,” that the roofs leaked and that the patients’ beds were often soaking wet. A reporter from the New York Tribune visited the hospital, was shocked by what he saw, and wrote that there was not a single patient in the place who was not Irish.
    A few patients who were strong enough to do so managed to escape from the hospital by stealing small rowboats and rowing the five and a half miles to Manhattan. And so it was inevitable that “ship fever” made its way quickly to the city. In the spring of 1847 an epidemic of typhus and typhoid fever broke out in New York, and 1,396 deaths were reported. The actual figure wasunquestionably higher because, although one was supposed to report all such deaths, there was no penalty for not doing so.
    Meanwhile, Staten Island had become a wealthy summer resort for rich New Yorkers, and a number of fine Greek Revival mansions lined its shores. Staten Islanders were soon complaining about the hordes of “diseased Irish” in their midst, and one property owner, Robert Hazard, claimed that the stench from the hospital was so unbearable that he had to close the windows of his house, Nautilus Hall, whenever the wind was blowing from that direction. Local indignation finally came to a head in 1858 when a group of Staten Islanders rioted, stormed the hospital, and burned it to the ground. Many patients perished in the blaze.
    Manhattan for the Irish had, in the meantime, become a city of cave- and cellar-dwellers, with families crowded into downtown basements and dug-out hollows beneath the floors of buildings. One cellar, beneath 50 Pike Street, measured ten feet square and eleven feet high with a single tiny window. In this room lived two Irish families, ten persons in all. In another cellar below 78 James Street an investigator found, lying on some straw, the corpse of a woman who had died of exposure and starvation. The single room contained no furniture, the floor was wet, and the woman’s husband and five children sat “moaning” in a corner. All were Irish immigrants who had landed in New York three weeks earlier. In the 1840’s the problem of Irish beggars in the streets—including old women and small children—had reached such proportions that the Tribune demanded sternly, “Cannot this be stopped?”
    For many of the Irish poor, drink—“the curse of the Irish”—became the quickest path to forgetfulness of suffering and poverty. It wasn’t long before “Irish” became synonymous with drunkenness, rowdyism, bar