Knight Persons

No Irish Need Apply.

The faded sign hangs beside the bar at the Knights of St. Patrick hall in New Haven, a reminder of the world in which its founding members lived—a New Haven that often excluded them from employment and housing and, once they’d worked their way into the system, membership in the city’s social clubs. So they founded their own.

The Irish club—and other immigrant clubs like it—became a “home away from home” for new Americans, says member Bernadette LaFrance, herself the daughter of immigrants. “Having a network of people who were already established or becoming established in professions” was important to those who had just arrived, LaFrance says. “When you had a connection or you knew someone… it was helpful and [gave] them a chance to get established and become [part of] the melting pot that is New Haven.”

The principle still applies. “I have very early memories of being both here and at the Gaelic Club in East Haven,” LaFrance says. When more settled Americans “would have family gatherings and get together with family, we’d go to the clubs.”

The Knights of St. Patrick’s unassuming hall on upper State Street was busy on a recent Wednesday evening, with at least two different organizations holding meetings and a small clutch of members communing at the bar, dubbed Gooley’s Tavern in honor of Daniel R. Gooley, a past president. On the wall near the front door, a photo montage of 42 well-dressed 19th-century men bearing serious expressions commemorates the club’s founding on St. Patrick’s Day, 1878.

The timing, of course, is no accident. The organization takes its name from the venerated patron saint of Ireland, whose March feast day is still celebrated with the rollicking Greater New Haven St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Ensconced in a nearby corner of the hall is a life-sized statue of the saint, holding aloft his walking stick adorned with a gilded shape suggesting a shamrock. He stands on a black snake, representing his legendary banishment of snakes from the Emerald Isle. The artifact was rescued from the old St. Patrick’s Church on the corner of Wallace Street and Grand Avenue, which was torn down in 1966. Click here to continue reading.