February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The song has an appealing melody with lyrics dipped in nostalgia (“how I long for the days when we danced in the aisles”) and pride (“we started with nothing and wound up with it all”) but roughened with reality (“wakes,” “heartbreaks,” “we worked on the subways,” “we put out the fires”). About 15 years ago, it seemed to be on every singer’s lips in every New York-area pub.
The lyrics are printed at the conclusion of “That Special Place: New World Irish Stories,” a book of candid, painful, hilarious, thoughtful older-and-perhaps-wiser slices of autobiography by Terence Winch, the song’s composer. He is a founding member of Celtic Thunder, the Washington-Baltimore group that first made “When New York Was Irish” popular on their 1988 Green Linnet album, “The Light of Other Days.”
Winch’s comments about the song illustrate the Bronx-bred directness in his style: “Some people seem to think it’s too arrogant or jingoistic. I tell them: write your own version.” But he’s also a published poet — “Irish Musicians/American Friends” in 1985 remains a favorite of mine — who can evoke
an image of pinpoint vividness.
In the book’s title story, an urban adventure involving the purchase of a black-leather motorcycle jacket, 10-year-old Terence and his 49-year-old Galway-born mother ride the subway down from the Bronx to Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. “We sat on those seats that always reminded me of shellacked corn on the cob,” he writes. In scribbler parlance, that’s a perfect metaphor.
Throughout the book are references to individuals, named or not, whose odd, comic, or otherwise intriguing behavior Winch deftly describes and sometimes skewers. For those who know the East Coast Irish music scene, there’s a roman-