Getting inside the GAA

Over the years it has been a place to watch a game, or to meet with friends; it has been a place to find a job, or find romance; it has been a place to congregate or a place to avoid; it has even been a place to meet or marry your future spouse in.
Each arriving generation of Irish immigrants has vigorously laid claim to it, and each will attempt to persuade you that it was better in their own particular heyday.
What most people can agree with, however, is that Gaelic Park occupies a place of importance to the Irish community of New York that is not easy to describe to the uninitiated.
Sara Ellen Brady knows this better than most. A doctoral student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a first generation Irish American, she is currently writing a thesis on Gaelic Park’s cultural significance to the Irish community in New York.
There’s much more to it than that, of course, and she would be the first to tell you. A straight talking, fiercely articulate academic with a background in theater and performance studies, she instinctively understood Gaelic Park’s role as a space for Irish cultural performance, and in many ways she’s the perfect candidate for the job. When she first began interviewing regulars about the venue, they concluded that she must be writing its history. Even today she is still commonly introduced as “the historian,” and she’s learned not to argue the case. The regulars who encounter her realize that she is respectful of her subject, and more and more of them are willing to talk to her now.
“The first time I visited Gaelic Park was in the summer of 1999,” she relates. “I had never heard of the place. I was visiting some friends in Woodlawn – all of whom were recent Irish immigrants – and I could not believe the trouble they had taken to look their best that Sunday afternoon. My Irish friends – two men and one woman – emerged from the house like they were hitting the runway at Fashion Week. They were showered, made up, cologned, coiffed, in their best nightclub outfits and ready to go. It was exactly as if they were going to a club or to see a play. Before we even got there I realized that Gaelic Park must be a special place.”
Ever the theater academic, Brady soon became fascinated by the weekly performances she saw enacted within Gaelic Park itself: the sporting events, dances, concerts, contests, benefits, weddings, meetings, political rallies and craft fairs – all were transient but important cultural events – and in their own way they were also immensely theatrical – and with that realization she was hooked.
When you enter Gaelic Park, she discovered, you are neither in Ireland or America, but somewhere in between. It is, she realized, exactly like watching a play and playing a role in it at the same time. On the one hand, the Park exists quite independently of the city; on the other hand, this unique “Irish environment” actually adapts to the changing cultural needs of the Irish community outside its gates.
Said Brady: “Because it’s in the Bronx – and in a way, its not in the Bronx – it creates a space where things can happen. I was also amazed that an immigrant culture involved so many performances in everyday life. I mean, yes it was just a pub, and a field, but it was also a theater pit, and an arena – it can become all of these things, depending on the need and the occasion. No other ethnicity in New York has a cultural space that is anything remotely like it.”
For many recent arrivals Gaelic Park was and still is a traditional place to spend your Sunday afternoons during the football and hurling season, which runs roughly from Easter through late September. It’s also a place to meet up with the New York Irish scene en masse; and although its cultural role is always evolving it is always a place where connections are made.
For Brady, Irish identity, like any other national identity, is always something constructed rather than something acquired. It is not necessarily fixed and fated, it can adapt and become something new as the need arises, rather like Gaelic Park itself. “Hurling didn’t spontaneously become re-popularized in the 19 century in Ireland,” she explains, “it had a little help from Irish nationalists. Similarly, Gaelic Park didn’t suddenly materialize out of an empty patch of earth, it was literally filled to create a flat pitch. The Park’s existence is the result of decades of repeated performances, from a Senior A football match to a Ladies Camogie championship to a long afternoon with the auld boys in the top row of the bleachers. It’s a particular form of Irishness that is very specific to the Irish community in New York.”
At Gaelic Park, then, with its weekly repetitions and rehearsals, identities are formed, performed, and transmitted. Identity for many players or spectators relied – and still relies – heavily on sport. The activity that once gave the immigrant a job also functions as a marker of the immigrant’s sense of self. Just as the G.A.A. in Ireland needed to repeat the performance of what was uniquely Irish, the New York G.A.A. – also needed to repeat what was Irish about New York. Few ethnic groups in New York had the opportunity to do so in such an autonomous and semi-public space such as Gaelic Park.
Said Brady: “One of the tasks I face is to address Gaelic Park’s cultural significance with people who have, for one reason or another, never really thought about it. Irish culture isn’t just the product of our famous writers, or our musicians – and my thesis arises from this basic awareness.”
Brady knows that many believe that Gaelic Park’s traditional role within the Irish community is finished, but she doesn’t agree. “Some of the people I talk to tell me that people used to go to Gaelic Park to get jobs, but they insist that that era is over. They say they just visit the place now out of nostalgia for an earlier time. They tell me soberly that everything it once was has all vanished and passed away. They talk about the glory days. But I’m looking around and I see lads as young as 17. And they’re new arrivals who are willing to play and are looking for work. They’re filling out my questionnaires and they are very much a part of Gaelic Park’s tradition.”
With plans for a new G.A.A. venue on Randall’s Island now at an advanced stage, it seems certain that the new space will inherit the traditions of the old one.
“Both the Fire and Police Departments have training grounds on Randalls Island. And almost certainly it will become the place where Irish groups will host their dinner dances. The love of the sport and the demands of Irish and Irish American identity require a performance space, and I believe that Randall’s Island will probably take over when Gaelic Park closes. The people who built it and the people who’ll play in it will not be there for money. Time and again when I speak to the players they tell me that they’re there for the love of the sport. It fulfills a role in the Irish community that is not unlike the theater – it shows us to ourselves, at our best and worst. As long as it is needed it will exist.”

Sara Ellen Brady can be contacted at: seb213@nyu.edu