A surprising detail in bank records helped bust a myth about Irish immigrants

>“I was really surprised … It just went against the whole reputation of Five Points that it was this terrible, impoverished place,” he says. “It’s not that they were rich, but they weren’t poor. And their bank accounts clearly showed that most of the people who lived in Five Points could afford to live elsewhere if they wanted to.”

Eh what? It was a fairly typical story at the time that families would have to commit to living in poor areas for some years while scraping together the savings needed to make the next big move to a better area, better life.

In fact I watched this last night, Eugene Levy discovered his mother’s family emigrated from Poland to Glasgow because a direct trip to America was so expensive. They stayed in the poor neighborhood for years until they were able to move on to Canada.

Maybe this is unimaginable today? That in the past there weren’t as many options to take on debt to pay for your dreams, and instead many chose to put up with poor living conditions while they saved up what they could not borrow.

There was plentiful supply of cheap labor of other immigrants like Slovaks, who were even below Irish in the pecking order and not inclined to establish own businesses.