The men who dug the New Basin Canal between 1832 and 1838 came from Ireland because the Famine left them nothing to stay for. They worked by hand, three miles of swamp, a dollar a day. Yellow fever and cholera took the camps — the death toll was never officially recorded; estimates ran from 8,000 to 30,000. The ones who survived built houses on the river side of Magazine Street and made the Irish Channel. In 1840 they raised St. Patrick's Church in the American Sector — an 85-foot vaulted ceiling, stained glass shipped from Europe, a cathedral-scale rebuke to anyone who'd written them off. In 1896, Kingsley House opened on Constance Street as the South's first settlement house, modeled on Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago. It's still on Constance Street, still doing the work, 130 years on. The Channel changed; the bones stayed.
