Book Launch: The Art of Being Irish in Hell’s Kitchen: A Memoir on the Organizing of the Irish Arts Center in New York City, 1972-78, by Jim Olwell

Wednesday, October 2, 2024, 5:00-7:00 pm ET

Youth is not wasted on the young. It is their learning playground for their early dramas. They learn who they are and who they are becoming, by trying something new or not trying, by succeeding or failing and usually both.

In the 1970s New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, then a slum, these young Irish and other Americans created an environment where they could learn, by supporting and learning from each other and by being inclusive. They taught each other and learned from skilled artists how to play music and dance, how to act and do theatre, how to sing songs they loved. They learned how to build an organization, their own arts and cultural organization, by their own doing.

They were tin whistle players and uilleann pipers, not to mention fiddlers and dancers, penniless artists and aspiring poets, hundreds of volunteers and dreamers of dreams.

That early activity helped initiate a vibrant, living Irish culture there in New York and the US. 50 years later, a magnificent new multi-faceted Irish Arts Center was built on 11th avenue in Manhattan right around the corner from and connected to in the back their original building on west 51st street

This memoir on how it all began is written by an Irish American from the Bronx who was the second director and 6 year organizer at the Center. He fell in love with a young French Canadian modern dancer from Montreal on a grant to study with Merce Cunningham, and in 1978 he moved here to be with her. They had 2 bilingual children who were born and live here. He spent his professional life here as a community organizer with the CLSC Benny Farm where he helped citizens create organizations and services they needed and did not have. Author Jim Olwell will be launching his new memoir at the Benny Library in NDG in September.

This is a free event.