THE creation of the immigrant neighborhood is one of the central features of American urbanization since the nineteenth century. settlements in North America since the early 1800s have been analyzed with depictions of various Irishtowns and Corktowns. (1) While images of ethnic homogeneity in urban neighborhoods in the period 1850-1930 have been dispelled by detailed research, the endurance of ethnically defined populations and identities has received scant attention. (2) Indeed, it has been assumed that the durability of such populations and identities in given neighborhood seldom lasted beyond the immigrant generation, but rather represented temporary or transitional arrangement in city's social geography. (3) The urban ecologists of the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, with their spatial assimilation models, did not expect working class immigrant neighborhoods to last for more than generation. The descendants of the inhabitants of such places, they believed, suburbanized relatively quickly, paving the way for newer immigrant groups to occupy cheap housing close to downtown. The residential dispersal of the Chicago from the notorious Stockyards district in the early twentieth century, for example, moved Paul Cressey to write that they had undergone a more complete disintegration ... and greater degree of cultural assimilation than the city's Germans. (4) Though the exodus of the lace-curtain or steam-heat from early shantytowns forms key element in the story of America at the turn of the century, little has been said of the primary settlement areas they left behind, or about how long such areas remained Irish. This paper explores, firstly, the socioeconomic milieu of the First Ward, the principal district of Buffalo, New York, in the late-nineteenth century; and, secondly, it explores the conditions that contributed to the ward's durability as an neighborhood into the twentieth century. In contrast to many other pioneer neighborhoods in urban America, the identity of the First Ward as an working-class neighborhood has endured far beyond the first generation of immigrants who settled there in the 1840s and 1850s. (5) And though the neighborhood has been hit hard by de-industrialization, with part of the housing stock now put to other uses, the neighborhood is still viewed by Buffalonians as the part of Buffalo. Rather than being seen as bounded Irish world, neighborhood is conceptualized in this paper as fluid entity. I argue that variety of social territories co-existed alongside, and overlapped with, one another and were inextricably linked in web of ethnic-based social relations. The First Ward, in other words, was not world unto itself. Profiling the economic and social structure of this neighborhood and mapping its various social landscapes is possible through the analysis of census manuscripts, municipal records, personal memoirs, and con temporary novel, Roger Dooley's Days Beyond Recall, set in the First Ward circa 1900. (6) The book chronicles the family and social relationships of Rose Shanahan, born in the ward to Limerick-born parents. Although Dooley, born in 1920, was writing about the previous generation who lived in the district, I argue that his status as First Ward native of background and his use of real place-names in the book offer more nuanced picture of neighborhood life than can be gleaned purely through reliance on non-literary sources. As Mallory and Simpson-Housley argue, such novelistic descriptions of places enable the essences of sense of place to be felt strongly by the reader. (7) In discussing the First Ward's Irishness, I explore not only the district's residential geography, but also its labor market and various social and political institutions, all of which functioned to produce an Irish-American neighborhood of long standing. …