Another thrill for visiting New York for me was to see the area in the Lower East Side where I sent Ellen O’Casey, the heroine in No Cure for Love, to at one point in the story.
When I sited Ellen’s brother’s house in Riverton Street I did so because it was in the heart of New York’s Irish community in the 1830s. I did it all by maps and research so I was very pleased to find it was just as I imagined it would be.
I also found the brilliant Tenement Museum not a stone’s throw away in Orchard Street. Although it postdates Ellen arriving in New York by twenty years it gave me a vivid insight into
the living conditions she and her daughter Josie must
have experienced.
Although the tenement design and construction was innovative in their time, whole families lived in three small rooms and shared toilets and washed clothing in the backyards. The family not only lived in the cramped tenements but often worked there too, as you can see from the picture.
Each floor of the museum is reconstructed to reflect a particular immigrant family, and artifacts and documents from an Irish, German Jewish and Catholic Italian families are displayed and talked about by the excellent tour guides. It is a brilliant place to learn about the history of the poor of New York.
We also walked around the old riverside area and looked out over the Brooklyn Bridge. 
Of course Ellen wouldn’t have seen the famous landmark as it wasn’t built when she lived in New York but the warehouses were as they are today, although not as clean and smart.
There were two things that struck me about New York firstly, because I’ve seen images of it on televisions and on films for so long, I felt I’d been there before and secondly, in the same way I have Ellen thinking at one point in the story that the waterfront in New York is very much the same as Wapping, it really is.
From the 1830s both areas were busy working ports, crammed with people from all four corners of the globe who lived, worked and died in appallingly overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. However, out of this maelstrom of adversity a vibrant and resilient identity emerged, the native New Yorkers and the robust East Londoners. Brothers and sister, if you like, on either side of the Atlantic and ripe pastures for any historical novelist to plant a story.
Of course there was time for shopping and as a bonus it was Fleet Day while I was there and so the Marines were in town.
