How the South Side Irish community marks June 16 — James Joyce, the Irish American Heritage Center, and a day that belongs to Chicago as much as Dublin.
Chicago has been marking June 16 since before Dublin was comfortable doing it. A city where Irish immigration put down roots so deep that the very neighbourhoods carry it — Bridgeport, Beverly, Canaryville — Bloomsday in Chicago is not a literary affectation. It is a community event.
Chicago has one of the most sustained Bloomsday celebrations in the United States — a city where Irish immigration ran deep, where the South Side Irish were a political and cultural force, and where James Joyce found an audience decades before Dublin was comfortable with him.
The Irish American Heritage Center on West Wilson Avenue in Andersonville has hosted Bloomsday readings and events for over two decades. The celebration draws from Chicago's dense network of Irish-American families, many of them descended from the great Famine migrations and the later waves of economic emigrants who arrived through the early twentieth century.
The IAHC at 4626 North Knox Avenue hosts the main Chicago Bloomsday celebration. Readings from Ulysses, period costume, the gorgonzola sandwich and Burgundy, and an evening that runs long into the night. The Centre's Fifth Province pub provides the appropriately named Irish setting.
Joyce had Chicago readers from early. The city's substantial Irish-American population — concentrated on the South Side in neighbourhoods like Bridgeport, Beverly, and Canaryville — had an instinctive response to a writer who took seriously the lives of ordinary Irish people in an ordinary city. The emigrants who came from Cork, Galway, and Kerry brought stories of the Ireland Joyce was writing about, even if they would never have called themselves literary readers.
Chicago's Bloomsday tradition grew partly from that readership — not from academics, but from the sons and daughters of people who left the Dublin Joyce was mapping. The celebration carries that weight.
The surnames Joyce celebrated — Bloom excepted — are the surnames of Chicago's Irish-American families. Brennan, Kennedy, Ryan, Gallagher, McLaughlin, Fitzpatrick — each has a county of origin in Ireland, a townland of departure, and a story of arrival on the South Side. Bloomsday in Chicago is, in part, a recognition that those stories matter.
Leopold Bloom's Bloomsday menu is specific: a pork kidney for breakfast, and at lunch, a gorgonzola cheese sandwich on brown bread with mustard, washed down with a glass of Burgundy. The sandwich is served at Davy Byrne's pub in Dublin every June 16 — it appears at Irish pubs in Chicago too, for those who know to ask.
The gorgonzola sandwich became famous partly because of how precisely Joyce described Bloom's pleasure in eating it: "He bit into it. Chewing the cud of bread, he gagged faintly. A smell of stale cheese. Nice." The italicised inner voice is quintessential Joyce — and quintessential Bloom.
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