Good evening and welcome. For those of you who I've not yet met, I'm Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University. And I am so thrilled to be able to bring this presentation to you via Zoom. In my position here at the university, I have the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country, coordinating with chapter leaders and volunteers, toast events that keep alumni and parents connected to and engage with Fairfield. We have nine regional chapters from Boston to Washington, D.C. alphabetically and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. So hopefully I will have the opportunity to meet many of you in person at an event in your local area soon. Before I introduce our esteemed guest presenter, I would like to go over the format of the lecture this evening. It is a PowerPoint slide presentation and our guest lecturer will be speaking to those slides. We will have time for questions. So please type any questions you have in the chat function on the Zoom and I will be monitoring it and I will relay them to our guest. We do wanna see you, but please make sure your audio capabilities are turned off. When I'm asked to describe my role here at Fairfield, I start with the catchphrases I opened with this evening. And then I add that I'd like to partner with alumni with special areas of expertise, alumni who own businesses and beloved professors and former professors or esteemed lecturer falls into a number of these categories. Dr. Kirk Slicking is the E. Gerald Corrigan 63 Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences Emeritus. At Fairfield, Dr. Slicking served as the Dean and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Waterfront Manhattan from Henry Hudson to the Highline 2018 is his third book for Johns Hopkins University Press, Grand Central Terminal 2002, won the Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional Scholarly Book in Architecture and Urbanism. Grand Central was the basis for the 2008 PBS American Experience Grand Central, an award-winning documentary. Dr. Slicking was the academic advisor and appeared on screen as well. His academic research is at the cutting edge of the field of Historic Geographical Information System, HGIS, which he used to study the Irish in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. In the spring of 2017, he was a visiting fellow at the Moore Research Institute, National University, Ireland, Galway. Currently, he is co-director of the NYHGIS, New York Historical GIS, centered at the New York Public Library and is an advisor to the Library Center for Digital Humanities. He remains active at Fairfield University, serving as co-principal investigator for the Center for Social Action's major project to conduct a needs assessment for the United Way of Greenwich, Connecticut. Kurt also remains active as an Office of Alumni Relations volunteer, as he and I have now partnered six times on events, two actual tours of Grand Central Station and one of the New York City Waterfront and then our online offerings. And these events are always incredibly well attended. So, back by popular demand, I have the great honor and pleasure of introducing Fairfield University alumnus from the class of 1970 and beloved former professor, Dr. Kurt Schlechting. Well, thank you, Pat. That's very nice to hear. And it's great to be here and to share this work that I've been doing with the Irish in New York and as well as the Irish in Newport, Rhode Island. And as Pat mentioned, Pat. Pat, I'm going to have to stop the share. Okay. I'll share again. And hopefully we'll get the PowerPoint to go from the beginning. There you go. And as Pat mentioned, I was a visiting fellow at the Moore Institute at the National University in Arlen-Gallway and doing work with some of the faculty at the Moore Institute. And I also did a book chapter for the Rutledge Handbook of Spatial History and it was about little Germany and Klein-Deutschland and that's the Lower East Side. Many of us remember the Lower East Side. Think about the Lower East Side as where the Jewish immigrants came and they did, but the Germans preceded them. And then I've done a number of presentations at the Museum of Newport Irish History and you can see some of that here. So it's a little shameless self-promotion. What I want to do is I want to talk about New York and the evolution of the Irish in New York. And, you know, we need to remember that New York has been a preeminent city in this country since its settlement. And it's the center, it has been, it has been the center of immigration to the United States and it's a very small island. It's 12 miles long and at 14th Street, it's two miles wide and it's the most densely populated city, the largest and most densely populated city in the United States. And it's been that way from colonial times to 2021. And what we're going to talk about primarily here is Manhattan Island because that was New York City until the consolidation in 1889 with the other boroughs. And short over to book in 2005 in modestly titled The Island at the Center of the World. And many people, many of New Yorkers think that it's still the center of the world. Telling the story of the Irish in New York City, it's a really complicated process. And there's literally thousands of books, about thousands of books, memoirs, movies have been made about the Irish and the Irish coming to America. And for example, Kevin Baker published a Paradise Green, which I believe they won the Pulitzer Prize. There's films, Gangs of New York. Now Scorsese's other famous movie, The Departed, isn't about New York, it's about Boston, it's about Southeast and so is Goodwill Hunting. And there's real parallels between Southeast and Boston and parts of New York City. And historians have written extensively about the history of New York and particularly focused on the Irish. And Kyle just put a couple here. Machine made, Tammany Hall and the creation of modern politics. Tyler Anbinder was a colleague of mine, wrote the five points. You can see the subtitle is quite ambitious. And then there's individual biographies of someone like Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy clan. And then there's family history and memory. Now, whether you have an Irish heritage and Italian heritage or Hispanic heritage, family history and memory is important. I like to think that all of us have a sainted grandmother or great aunt who tells the family story and often tells that family story at Thanksgiving, sits down and relates a tale about grandpa or great grandfather coming in X, Y and Z. But that's important in shaping how we think about the ethnic experience in an American history. And of course, a lot of us, especially when I was younger and you went to high school or college and histories were narrative in nature. And if you really want to think about New York, I mean, look at what Ed Burroughs and Mike Wallace, won the Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, the history of New York City to 1898. And it's 1300 pages. Now, Ed Wynne Burroughs passed away, but Mike Wallace, who teaches at Brooklyn College, continued and wrote a greater Gotham. And then a famous historian, Kenneth Jackson, who was at Columbia for years, organized the project to publish the Encyclopedia of New York City. And lo and behold, my computer is propped up on that this evening. And you can see that that's massive, a massive reference book. And then Johns Hopkins in 1996 published an anthology of articles about simply the New York Irish. And it's wonderful, it's wonderful to read. It's very, very well organized. The research is terrific. And so that we have this rich, rich heritage of narrative history of New York City. And that's what many of us were raised with or are familiar with. So let me begin by talking about the, just giving an overview of immigration between 1820 and the end of the century in 1999. And I'd like to point out that the period of time from 1820 to 1924 is called the century of immigration. But we really need to think about that as it's really the European immigration is in that century with the exception of immigration from China, which really didn't affect the Eastern coast. There was a Chinatown in New York, but really it was immigration to China. Immigration to China, immigration from China to California as a result of the Gold Rush. And post-war immigration, certainly in the 20th century was, first of all, there was a real decline in immigration because we passed immigration limitations and the drastic immigration limitations in 1924 followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War II. But the immigration that followed for the rest of the 20th century was not from Europe. And that's obviously true today. Post-war War II, it's Asia, Central America and Mexico. And immigration has accelerated over the past decade. But we're gonna be looking primarily at that century of immigration because that's when the Irish come. Now, this is an outline of Irish immigration between 1820 and 1975. And you can see the impact, we're gonna see the impact that the Irish famine had and the resulting massive immigration to the United States. From 1841 to 1860, about two million, almost two million Irish immigrants came to the United States. And they came, the port, we'll see in a moment, the port that they came to was New York. And then over this time period, 4.7 million people have emigrated from Ireland to the United States. And I want you to keep that 4.7 million number in mind if you join us for our second part to this on November 9th, we'll talk about that 4.7 million. Now, why New York? Well, in colonial times, there were other ports that competed with New York to be the primary entree port to the United States, Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston. But why did New York emerge triumphant? Newport and Boston are closer to England and closer to England. But what happened was in 1817, ships used to come to all of these ports, they'd arrive and then when they were about to depart, they might put an advertisement in a newsletter or to sign up on the dock that they were gonna leave on a certain date. And people would come to the port and they'd wanna sail, they'd wanna leave to go to ex-leave, leave to go to another country, and the ship wouldn't leave. So a group of merchants in New York decided that they would form a shipping company called the Black Ball Line. And what they would do is they would have a ship that was advertised to sail on a certain day each month in effect on schedule. And they kept that, whether it was a bombing June day or if it was the middle of a blizzard in February, that ship would leave from the pier's along the shoreline of Manhattan and leave, and this was primarily to link New York with Liverpool, and then eventually New York with London and New York with Ahar, France and Hamburg, Germany, but these were called package ships. And so that gave New York an enormous advantage over every other major port in colonial America or the early United States because they sailed on schedule. And then what was really important is to understand that the prevailing winds in the North Atlantic blow from the West to the East. So that makes sailing from Liverpool to New York much more challenging. And during the day era of sailing in the first and almost second, continued into the second half of the 19th century, ship passage over from Liverpool to New York could be very, very challenging. And the passage averaged 30, 40, 50, sometimes over 60 days. And this was particularly challenging during the famine years because what the Black Wall and the other package ship lines did was they took an area just below the deck of the boat and called that above the storage in the hull of the boat and they called it the twin decks. And that's where the immigrants, that's where they were housed when the ships were sailing. And if a storm arose, what they would do is they would cover the hatches to where the immigrants were sleeping, as you can see in that woodcut and they'd be locked under there at that until the storm was over. And there were no, obviously there were no toilets. There was nothing like a toilet. It was called a head on the ship. And so chamber pots had to be used. And it was held in those twin decks with hundreds of immigrants crowded in, fleeing Ireland from the famine years, during the famine years. And the Great Famine. This is an event that changed both Irish history and American history. And a huge amount of research has been done on the famine and people have written extensively on the famine. And that's something that if you visit a place like the Moore Institute, they wanna understand that particular event because it's central to Ireland's history. And one book I'd recommend it's The Graves Are Walking. That was published in 2012 by John Kelly who's out in another name. It's a heart wrenching book in places. So the population of Ireland, the English, first of all in the English, it was part of England in 1841. In 1841, they had conducted a census. And the population was estimated probably pretty accurately or collected at 8.2 million people. And by 1851, they used to do it on every, every first every year, every 10 years. And the 1851 census was 5.1 million. So approximately 1.1 million people died and 2 million immigrated. And now Ireland was part of England and England was the wealthiest person, wealthiest country in the world. And the question that Kelly and other historians ask is what was the response? What was their effort to alleviate the famine years in Ireland? And it was horrific. One thing that the, what the English parliament did is they set up a workhouse program. And this was in parts of Ireland, they would have a workhouse and that was built with government money. And then destitute people would come to the workhouse and they could live in the workhouse, but it separated the family. The men were on one floor, the women were on another floor, the, they're with their smallest age children. And then the children were on another floor. And you could only stay in the workhouse if you were destitute and then you worked. You worked on building roads and that's what you did. And then with the landowners, with the British armed forces, the British soldiers stationed in Ireland is they went and evicted peasants from their homes who couldn't continue to pay their rent during the famine years. And it was horrific, the suffering was unbelievable. And so this immigration, this movement from Ireland to the United States ensues. And you can see that picture, that woodcut on the right-hand side, often when the farewell was to take place, there would be a gathering in their cottage, the night or two before the emigres were gonna leave. And they called that an Irish wake. And because the reason was they never returned. And in 1850s and 60s, that would have been very difficult for someone to go back to Ireland. They could send a letter. And by the way, at the Moore Institute, I was talking to the director recently, they've received a gift from an American collector of 20,000, roughly 20,000 letters written by Irish immigrants back to Ireland.  And a couple of points. Ireland was an overwhelmingly rural country at the time of the famine. And the Irish came to the cities, the American cities. And they had little money and they often stayed in the city that they arrived in, and that was New York primarily. And in 1850, a quarter of the population in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore were Irish immigrants, people born in Ireland. And they worked on the docks in New York. They worked on the docks. They built tenements, they were laborers. They didn't have skills. They didn't have skills. What they did is they gave their labor. That was what they came. Now, another way of following this, I wanna return to family history and memory. And you'll notice my family's names are O'Connell, Tobin, and Donovan. And my grandmother was, my mother's maiden name was O'Connell and my grandmother's name obviously was O'Connell. And her father's name was Tobin. And there are records that he came, he was born in Ireland in 1867 and he came to New York in 1883. Well, now what we can do on ancestry.com is we can go and find what's called the ship list. And this happens to be the ship he arrived on in August 17th, 1883. And there was a list. I'll explain more about this later. And you can see James Tobin is there. So he's on the ship Republic. It was a sailing ship and he came across. And there were 696 immigrants on that ship. And this wasn't in the famine years. This was significantly later than the famine years. He left in 1867. So here's where family history and memory interacts with history, the history of the study of the Irish coming to New York. And I'm going to explain how one can do that. And New York played a major role in immigration. It was the Golden Door. And before there was Ellis Island, that the New York state legislature in response to the overwhelming numbers of people coming to New York on the immigrant ships. They opened, there was an old fort on the battery in the tip of Manhattan Isle and it's still there. And that was called Castle Garden. And they set that up as an immigration center that the ships would anchor in the harbor and the steerage passengers who were the immigrants coming had to proceed to Castle Garden to be processed. And then Ellis Island opens in 1892. Now, what happened before that? A ship simply went to the East River. Package ship came back from Liverpool and the ship tied up on the pier on the East River. And the immigrants walked down the gang plank and were in America. And there are scenes and gangs of New York of them doing that. But here's a woodcut of Castle Garden and you can see the immigrants coming. And Tyler Anbinder published a book in 2017, another terrific book, City of Dreams, the 400 year epic history of immigration in Red New York. And he talks about immigration more broadly than just the Irish, but the German and eventually the Italians and Eastern European immigrants who came and the immigrants who come today. So here's going back to those ship lists. And what I did is working on the Manhattan Waterfront book, I wanted to look at the ships that actually came in a given period of time. And I hope you can see this name, Steve Morse. This is a website he's built. You can look at this online and it turns out, it turns out Steve Morse was a founder of Intel who must be a billionaire and he's retired. And for the last 15 years, he's been building these incredible with other colleagues and a lot of very smart people. He's been building these websites where we can go and we can look at something like these records of the Lucy Thompson, William Stetson arriving in New York in 1853. And what you do is you enter the year and then up comes this kind of a list here. I entered September, October, 1853 and it found 194 ships that came to New York Harbor in those two months in 1850, 194 sailing ships. And the one I was interested in was the Lucy Thompson and I clicked on this and it goes to ancestry.com and it opens this ship list. This is the list that the officers on the ship had to make of everybody, all every passenger that was on the list. And they had to bring this to the customs office when they arrived in New York. This was federal law. And you can imagine how many pages there are that look like this to record, to list the 835 people who came on the Lucy Thompson. And here's a piece to this. Here's a piece to this. People died in this passage. And on the Lucy Thompson, 40 of the passengers died while they were on the ship coming to America. So there, and so here's the ship list. Here's the report they left from. And you can see they simply wrote died on passage. Well, what did they do with the bodies? They tied them up in sailcloth and they lowered them, tossed them overboard. There was, that's what they did. So imagine you're an Irish immigrant coming to America with your family and you're desperate to get to America and on the passage to, across the Atlantic, one of your family dies. And it could have been a baby, it could have been an older relative, could have been your best friend and they were buried at sea. Well, I also wanna talk about the real, the revolution that's underway in this type of the type of work that I do. And it goes by a number of names, digital humanities, historic data, quantitative history. But what underlies it is, as Pat mentioned, historical GIS mapping. And that's called the spatial term. That's been in process now for about 15, 15, 20 years. And it allows us to explore research questions about immigration history. You're gonna see some of this. That was impossible. You couldn't answer these particular questions. It's not narrative history. And a colleague of mine, Ann Knowles, that I've known for years, who was at Amherst and now is at University of Maine, she wrote an essay that gathered unbelievable interest and the title was What Could Lee See at Gettysburg?  We wanna talk about the Irish in New York. And then she published the Anthology in 2002 and Benjamin Ray did a chapter called Teaching the Salem Witch Trials. And you can see what he did over here. Here's Salem. This is the famous event in American history. And what he did is he mapped the boundaries of Salem and he pinpointed where the accusers lived and where the accused lived. And he found patterns that were spatial in nature. So that's the idea of the spatial term. And there are resources to do this kind of work. And what I'm gonna show you is doing microgeography, historical geography, and we can then look at the Irish coming at the neighborhood level, the city block level, and the building level. That's possible now, that was impossible. Now, there would be narratives about this, but you'll see that it's beyond the narrative. And some of these resources are at the New York Public Library, a program called the Map Warp that I'm gonna show you in a moment. They took 20,000 maps, historic maps of basically Manhattan and surrounding areas and they scanned them. And then they're basically a digital picture. And I'll show you how you use that. Columbia, up at Columbia, there's a project underway called Mapping Historical New York. And they're building historic GIS maps. GIS, that's when we open Google Maps, up pops this map. And then we can see the streets over it and we can type in an address and a point appears. That's what GIS is all about, the geographical information system. And then there's these mega projects to collect historical data. And an example would be out at the University of Minnesota, the Population Center. There is the NHGIS, that's National Historic GIS. And it's an online project where you can download census data from 1790 to the present. And then Brown University, John Logan has a project underway that'll look at race in the American cities, the large American cities historically. And then of course, there's Ancestry.com. And I'm sure many of you use Ancestry. And that's really the Mormon Church. Ancestry is basically started by the Mormon Church. And what they began to do was they began to scan historical census records from 1790 to 1940. And now 1950 will be available next summer. And they created these digital files. And they built that sophisticated website that's searchable. You open it up and there comes first name, last name. And you can choose to look at the US census records. And you search and you find an ancestor and it up pops the picture, the digital picture of the book that that data was entered into in, let's say, 1880. And it's searchable. That database, that scan has to be a billion records. It has to be over a billion records. It's unbelievable. Just take the US population, Google the US population over time, and then add up 1790 to 1940. You'll be close to a billion records. And it's searchable. Uh-oh, I'm stopped. That's okay. You wanna reboot and then start from here? Yeah, I'll be, maybe I gotta leave that first, right? I gotta leave that first, right? Okay, yes. All right, let me just, I can't leave. I'll stop my share. Right. Hello everyone, it's great to see everybody. This happened and we don't know why. And we're gonna just come back here. And we're back here and I'm gonna go here. Right. I'm gonna, okay, so from current slide. Sorry everybody, we don't know why this is happening, but it's happening. So here we are. And here's an example of what this spatial turn means. Data was always published for each decennial census. But when you look at the 1860 or 1870 census, it's by, in cities, political wars. And they're quite big. So there were 96 words on Manhattan Island in 1860 and 388 in 1870. But then the Census Bureau decided to change the spatial scale to zoom in and they organized the census by census enumeration districts. And here's a map of the census enumeration districts in the West Greenwich Village. This is where Pat and I have done our walking tours and we're planning another one in the spring. So what the Census Bureau did is they took a map, a map and probably with a black crayon, drew these boundary lines and they labeled each one. They gave it a number. And there were, for Manhattan, there were 681 of those in 1880 and that made the number of, the average number of census records per enumeration district is about 1700. And then later on there, that decreases because they increased the number of enumeration districts. But think of this as zooming in. They're zooming in to West Greenwich Village. And this continues to today. In the 2000, for the 2020 census, the Census Bureau doesn't use enumeration districts any longer. It uses what it calls block groups, but they're very similar to this. They cover specific geographical areas. And for the 2020 census, the Census Bureau designated over 217,000 block groups. And now I want everyone on the Zoom tonight to realize that you live in a block group. And the Census Bureau provides digital maps of that. And you can link that with census data. So the spatial turn really continues, continues. And here's map warper. Now, this is, I cut and pasted here, as you can see from, I cut and pasted from the website itself. But what map warper does is you open map warper and you zoom in on a Google Street map here. This is interactive. And as you do that, here I set the timeframe from 1851 to 1910. And what it does is it opens the maps that have been scanned and geo-rectified. That means oriented to longitude and latitude because that's how the Google maps are set up. And what you do is you select one of those and you highlight it and then you download it to your computer and you open it in a GIS program. And so for example, I'm gonna give you an example of that. Here's the Google map of Manhattan Island. And that's right off of Google. And all those streets are there, all the streets are there, the modern streets. And of course, this map then you type in an address and it places a point somewhere in lower Manhattan Island, depending on what particular address you're looking for. Well, what I can do is I can take that geo-rectified Romley map and it opens perfectly. It opens right on the Google map. And you can see that it fits perfectly. So here, if we zoom in, here's Water Street and here's Water Street here. And this is the Water Street on the Google map. And then just fits perfectly. This then allows us to do all sorts of really neat research. This is the fourth ward. And I'm gonna talk about the fourth ward because this was a ward where these are the piers here along the East River. They're no longer there. This is the East River was the major part of the Port of New York until late 1880s turn of this ninth to the century. So the ships came tied up on these piers once the, and that's the way it worked. Then what we wanna be able to do is we wanna be able to zoom in. And here's Steve Morse again. He built this app with this web page. And this allows us to find an enumeration district. And I've got this set up to find 28 Cherry Street. And so you can Google Steve Morse, ED Finder and this is what we'll open. And I chose to try to find an ED for this street to address in the fourth ward in 1880. And I type in the address in the back street and the cross street. And then it comes up and says it's census. It's ED 32. Well, I opened ED 32 in ancestry.com. And here's what you see. This is what the ancestry is. These are pages from the 1880 census. And these were handwritten. They were handwritten records. What the Mormons started to do was volunteers would sit with, they'd sit with a device that had a reel of the 1880 census for this enumeration district in this particular street. And they'd read the name, Daniel Donovan. And then they'd have open an Excel spreadsheet and they'd enter that name. And he's the head of the household they'd read this text up here that he works in and they wrote in and they entered this. Here's the city. And here's where he was born, Daniel Donovan. But his parents were both born in Ireland. So that's Daniel Donovan. And then you go down and here's Michael Sullivan and his wife Ellen are both born in Ireland all of their four or five children are born in New York. So that's their birthplace. Their parents obviously were born in Ireland. And then what you can do is you can create a code. You can code and create a new variable, ethnicity. And the Sullivan children are first generation, first gen. And this database for the 1880 census, which is just for Manhattan Island has 1,214,029 records. And I happen to hear on the computer, I'm doing this with. And this is this revolution because now we can look at a particular address in a particular neighborhood. In a particular neighborhood and we can look at the people who were living in that building. And this allows us to look at all sorts of different questions. These are mainly Irish immigrants, as you can see in 28. What type of occupations did they have? Here's a longshoreman. Here's a watchman on a dock, watchman on a vessel because this street is three blocks up from the East River. And we can see it's this particular address is where the Irish came to. So that's that idea of immigration patterns. And we can do this for New York. We can do this for Boston. I've done it for Newport. All the major cities can be accessed through this particular process. And it just changes the way we can do and think about immigration. The Irish immigration, the Irish come into New York. And what we also, so what we can do is we're looking here at the famine period of time. And the estimates are that there were approximately 96,000 people born in Ireland in 1845. And by 1960, that's the, this is a large, this is the famine years, population is 200,000. So 107,000 population, the Irish population increased by 100,000. And the Irish were 25%, Irish born were 25%. Of New York's population, never mind their children. But also notice the German, they're beginning to come. And that's another set of reasons why the Germans come. It's not from famine, but they're coming to New York. So the two major immigrant groups in the first half of the 18th century, 19th century were Irish and the Irish born and in Germany. And then there's another database that you can download from the United States, the U.S. National Archives and it's the famine Irish database. And then we can look at this by neighborhood. So here are the ethnic conflicts and they persist over time. Chelsea, West Greenwich Village, on the East River it's Ward 4, which we're looking at in Ward 7 and the five points. And then the Germans went to Klein-Deutschland on the Lower East Side, wards 11 and 17. So we can look at this now at the neighborhood level. And of course, Tyler Randbinder does this with the five points and the gangs of New York. Tyler Randbinder, the five points is not the fourth ward in the river, it's actually what is now little Italy, this neighborhood here. And so that we can then zoom in and we can think about this particular, these the Irish neighborhoods, the Irish enclaves. And you can see that the, we can also look at that along the East River, those four and seven, 53% Irish, West Greenwich Village of 41% Irish, Chelsea 51%. And in turn, in Klein-Deutschland, the Germans were 58% and so what emerges are these distinct ethnic conclaves and they have an ethnic identity and for the East River, West Village and Chelsea it's the Irish and what's common to those three areas it's on the waterfront. And here's another way of looking at this is to analyze this data by the ethnicity in all of the 681 EDs in 1880 in New York and you can see these spatial patterns. So there are these specific ethnic enclaves and you can see here's Klein-Deutschland, little Germany is here and the Irish are here along the East River and West Greenwich Village, Chelsea. This is called the Gas House District up above 14th Street. By the way, this map is from a lesson plan that I'm working on with the Columbia University Project mapping historic New York. And let's take a look at West Greenwich Village. Well, as you can see, here's a brownie map of West Greenwich Village and you know, when I was at Fairfield full-time I had some terrific, I had terrific students and with my Corrigan chair, I had some research money and I would have them work with me on the projects these HGIS projects and this is a map that they created and what they did is they gave a number to each block here. So this is a block and that was block 16. And so we were able to look at the enumeration districts, the city blocks and then on these 76 city blocks, there's this 44 shown here, there were a total of 861 addresses and then we could aggregate that to the ED enumeration district, the block and the building level. And that allows us then to, well, this is about the Longshoremen because this is what they did. But here's a map of the buildings, individual buildings in 1880 in the West Village on Horatio and Jane Street. And these numbers here are the number of people in the buildings and then we know what the ethnic makeup is. And you can see that in this one here is more native. Now native means someone born in America in the United States with both parents born in the United States. And that's very different here along Washington Street. These rivers right over here, you can see these buildings are overwhelmingly Irish. And so what we see is a neighborhood that is somewhat mixed ethnically. And you can see that here, and not the Germans, they weren't over here. They were living over in... And this persists for a long period of time in the West Village. And you can see people have written about this. You can look at that data and you can see that between 1880 and 1920, the Irish predominate, but not later on by 1930. And that's another story. That's the Italian immigration coming and they came to the docks as well. And we can look at a particular building, 32 Bethune Street. And here's 32 Bethune Street and here's half a century of Irish immigration to one particular building. Whether it's 1880 or 1930, you can see that there are Irish immigrants and their children living at 32 Bethune Street. And of course, what I would do is take my students to New York and we would walk the streets and we'd go to Bethune Street. And what I would do before I took the group, the class down there, they would study a particular building. And since West Greenwich Village is one of the oldest parts of Manhattan, many, many, many of the historic buildings are still there in 32 Bethune Street. And then I hope everybody has their checkbook out because it's sold last month for $6.6 million. That's this. This is from Zillow, but that's what it's sold for. And that's of course the gentrification of Greenwich Village. Then I'd like to do just a piece on the East River. We'll look at the fourth ward. So we're over here now on the East River and we're looking at Cherry Street. And I wanna look at a particular tenement on Cherry Street. We're gonna look at a particular, we're gonna look at a particular, we're gonna look at Coffin Court on Cherry Street. And that's here. This is where Al Smith was born. This is Water Street here. And here's the East River Pairs. And Longshoremen, that word comes from what would happen early in the history of New York City. The ship would come and tie up on a pier. And the cry went out, Longshoremen, and that's where the Longshoremen come. And in this particular enumeration district, we're almost 2,000 people. And 81% of them were either born in Ireland or a first gen. And 51, only 51 residents in 1880 were native, born in the United States with both parents born in the United States. This was an intensely ethnic enclave. The fourth ward on the East River in 1880. Gotham Court, and they lived in these tenements. And it was awful. These were awful. Here's an outline of a floor in a survey that I'll show you in a moment. There were four apartments per floor. So you had what they call the living space. And then there was a bedroom. That's what this is here. If you go to the Tenement Museum in New York, you can see these. And of course, out in the back here was the shed. This wasn't for garden tools. This was the privy. There were no sewers. There were no toilets. You went out and used the privy.  And these privies were unbelievably awful. Source of diseases we'll see in a moment. And people had to live in that environment. And periodically the privies had to be cleaned out. You had to clean your privies. Well, Gotham Court, this was a tenement in the fourth ward. And we'll talk about it in a moment. And Harper's Weekly did a story and they found there was a Danny Burke, four years old, who sold papers on the streets for two cents. And the writer of the article interviewed his mother and he said, how many children? The answer had 12 of them. Question, are they all living? No, sir, seven are dead with an Irish accent. Seven children were dead. She had 12 and seven died living in Gotham Court. And here's a schematic of Gotham Court. When Charles Dickens comes to America, he travels to both the five points and then he goes down to the fourth ward. And he said that Gotham Court was the worst tenement in New York and he had seen some of the worst tenements in London. And it wasn't torn down until 1892. It was poverty, righteousness and vice. That's what he said. And there's a sanitary report. This was a study and I'll show you this in a minute. There were 400, in 1865, there were 400, 500 people living in these apartments and they were two rooms. And it was multiple stories high. And so if you're on the top floor, the fifth floor, you had to carry your, if you didn't use the privies in the cellar, you had to carry your chamber pot down five flights of stairs. And in this particular report, which I'll show you in some of it in a minute, they found that there were 138 births in 1864, 1865. 12 were stillborn, 77 survived to age two. So the infant mortality rate was 44%.  And this is where the Irish had to live because they were impoverished when they came. And then here's the Gotham Court in the 1870 census. And you can see that these four families, they're all Irish or either first gen and they're living in Gotham Court. And they're the father, the men work as laborers, excuse me, longshoremen or laborers. And they're living in a two room apartment. Each of the apartments was two rooms. And then we can see, getting back to Cherry Street and we look at the building, you can see it's overwhelmingly Irish. It is just overwhelmingly Irish and no natives. So this is this enclave living on Cherry Street, two blocks from the East River. The Irish predominate here. And I've got other maps which will show where all the liquor stores were or bars were on Cherry Street, Water Street. And it was filled with that. There were more places to buy alcohol or to drink alcohol than there were groceries, source of groceries. And then we even went back to the 1870 census and we looked at 329 Water Street and that was the sailors boarding house. And the sailors live unbelievably, they're all from Ireland. And when they got back on shore, they had a few dollars, they drank, they womanized. And then they ran out of money and they had to sign on to sail on another ship. And they got an advance and often the boarding house kept that. And later, if a ship needed, the last minute needed some additional sailor, sometimes they were shanked. And then 351. Here's the 1870 census for 351. And the census taker writes that this was a house of ill fame. And you can see that it was a house of prostitution. And this is not, by the way, what the, you know, with the wonderful advertisements for ancestry.com. This isn't what we expect to find. This isn't what we expect to find. And Annie McGowan and Catherine Sullivan are immigrants from Ireland and their prostitutes. And it's a way of life they had to live. Tyler Manbinder writes about that in the five points. And there were young girls who were hot corn girls, they called it. They had blazers out on the city streets, a couple of city streets and they sold corn. They would roast the corn over the fire. But they were also prostitutes. And that's how people had to live. And this was this reports of, and there was a response to this, but it wasn't by government. No government thought that it was their responsibility to help, to monitor the hygiene and public health. And so there were these two organizations and this one, the Citizens Association of New York was very prominent. They did a survey of all the tenements in New York by dividing the, they divided the city up into 27 districts. They hired a doctor and staff to collect information about the tenements in their particular district. And the fourth sanitary district was the fourth ward. And Ezra Pulling was the doctor who led this. And he built, or he had drawn a detailed spatial map, a detailed map, which we can use for a spatial analysis. By the way, this report was 507 pages. And here's what Pulling and his staff did. They found where there had been typhus and smallpox. And you can see it's everywhere in the fourth ward. In the fourth ward. And here's Gotham Court. And what they then did is they mapped where the privies were. And they divided the privies into two types, privies, and then privies that were extremely offensive. And by the way, the city was now building sewers, but there was enormous battle in the fourth ward and everywhere to get the tenement owners to connect to the sewers. And then they had to obviously have built toilets and they didn't want to do that because it was expensive. And this was the year before the germ theory of disease. And the thought was my asthma, the bad air, especially the bad air of the privies was the source of disease. And they were correct that the privies were at the source of disease, but not because they smelled or gave off gases. It was because of germs. So this was, you can see how the spatial analysis of this on you can do this or we were able to do this spatial analysis that we see. And then the Irish faced enormous discrimination when they came. And Thomas Nast was a journalist and he was also an artist and he would do these woodcuts that would be published in magazines. And here's the, this is the picture of the Capitol and he's got the Vatican flag flying from it. The schools are up here. Here's the, here's the Cardinals threats to the American children. And then this is the picture that Nast always used of the Irish that they were Simeon, they were apes. And that stereotype of the drunken Irishman was there for all to see. And then the New York times would argue, well, what Bible should we use or which Bible should be used in the public schools? And of course the King James Bible. And well, that created an enormous uproar and we'll talk in the second, when we do our second part to this about this, but they faced an enormous discrimination and there would be these broadsheets and illustrations in magazines about the Irish immigrants coming. And the Pope would control America. The Irish were poor, they were slobbingly, they were drunks. In New York, there was a proposal to change the immigration law and change the law about becoming a citizen and being able to vote. And before the New York state legislature and I believe it was 1855 or was it 1865, the proposal was to change the period you had to wait before you became, or before you registered to vote. They wanted a 21 year period. And that was proposed across the United States and many states which had large immigrant populations. And then I'm gonna end our part here tonight by just reminding us that this continued. And this was the television show when I was a kid in the 1950s, the Jackie Gleeson show was on every Sunday night. And often it was Jackie Gleeson as the bartender and here's the Irish drunk. And then I just wanna, and I know this is difficult to read, but this is when Fairfield University was going to start at the prep and the university and a pastor in St. Peter's Parish and Bridgeport wrote a letter to the New England Jesuit provincial explaining why the Jesuits had to come to Fairfield. And as you can see, the reaction there was one of the sense that the Catholics, Irish Catholics were still not accepted. And John Kennedy faced the same thing when he ran for president. So I'll stop here. It's Pat's here. Yes, and I do have a couple of questions for you. Yeah, so you did mention about doing the same type of research not only in New York, but other cities as well. Are we using that Steve Morse app to do that, say in Boston? Yes, yes, absolutely. And there is, I haven't been on that. I can't remember the name of the website, but there's a website that has these detailed historical maps of Boston, which you can download just as I did for New York. And so the answer is yes. Okay. And the immigration records for the immigrants coming on ships to Boston or on ancestry.com. You can just choose Boston instead of New York because Boston was the second largest port. Someone asked, why is New York City called Gotham City? I don't know. That'll be for part two. Yeah, well, I think someone while the group was there. You need Batman. We're gonna have to look that up and answer that on part two. Does anyone else have any questions? I'm monitoring the chat. Pat, can you turn people on so that maybe just someone could ask a question? I certainly can. Let me, let me see. No, I don't know that I can. Well, we can just unmute ourselves. Yeah, you can unmute yourselves, right. Right, I don't have a question, but I wanted to say thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this. And I look forward to the next session. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's really good work and you know what you need. So this would be a part of courses I taught all the time. And many students at Verifield today, as we all know, are not first generation, they're second, third generation, whatever they are, whether they're Irish or Italian or Portuguese, it doesn't matter. And it's important for them to understand where they came from. Right. And that struggle of, for upward mobility, that's something I'll talk about in the second session, that's real. And it's still real for the immigrants who come today. And there really are parallels. There really are parallels. But sometimes when I would talk about Catholic, the discrimination that Catholics face, people are stunned. They can't imagine that. The Irish Catholics in particular had to confront when they came to America. And that's by the way, the reason why they built, you know, if you were raised as a Catholic, you were in a particular parish and the parish had the church, the parish had the rectory, then the parish had the school, and then it had the convent where the nuns lived. And imagine building that system. The bishops met in like the 1870s and said, American bishops, they wanted every Catholic child to be to attend a Catholic school. And they went out and built it. And by the way, that infrastructure is still there today. I don't know if I am. Okay. If I can be heard. George, I'm wondering. I'm wondering. I'd like, sorry, can I go ahead? Oh, sure. Yeah, Kurt, I'm wondering if you would consider putting this slideshow online for people who attended this lecture. Patrick McCarthy. Patrick, I was going to answer that question. I have recorded this and I will go on the university's YouTube channel. Great. Yeah. Terrific. Excellent. Superb. Thank you. Thank you. But sometimes this is not, sometimes the students, you know, we feel comfortable now at a Fairfield to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Put on the green. Well, for generations, that was very difficult.  And feel comfortable and, I guess comfortable in your own skin. Yeah. Kurt, I was going to say, there are a couple more questions that just came up on the chat. So I'm going to, has there been any much of this type of research done in Ireland? Yes, there is. It's, there's parallels in Ireland and what they're working on at the Moore Institute in Galway and others is imagine that we're looking at the story of the Irish once they arrive in America. But what about the story of where they leave from and the particular challenges that they faced? And remember Irish immigration continues long after the famine years have ended. By the way, what some of the landlords, the English landlords did in Ireland was they paid for the Irish who were living in the fat tuts on their land. They paid for their voyage to America because what they wanted then to do was to enclose the lion and raise sheep and cattle. And so that was a particular aspect of immigration that Tyler Ranbinder talked about where the Irish, I forget the Lord's name, but it was from Ken Mayer in the west of Ireland. And the landlord, a wealthy, wealthy, wealthy sir, whatever his name was, he paid for their passage to America. Another question, have you implemented artificial intelligence for further research? I haven't, but out in Minnesota, the University of Minnesota, what they're doing is, so here's what the work that this is, you look at the 1880 census and then you look at the 1900 census. The 1890 census was burned, so you can't use that. And when you look, for example, when we looked at 32 Bethune Street, you notice, as you did notice, that the people living in 1900 weren't there in 1880 and the people living in 1910 weren't there in 1900. Well, how did that work? So can we follow particular families through the census over time? And to do that, you need to write these huge algorithms that are going to try to match people over time. And they used artificial intelligence for that. And you can imagine doing it for the men in the family, but the women, it's harder, right? Because if something, a woman was 10 in the 1900 census, and now she's 20 in the 1920 census and she's married, her name changes. So that's what, that's quite complicated. They're doing it. Okay, interesting. Another question, did the Irish and Germans collaborate to improve their living conditions given they appeared to be in close proximity? Not so much. Not so much because first of all, the language barrier. And then the Germans came for political reasons often, not famine. And they had more resources. Some of them had gone to school, they had trades. So if you were looking, if we could fly back to 1880 and we're gonna go over and look at the building of the tenements, it was the Irish carrying the bricks on their shoulder, up the ladder to where the German makes them was. Or the Irish were shoveling coal into a fire where the German was the machinist was working there or the blacksmith. And so for example, and you can see that because the Germans are in Lower East Side in 1880, but they're gone basically a decade, a decade and a half later and they've moved uptown to Yorkville and Yorkville was a better neighborhood. And the buildings that they lived in in the Lower East Side, that's where the Jewish immigrants come. So they had, then the Catholic churchmen's, I'm gonna talk about the Catholic church in the second one, our second session, but the Irish dominated the Catholic church. The Archdiocese of New York, the bishops of all Irish and the Germans resented that because they didn't want to have an Irish pastor in their particular churches. So that was a conflict within the Catholic church. Let's see, there's a question here. Can you talk more about the anti-clerical sentiment? For example, it was expressed in the cartoon depicting cardinals as crocodiles. Well, that was the, so the argument, the native argument about the Catholics coming was that their loyalty would be to the church, to the bishop, to the cardinal and then to the pope. And so that was a threat. They couldn't be loyal Americans because they had a faith that bound them to the church hierarchy. And that was perceived as a threat. By the, that was the argument made about the Irish. Okay, okay. A few more questions, this person asked, they are from the northern tip of Manhattan. Are there any resources on the history on how the Irish neighborhoods migrated north? There are because they would go up to, went up the island and then they went to the Bronx. The Irish went to certain parts of Brooklyn and then as upward mobility starts and they're no longer working as Longshoremen, they move to Sunnyside Queens. And I'm sure some of the people on the session know where Sunnyside Queens is. And so yes, their people have written about that, the migration of the Irish to other parts of the initially of the city and then of course suburbanization. I have one more question. Okay. Does the experience show us that the issue of immigration is not a race issue, but an economic issue of haves versus have nots? It is, it partially is. I wouldn't dismiss race. That's another factor. We might want to talk about that in our second session, but it is social class because certainly the Irish came and they were at the bottom of American society. And they didn't have skills. So what do you have if you come? And all you have is your labor. And you'll take jobs at the bottom of the, at the bottom of the wage scale, the occupational scale. So for example, when the Italians come in large numbers, the way New York, the way people heated their homes and eventually generated electricity was with coal. And so in the shops, the manufacturing centers on Manhattan Island use coal. So coal barges were brought to New York to the along, on the piers in the river and it was backbreaking awful labor to unload those coal barges. And the Italians had to do it because they had just come and they didn't speak English. Many of them didn't speak English. Pat and I have talked about this often and that's all they did.  And you know, since the Irish arrived first in terms of city jobs, they end up as the policemen and firemen and the Italian immigrants coming later end up as the sanitation workers. And so there's that hierarchy there. And of course, then the most recent immigrants take the jobs at the bottom of the occupational scale. Right. Those are some great questions. Yes, they are. So we have a lot to look forward to, to November 9th. Okay. Yeah, so if I may, thank you Kurt. It is always a privilege and a joy to partner with you, both on virtual and in-person events. I can never thank you enough for sharing your time, your talents and your expertise with us. I want to give everybody just an overview of what's happening and then what I usually do is we're all going to unmute ourselves and we're going to give Kurt a round of applause. But before we do that, I want to thank everyone for coming as well. As Kurt and I both said, two-part series, part two will be on November 9th. It's a part of alumni college. So keep an eye out for the e-blast. Again, I've recorded this and I'm going to put it out on the YouTube channel. And as I always do, there's a reminder to visit www.fairfield.edu forward slash alumni events to learn about other in-person and online happenings throughout the university. Thank you, thank you. I want, I hopefully I will see you all in an in-person event soon. But until then be well, stay safe and go stags and everybody unmute themselves. Let's give Kurt a huge round of applause. Thank you, Kurt. Kurt, thank you. Hope to see you all soon. Okay, thank you.


Our first discussion this morning, President Guari presents a budget of 16.39 trillion naira. But not a few Nigerians are worried about the huge deficit and new borrowings of 5 trillion naira. And of course, on top trend in this morning, actor Chew Atalu Agu has it rough with soldiers who assault and manhandle him in Anishap. His offence is wearing the colours of the African flag. And of course, as always, we go to Off the Press, which is a review of the major stories in today's newspapers. It's the 8th of October. I would say good morning and thanks for joining us on the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. And thanks for sticking with us all through the week and in the month of October so far. I am Osaugi Aguawan. Great to have you here. We'll start with of course our top trending stories. The first one of course takes us to Anambra State where veteran actor Chew Atalu Agu made headlines yesterday for very, very sad reasons. There were video clips that show him being assaulted by members, officers of the Nigerian army in Anambra State where of course he was accused of agitating and causing insurrections or whatever the army put out. I'm going to share a statement from the Nigerian army. It says, troops of the army have arrested one Chew Atalu Agu while inciting members of the public and soliciting for support for the prescribed indigenous people of Biafra, dressed in a well-known attire of the prescribed group. Chew Atalu was picked up for questioning while inciting members of the public to join the prescribed group. Though he attempted putting up some resistance when troops made efforts to take him into custody, he was not assaulted or subjected to brutalization. But from the video clips that we saw, that's all lies. We can basically also tell that this wasn't necessarily anybody trying to incite or call people to join the IPOB or to join in any insurrection. This was basically Chew Atalu Agu driving around with his popular green bus because I've seen this bus a couple of times in the southeast. I also have problems with the bus we'll get to later. He was most likely driving around to either a movie set or wherever he was going and, of course, was dressed in the Biafran collars. Of course, in a traffic stop, the soldiers saw him, asked him to step down from the vehicle very likely and, of course, all the drama then ensued. There's also a video clip showing him being assaulted by members of the army and, of course, you can see they're made to sit on the floor. I mean, every week there is one story or one video clip or something that just makes you sick in your stomach here in Nigeria. And this is our video for the week. Maybe, of course, the killing of Chika Akunili covered for last week, but this is our video for the week that makes you completely sick in your stomach in Nigeria. There's many angles to this. The actor's guild of Nigeria and its president, Tameka Rula, has put out a statement saying that he was wrong for putting on those collars, which, of course, there's people who would say yes. In the times that we currently are in Nigeria, there are certain things that you shouldn't do just to avoid the drama and the problems that might be associated with it, especially in the southeast where there currently is an army operation. Talking about army operation, well, I'll get to that. And so I know that and I've seen a couple of people who say yes, it was wrong to wear those collars, not because it is necessarily illegal to dress in those collars, but because of, if you read the room across Nigeria, you might tell yourself that it's just not a time to be dressed in that way in the southeast, where there's, of course, security agents everywhere. Now, talking about the collars itself, if you, of course, are aware, there is a particular alcohol brand that has pretty much the same rising sun. I think that's what it's called, the land of the rising sun. And so they have pretty much the same green bottle, obviously, and there's a sun on the bottle. Does that make it illegal? Is that now illegal to dress in those collars? Is it now illegal to have a sun on your outfit? Is it now illegal to wear red and black and green with a touch of yellow? These are the questions that need to be answered as quickly as possible. But moving away from whether it's illegal or not, what is legal or illegal, I'm sure that there's many, many legal practitioners that might be looking into that. A lot of people might tell you that it's not necessarily illegal. Yes, the IPOB has been prescribed, but every person still has the right to say, okay, well, I agree with the call for Biafra. I'm not necessarily committing any crimes, but I agree with the narrative of secession. I agree with the idea of secession. And of course, either through Biafra or through the European nation agitators. There's different groups here and there. And so if you are not necessarily committing any crimes, if you are not in any way causing insurrection, if you're not in any way causing violence, you are attacking Nigerian police officers or the Nigerian state, then what exactly makes it illegal? The Nigerian army, and I think I mentioned this sometime this week, that the Nigerian army has over time, in the last couple of years, cheapened itself so much that it has lost the respect that it normally should have. In other climes, when you see soldiers maybe outside Africa, in the US or the UK, there's a lot of videos on YouTube where you see soldiers returning from war or being in the supermarkets or wherever. And you see the respect that they have. Even people who were veterans, people who fought in World War I and World War II, you see them in the streets in the US and there's a level of respect that they have among citizens. But the Nigerian army has, in the last couple of years, made itself look so cheap and has lost complete respect and value in the eyes of the common Nigerian. There is never that level of respect that you should have when you see a soldier because they have basically flooded the streets, they've committed some of these crimes and make them look very, very, very embarrassing. And that's the next point that I'm going into.  Shouldn't the Nigerian police itself be able to tell when a person is a seeming threat or not? What exactly makes a person dressed in certain colors an immediate threat and what makes it immediately offensive to officers of the Nigerian army? These are the very, very important questions that we need to start in ourselves and it really just tells two things that we still, in 2021, have not been able to get to ourselves to a place where security agencies understand the respect for the rights of the Nigerian that they are meant to protect. Yes, there's a narrative that the clothes that they wear, the guns that they use are paid for with taxpayers' money. But they still do not understand the rights of every single Nigerian. They don't value themselves, those rights of every single Nigerian that they are meant to protect. And that's why you get to see these things happen from the police, to the NSCDC, to the DSS, to the army, every single security agent because there's zero respect for human rights here in Nigeria. Zero respect in any way for rights here in Nigeria and that's why you see some of these things continue to happen. And it's embarrassing, and I will say that. I've seen Inebehe Efrong put out his own statement on social media condemning these actions and, of course, asking that Chulita Loagu be released. I hope that we understand that we must do the right thing and this also makes you start to wonder whether the army operation in the south is really to protect and, of course, kill insurrections and cortisim and some of the things that they had mentioned and robbery and kidnapping. It's really just to put fear in the eyes and the minds of the IPOB because that's what it seems like. It feels like they've been told that anybody who looks or dresses or sounds or barks like an IPOB member is immediately a threat and should be eliminated and that's what you saw play out in that video yesterday. I'll also quickly mention that I don't know why Chulita Loagu is still driving that green bus when actresses across the industry are buying new benzes and houses across Lagos. It's embarrassing. I'll say that. Anyway, to other stories this morning, in the news, of course, the son of Abdulashid Mena, former head of the pensions reform tax team, has been sentenced to about 24 years in prison and by Chip George Okona Bang. He, of course, got five years for the first count and, of course, another five years and an extra 10 years, I believe. I need to look at that again to be sure for, of course, the crimes that he was accused of, mostly money laundering charges. And if you remember also, his father is also currently in custody and, of course, has been sentenced or rather has been held until he's sentenced. He also, you know, was accused of jumping bail, if you remember Abdulashid Mena, a couple of years ago. I think it was in 2019 or 2020. Had jumped bail, he was, you know, eventually rearrested and, you know, held in custody. The judge acts that he be held in custody. He applied for another bail in September, I believe, of 2021, which was denied because, of course, the judge said, well, you jumped bail before there's no way we're going to give you bail again. But his son also, who has pretty much the same or similar charges of money laundering, has now been sentenced to about 24 years imprisonment. The difference with these two stories is, or maybe the similarities with these two persons is the fact that Faisal Mena is currently nowhere to be found. And so he has been sentenced in absentia.  Will he be found the same way Namdi Khan was easily found? What exactly would play out next? Yes, this, you know, would be seen as a victory in the fight against corruption and the fact that those people whose monies were laundered and mismanaged by these two persons, father and son, who couldn't get their pensions for one reason or the other, those persons who somehow or someone may be able to say, yes, this is justice. And so, you know, you know, it's kudos, I believe, to the Nigerian, to the EFCC and, of course, the Nigerian justice system being able to prove their case in court and find these two guilty.  We hope, you know, somehow, some way that Faisal will be found wherever he is, either here in Nigeria or outside the country. And of course, we'll get to serve his, you know, time in prison to pay for, of course, the crimes that he committed against the Nigerian state and, of course, against those thousands of pensioners that, of course, had their monies laundered. Billions of Naira that were allegedly laundered by these two persons. Pretty interesting development in that case. Finally, I'm going to wrap up our top trend in this morning. We're talking sports. Yesterday, Lagos State basically was shut down. I remember that I shared the news, you know, a few times yesterday saying that there was going to be traffic, you know, blockage in certain places from Surulir to Osho to many, many names. You can dive that left and right. You can, you know, have to stop here.  It's supergoose are going to be playing today.  They eventually lost. They eventually lost the game. And so, while it's caught, I remember just before sports yesterday was complaining bitterly, you know, about how, you know, he didn't think it was necessary to cause that much traffic and, you know, discomfort to Lagosha and simply because the supergoose were playing. It's not like they were playing against Lana Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. It was Central African Republic. And so, why did we need to shut Lagos down? But the reason they shut Lagos down, you know, eventually they didn't go as planned as the supergoose eventually lost. I think it was Wango Tino yesterday. There have been calls for Gernet Ross. I've seen a couple of those calls on social media. I'm not sure how that will turn out, but we will continue to wish the supergoose best of luck and hope that they eventually get to qualify for the World Cup. While it's caught, when he steps in for sports this morning, we'll be telling you a little bit more about their chances going forward. But of course, it's really, really sad that they lost that game. But these are our top trending stories from Anambra State where Chihuahua Go was assaulted to Fisal Meina who has been sentenced to, you know, about 24 years in prison and, of course, to sports where the supergoose yesterday lost to the Central African Republic. Once again, why is Chihuahua Talago still driving that green, ugly boss when the Nollywood actresses are buying their vehicles and houses every week? There's a new actress buying a car or house. Stay with us this morning. We'll take a short break. When we come back, Jiray Johnson will be joining us for Off The Press and we'll have a quick review of the stories making headlines on breakfast this morning.


Yeah, thank you very much and welcome to my presentation about the innovation framework for sustainable product and venture building So first talking about the relevance of this topic So in 2021 Germany only produced over 670 million tons of co2 and this is it is expected that digitalization or digital solutions are able to reduce them by 20 percent and So who am I or who are we we are what x we are a company builder focusing on developing sustainable digital solutions Solutions and trying to get like this leverage on helping to overcome those climate issues in the long run And how are we doing this actually so we have a pretty simple step and process first You have to find the idea then second we have to validate the idea and Third we have to build the idea actually So and today I'm going to talk to you about each of those three steps Let's start with actually finding the idea And so for us and it is important that the idea has some kind of sustainable Component in it you might ask what does sustainability mean in this context, so it really depends on the business model So it could be the pretty simple equivalents of co2 saves to the Competition or maybe mapping it to the stg's to have an alignment there I said really depends for case to case so there we have those two areas Meaning that when we get approached by a company our customers are often middle-stand middle-stand companies from Germany So they either want to transform one of their existing products sustainable Let's say a company once they turn their production circular or They want to explore new ideas in the news basis For example company approached us Wanted to find ideas in the sustainable construction space So what we do there? We kind of look at Opportunity areas to see where there might be a match for the existing business model for our customer Here are some example of for opportunity areas. We're looking in we're looking at so Rental and sharing maybe tracking and offsetting supply chain transparency and Recycling and refurbishment. I don't think that I have to explain what each of those category means But I'll illustrate it how we actually do it with an example So one of our customers was next March next March is a b2b software as a service provider And they're focusing on OEMs that operate in the construction space like for example Bosch that produces those drilling machines or Hilti and They provide an ERP software that integrates Over the whole value chain until the end customer Meaning that they have this b2b2b or b2b2c kind of business model and also as said they have Products Integrated over the whole value chain. For example this EDI connect which helps to connect the EDI of the OEM with the one of the retailer the ERP connect which Provides the product availability on the website of the retailer You name it so they have a bunch of products but important here is that they were super close to the OEMs and Realized that there is a huge Potential because of the batteries of the drilling machines because often when they're used they get thrown away or Left behind or stored in the storage room for forever and nothing happens and this was also pre-election time So they were also expecting this bearbok effect I'm kind of thinking that after the election everything will turn green and Recycling has to be a has to be forced on every company. So they were approaching us to find an idea in this recycling Circular kind of sphere So what we did there we started by mapping the life cycle of a product and starting by design engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, sales, usage and end of life and Then we had a look on what different business models exist in each of those steps So what kind of sustainable business models exist there? So for example in sales there are rental platforms refurbing economy end-of-life you have giveaway platform and recycling as well and So then after that we went a step further and had a look on what exactly the exact and what companies already exist in those spaces For example in rental platforms. There's Grover. You might know this B2C renting platform In giveaway platforms. There's too good to go That operates there. So having this kind of knowledge We then organized innovation workshop one of those classic design thinking ideation workshops and were then able to find ideas in or it was like a total of seven ideas I think in exactly those spaces and you have to imagine that this Idea finding process the output or outcome of this one is like a long list of ideas of Pretty high-level ideas between five and ten ideas which have to be validated in the next step So let's have a look on how we validate the actual business idea So the usual framework consists of analyzing the desirability To see if the customer actually likes the product where we would do customer interviews second the viability Where we check from a financial perspective if it makes sense. It's like a classical business case modeling and third the feasibility To see if it is even possible to build the idea mostly from engineering kind of perspective and Here Obviously we also check the sustainability here metaphorically is shown as a fourth Circle so let's have a look on how we're actually doing this We made it as a three steps process First it is important to check on how much the weighting of The sustainability as a criteria is actually as you know some of you might think hey It might be the most important one in the business model But as already said some of our customers are German middle-stand companies So they're already happy when the business model is a little bit more sustainable than their previous offering they had Second then the actual evaluation and here as already mentioned as well It totally depends on the business model what we're doing So it could be measuring the co2 equivalence to the previous version Looking for the alignment with the STG's Generally, yeah, you name it operating into those opportunity areas that really depends to the case to case specifics and third then the challenging where we all come together in our Team and have this kind of sparring rounds where we challenge the business model sometimes We also talk take external experts with us to actually Look that we really haven't sustainable impact and not fall into this green wash green washing mosh pit So example how we did it So our parent company Vismann approached us during COVID times, so they wanted to help the their employees to be active and This with a sustainable benefit kind of so they had the idea about the sport app where they would provide planting a tree for each kilometer and Our task was then to To validate if it makes sense to the to build the idea and spoiler The outcome of this idea was this classical running app Connected with some smart devices Where you would run? The running would be tracked where you could have team challenges where then and trees would be planted And overall it was a huge success. So we had a really high participant rate So there were six thousand seven hundred persit participants I don't know if it's probably like a third of the employees of this man. They were like over eight hundred thousand trees planted and Also, it was lightly shared on all social media platforms and there was even like this Garmin health finalist most innovative solution in engagement Kind of thing award. Yeah So, let's have a look on why this idea was validated in the first place so first this component of sustainability as an incentive so Visman, I don't know if you know the company so they're providing They're helping out at the providing energy efficient heating so they building heat pumps For example, so they're already operating into this in this sustainability sphere So it was kind of a value fit to also help their To also provide this incentive to their customers at their employees Second the focus was then set on Local impact so I already mentioned that this man approached us first with the idea to Just plant trees and when a big company talks about something where they would want to plant trees it's kind of a red flag going on or a red light and So what we did there we put the focus on local impact and meaning Trees were planted. I think around their Headquarter where they would have like actual influence and the employees would actually see what impact they had And I think like nowadays they even bought some land in Finland where they're doing the tree planting themselves so so it's not like some kind of project somewhere in the middle of nowhere where you would not have any influence and Third also important the social aspect this team challenges this I won't say social pressure that they could In a gamified way challenge each other Which helped a lot to engage the employees and therefore it became an overall success It even started to become an white label version So or is it's in the making or it's becoming a white label version and one of those big tech players apparently already is using it and So if the idea is validated then probably of the most important parts is that you actually have to build the idea and Here many people are thinking that the idea per se has to be sustainable and then it's already a sustainable business but Therefore I want to talk to you about the reason on why what impact we can have in product building So First there are more and more consumers using the internet So as we all know every job nowadays became digital in every profession You have to use the internet and also in emerging economies. You have more and more people with access to the internet second, I Don't know if you remember back in the days They're not that old but like 20 25 at 20 0 5 2010 like the websites back in back then They were like pretty simple With html css and so the average Size of a website was about 500 kilobytes And nowadays if you look at the website like for every small product you have this interactive website with three auto playing videos and Everything in it and therefore and the average website size Is about 2.3 megabytes? For example, Amazon is 5 megabytes. So you have like two factors. You have more people using the internet plus you have more energy used per internet usage meaning overall you have more energy that is used and therefore the internet traffic has tripled since 2015 and It is expected for the energy usage related to the traditional solutions to become like one fifth of the overall energy consumption Worldwide So what does this have to do with product building? so the internet usage depends on mainly four factors First the devices we used the networks Our capabilities the data centers and the manufacturing in digital products building we can influence three of those Three of those factors which account for about 84 percent of the whole energy usage So therefore you could have a real influence meaning that you can influence And the resources that are needed plus the hosting you can In influence the performance of the tool and you can influence the device backward capabilities Meaning that not every product has to be available only for the newest version of IOS Starting from iPhone 12 plus that the users are forced to buy a new device from time to time and you can generally influence the amount of data that are produced saved and Transferred So what you actually can do there and so in this is the product building simplified you have on the one side you have the cloud and Hardware data depending on how you're hosting and on the other side you have the software part So what you can do on the cloud side first you have to choose the right tooling for the job So as already mentioned, there is not always this fancy framework Necessary like sometimes the HTML and CSS is enough Also It is important to use auto scaling like if you're just starting your startup There's no need for cloud capabilities to host one million people So it's better to to update it the more you grow and Also important to delete unnecessary data for example in backups That there's like no need to do store the backups from five years ago Regarding hosting also important to hosting low-carbon regions. It doesn't matter how green the actual hardware is when It is in a place where the overall energy mix is Fossil fuel-based and it's still not Sustainable and also to have the hosting is possible to the To the close to the customers or consumers In the software part you can actually have influence by choosing the right programming language so per se and the interpreting languages like Python are Less efficient than for example C sharp or C++ and also to have the software always updated to Clean the caching frequently or don't clean it that frequently as much as needed to optimize the code optimize the assets and always measure the impact you have or look where there could be improvements and And One part of product development is the technical part on the other side You have also the business part where you could have actually impact on the sustainability or have Which is also impacted by the sustainability. So first you have the marketing aspects Here for example, obviously if not necessary, you shouldn't do like print media But also in targeting when targeting of digital ads when your target customer is in Berlin only There's no need to make like a German why it's targeting targeting every possible kind of person second the pricing There it depends there you have two possibilities to either have like a premium pricing model since you have this sustainability component in your business model and Therefore the customers might be willing to pay more or you could also use the competitive pricing meaning that your be and that the customer will prefer you compared to the Other model theory and also communication as we all know this inability is a sensitive topic So it's important to have this fact based consistent communication to not fall in this green washing pit So let's look at our last example again So our parent company this month and this is their sustainable strategy Leap lead by example empower people to act Advocate to foster a movement and partner to scale up. So they came to us with the proposal to find an idea in Exactly the empower and the partner space so we started there with this idea finding ideation part and What then? Happened after this we were founded our newest venture Climony So Climony focuses on customer or consumer Education in teaching them on how to become more sustainable or live in a more sustainable way and The ones that are not inevitable or the reductions that are not inevitable can be offset Over the application furthermore they provide like a partner network Where other companies operating sustainable space can Put their their offering Where the consumers can get to the Informations and therefore you have kind of like this match where on the one hand you have the businesses providing their information on the other hand You have consumers that can therefore with this information live a more sustainable lifestyle and So what actually happened there in product building so every product After this build process We have this checklist with about I don't know at the moment like 200 Questions we check each of them to see how sustainable our product is This is some random example questions that we check in each each release So and what improvements we did over the roadmap and for example we used vectors instead of pixels that are easier To load Seconds there were no videos used And third as an alternative for gifts we used lotty files Also an intelligent caching was used where on the user side that not for every loading of the new page There has to be new data transferred and also the design is optimized and also in the business part The focus was made on reduction rather than just offsetting And also it is aligned with the off oxford offsetting principles so coming back to our process and Talk to you about first finding the idea and then second Validating the idea and third building the idea. So this is obviously the simplified process so our real processing quotes Here in the first and the second part in the research print and the idea validation we're applying this kind of Design thinking framework you might know this double diamond about idea finding and Validation and the product builder and we're operating after this Lee and build measure learn principle the classical lean start up and This was already my presentation and thank you very much and I'm open for your questions Thank you so much and questions comments ideas Anything burning? This might be a little controversial But why should we build something for the sixth time that already exists in the case of? Climony where if you look in any app store you basically see five offerings that do education Unsustainability and also help you to compensate anything I think it's just like if we build the same thing three times. It's just a waste of resources, isn't it? You there's actually the founder of Climony there so you cannot nobody if you want to explain it you can actually Obviously, it's a good question. I think on the one hand We have yet not reached any point of space in which the total awareness in society has reached any point in which we can say okay Now everyone is actually educated So we believe for ourselves that we actually have a different approach to bringing this product and to the market so I'm also reaching consumers in a different way and also having our own approach to Education so it's a general question and totally get your point that why do something over and over again But on the other hand in our market in arm the way our markets work Competition is a good thing because it actually drives the best ideas to succeed and Will eliminate the ones that do not succeed? On the way so ensuring that the best ideas will come through I believe that with Climony We can actually help succeeding here And yes, obviously a lot of things about market economics that we can discuss but yeah If I'm only allowed for one follow-up question. So what is it that you do better than? competitors so Like most competitors that you actually look and let's say it's you to education space Don't really provide any actual education like background knowledge on if you look if you look into the app store and you look for any like CO2 application you find like some with like super generic tips and Then I don't know some that even lead you into consuming product and service etc. So What we do is for example, we partner up with the different like we are basically building an open platform in which different partners can participate with their knowledge and their approach and We make this a rather open Approach and not only like that. We are on the stage gate to what information is shown in the application Yeah, I think It was a bit too loud. Thank you And next up I think yes, obviously we have a unique brand and That we built around our product which is able to you to reach different kind of people than existing services Hope this answers your question Thank you. Fascinating following questions to this or anything else Why would you focus on? The carbon footprint of consumers instead of big tech or companies in general like The Individual or their carbon footprint doesn't really matter in the big picture. Does it? It's a question again to you Could could you please fall for once repeat your question? I wasn't aware that you were talking to me He asked on on why we're focusing on the reduction of consumers and not the corporate Corporates I think on all levels of society we have to reduce carbon emissions and The one that that we can influence most at the moment and in our own lives is the ones that Is it's the life that we control? I do not at all say that we should not Help or demand from corporations to reduce their CO2 emissions themselves And I guess most of us are also employees So we have a voice at our own workplace. We can also educate about that what and I think yes Obviously we need to start somewhere and I think in any way every ton of CO2 that can be avoided or reduced Is a meaningful contribution? I'm not saying we should be doing the either or the other I'm just saying that the one that approach that we are taking as the one that focuses on individuals on private households Not at all to say that we do not want any actions to be seen in the in the corporate space, but Obviously if you have a range with a variety of options that you can do and where you can invest your time with your money and We with our partner Or our partner companies Chose that to follow that path not at all saying that the other ones aren't necessary or not even even more needed And maybe also important that Climony is an example of one of the ventures we build in this space which happens to be a B2C Focus venture because our parent company asks us to operate in this space So I'm generally in building digital business models and we also are focusing on helping Corporates reduce their CO2 footprint. So we see this overall importance Further questions Yeah, I just have a question Do you see an increase in the interest? So you were telling that you are looking into the stakeholders actually the companies are you working for if? Sustainability is relevant for them, right? So this is this is your starting point I don't know how long are you operating already? Do you see an increase meanwhile something which indicates that it does matter? So we also have historically seen our company was focusing on this deep tech IOT sphere so Only since like one or two years. You asked its transition to focus in the sustainability sphere and so what we are seeing is an overall interest of companies to Operate in this to become more sustainable For example, you can go to every page of a middle shunt company in there You see a header section sustainability climate awareness. So everyone is theoretically open but more not Many people operate do actually anything so it's like at the moment It's more of an idea what you could theoretically do and therefore we're often doing like research Sprints, we're often doing this idea validation part, but like actual sustainable products that are built or actual Request for building some products are a few at the moment, but it's growing hopefully Further questions if not I have a question if I may You said you're always trying not to get into this pet of greenwashing and Sustainability is very easy to be for because we don't know what sustainability is so each company can say we're sustainable We're starting striving for sustainability, but it's not defined There's a thousand definitions of what's included. So when measuring the impact what are your criteria or what? academic or practical foundations are you building it on because It means a lot of different things to different people companies regions countries and so on Yeah, so so there's like no standard framework. We're using at the moment and Therefore we have first also a look at the company. So we made like this kind of background check if this company Actually is willing to make this transition in the sustainability sphere and it's not like I Don't want to throw shade on any company But it's not like an oil rick company that wants to have like one small Sustainable digital idea offering and therefore it really depends on case-by-case We try not to focus on co2 equivalents only since it's like not an overall or intersectional approach but Kind of Let's say for example check if it's An alignment with the STG's and So there's really like no hard framework. We're using there, but it depends really on case-by-case As an answer Also if I may add just to the question I think what we can what we always do and this is part of the idea validation is to talking to industry or Knowledge experts in that sphere. So when talking When thinking of how to validate the concept an idea then we could try to get multiple perspectives on that idea to see Okay, who and what things of this in which way tells of what additional things to take into consideration So that we get come to a broad and holistic perspective Okay, and I get the point and I find it very Valuable to see this sector definitely have other perspectives that needs to be taken into account however Sustainability is only recently taking social spect perspectives into account or social accountability for Products where it's produced whatsoever same goes for software like I haven't heard Not criticizing anyone here just saying Social justice in programming is not very big at the moment And so how to take resources water by diversity There's no framework. I know but I just want to be a bit critical of the idea saying it's so easy to to Name something sustainable, but there's no It's still in the making and it's still this Discussionable so how can how can it become like even better in the future like what can you build this on? when you are Counseling or creating products for other companies So here I also have to say that at the moment we're from these classical ESG We're currently operating into the in the e-part they're focusing on ecological ecological Sphere so we're totally aware that there are also social issues So at the moment and we're focusing there and trying to expand more into the future also take other factors into the consideration and then Could you repeat the question or no? Do you see any? Possibilities of creating a framework of course it cannot be static. It has to be dynamic It has to be learning Dynamic framework that and criteria that you can use but Are you already seeing some do you have to gain some learnings to see where this could be heading in the future? Based on the couple of products you have been inventing or creating for companies Good question Maybe if you have So so I think maybe first of all also to it to the whole room. I think the point you're mentioning is as a very known problem, right that you can stick a sustainable label on something because you consider it from one like Aspect right and maybe just in terms of how much energy efficient this is but it doesn't take into Count what other topics along the value chain it touches and where also like maybe specific Electrists other topics come into consideration that maybe or are influenced that are not taken into consideration in terms of how to move forward to build a framework To take this into consideration. I think there are great Already assessments out there for example like when we work I mean in German. It's now called the Lieferketten Sorgfalz Flichtgesetz. I think at that point We as Wattix benefit a lot from our cooperation with with this one because they evaluate every of their suppliers With the huge questionnaire of like, I don't know 200 or 300 different questions regarding touching all these different aspects So I think there are a lot of approaches to this I'm not saying they're perfect or that they're finalized yet But I think it is policy in that sense that also driving more and more the necessity to define One standard of how to define things have when to label them in which way So what we can only do we can or what we try is we try to stay open and try to learn a lot from the input that We're getting through different people that we are approaching when we're talking to these about these kind of topics Conferences like these are also great because then we get different perspectives again, and but I think lastly it has to come down to To one regulation approach in which we get defined when we can call something sustainable or whatnot Thank you. Any last remarks Thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you for contributing Enjoy the evening the last of bits and boime and don't forget the ending conference is then in