Paradise Square

1863 New York City the Civil War raged on. An extraordinary thing occurred amid the dangerous streets and crumbling tenement houses of the Five Points. Irish immigrants escaping the devastation of the Great Famine settled alongside free-born Black Americans and those who escaped slavery. The Irish, relegated at that time to the lowest rung of America’s social status, received a sympathetic welcome from their Black neighbors. The two communities co-existed, intermarried, raised families, and shared cultures. Within this galvanizing story of racial harmony undone by a country at war with itself, we meet the denizens of a local saloon called Paradise Square: the indomitable Black woman who owns it; her Irish-Catholic sister-in-law and her Black minister husband; a conflicted newly arrived Irish immigrant; a fearless freedom seeker; an anti-abolitionist political boss, and a penniless songwriter trying to capture it all. They have conflicting notions of what it means to be an American.