Memories of Little Caughnawaga in Boerum Hill

The Wigwam bar is now the . Located on Nevins Street between State Street and Atlantic Avenue, the Wigwam used to be at the center of Brooklyn’s Mohawk Indian community.

Paddy Heany, an Irish truck driver who hung out at the Wigwam before it closed in the 1960s, remembered an Indian headdress hanging above the bar and Mohawk women working as barmaids.

“They played pool, they drank, they argued with each other, they didn’t bother with anybody else,” he said of the Mohawks. “They were good people.”

And even before it was The Wigwam, the bar was called the Nevins Street Bar & Grill, which Joseph Mitchell described in “The Mohawks in High Steel,” his 1949 New Yorker piece that is probably the best-known study of Mohawks in Brooklyn. Mitchell called the bar “small and snug and plain and old,” and noted that it served Montreal beers.

Most Mohawks came to Brooklyn from the Kahnawake reservation near Montreal, with others from the Akwesasne reservation that borders Quebec, Ontario and New York State. They referred to their community in what is now Boerum Hill as Little Caughnawaga (Caughnawaga is an old name for Kahnawake) or Downtown Caughnawaga.

Kahnawake Mohawks have been working in steel since the 1880s, when, as Mitchell wrote in his article, the Dominion Steel Company gained permission to build a railroad bridge on reservation land by promising the Mohawks jobs as day laborers on the project. When the day laborers began climbing onto the bridge itself, the company officials were impressed by their agility.

“The company that was working there said let’s train some of these guys,” Kevin Zachary told me, one afternoon at the Killarney Pub on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge where Brooklyn Mohawks now congregate. “And so they trained them, and that’s our history. We’ve been doing it for a hundred years.”

But most signs of the Mohawks in Brooklyn are no longer there.

The congregation that met at Cuyler Presbyterian Church, on Pacific Street between Hoyt and Bond, is gone too. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the church’s non-Indian pastor, David M. Cory, gave sermons in the Mohawk language. As Cory recalled in his 1955 book on Indian life, Within Two Worlds, the community’s Protestant minority referred to Cuyler Presbyterian, in Mohawk, as “the church that makes friends.” Now, Culyer Presbyterian is a private residence.

When Mitchell was writing, every grocery store in the neighborhood reportedly carried Quaker White Enriched and Degerminated Corn Meal, a variety that still exists but that isn’t on any local shelves that I could find. Mitchell wrote that Mohawk women in Brooklyn used the corn meal to make kanatarok, traditional Mohawk bread. A long-closed spot on Atlantic Avenue called the Spar Bar & Grill served the customary Mohawk Sunday steak dinner, National Geographic reported in a 1952 article.

Brooklyn Local 361 of the Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworker’s Union on Atlantic Avenue between Third and Fourth avenues is also gone. The union hall — located on the second floor of the Times Plaza Post Office, according to Cory’s book — was the reason Mohawk men first began moving to the neighborhood in the 1920s.

Mohawk ironworkers worked on projects throughout the U.S. and Canada since the end of the 19th century. In New York City, as Mitchell and others wrote, they worked on skyscrapers from the Empire State Building to the United Nations Headquarters to the World Trade Center, on bridges from the George Washington to the Verrazano Narrows and on a multitude of other buildings, bridges and structures.

Mohawk women in the neighborhood worked as housekeepers and at local factories such as the Fred Goat Co. metal-stamping plant. According to The Breweries of Brooklyn: An Informal History of a Great Industry in a Great City by Will Anderson, that plant was located in the old Federal Brewery Co. building, which stands at the corner of Third Avenue and Dean Street.

Some reminders remain.

There are still union stickers on the mirror behind the bar at Hank’s Saloon on Atlantic and Third avenues, a reminder of when it was called The Doray Tavern, a hangout for Mohawk ironworkers. The older regulars told me that as recently as the 1990s there were still a lot of them coming in.

“The Mohawks liked country music, that was their music,” said one regular, an Italian-American electrician known in the bar as Frankie Doo-Wop. Frankie’s sister married a Mohawk man from the neighborhood and he spent a lot of time around the Kahnawake, both in Brooklyn and on the reservation in Canada. His sister’s mother-in-law, who he helped move from Myrtle Avenue into a new home on State Street, spoke English, French and Mohawk fluently, and Frankie recalled Mohawk being spoken in the bar. There are just a few of the Mohawk regulars left, he and the others said: Chappy, Bobbie Canoe and a guy called Bear who said a year ago he was retiring to move back to the reservation.

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“It’s only a six hour drive. Before the thruway, it was a twelve hour drive,” Neil Cross said in a Canadian accent. 

I talked to him as he sat at the bar at the Killarney Pub, drinking a bottle of Budweiser and watching the wall-mounted TV. During the week, Cross shares an apartment upstairs with a few other guys; Mohawk ironworkers living above an Irish bar in the middle of an Arab neighborhood.

Every weekend, unless they’re working, they drive back up to the reservation. The completion of the New York State Thruway in the late 1960s made it feasible for ironworkers to find work in the city during the week and go home to see their families on weekends.

With their families remaining back on the reservation, the ironworkers live a less rooted life in Brooklyn than they once did. Zachary, sitting at the bar with Cross, recalled his mother telling him about growing up in Little Caughnawaga and working at a local factory making parachutes in the 1940s, before moving to live on the reservation. That move was not uncommon.

In Kahnawake, “you’ll hear more New York accents than French,” Kahnawake native Reaghan Tarbell narrated in her 2008 documentary Little Caughnawaga: To Brooklyn and Back. 

Zachary and Cross could come up with the name of maybe one Mohawk ironworker remaining in what they called “the old neighborhood” around Boerum Hill. In addition to the shorter commute from Canada, worsening crime during the 1970s was a factor in prompting the Mohawks to leave, Zachary said. He remembered when a guy he knew got mugged and beat up on State Street, the onetime heart of the community. Later, he said, it was rising rents that made the area unlivable for the old-time ironworkers who remained.

Zachary said he was working on a building at Fourth Avenue and Baltic Street, not far from the old neighborhood, but living in Bay Ridge and driving back to the reservation on the weekends. He and Cross estimated there are around 50 Mohawk ironworkers in the New York City area. The ones in Brooklyn mostly hang out at the Killarney Pub and another place further down Fifth at 92nd Street. Although Zachary said he didn’t speak that much of the Mohawk language, he and another ironworker exchanged a few words in it briefly, and at one point he used it when ordering a beer.

“See, you’ve been gone for a week, I forgot all my Mohawk,” the bartender told him in her Irish brogue.

Zachary pointed out an iconic black-and-white photo, dated 1932, hanging above the pool table in the back of the room. 

"Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam," by photographer Charles C. Ebbets -- also known as "Lunchtime on a Skyscraper" -- shows a row of ironworkers sitting on a steel beam high in the air above Manhattan, breaking for lunch during construction of Rockefeller Center.

Three of the men in the photo were Mohawk, he said.