Mary Corcoran 1932-2009

It is with much sadness that I report that Mary Corcoran  Sheridan was buried on November 12, 2009. Mary had been in ill health for some time and had been suffering from dimentia.Mary was predeceased by her husband George.  Mary is survived by her sister Cathy and brothers Billy and Jimmy and many nieces and nephews. Her Requium Mass was celebreted by her cousin Father Jerry Gallagher. Internment was at St. Mary's cemetary in Freehold, N. J.
Mary's parents operated Corcoran's Grocery and Meat Market on Amsterdam Ave.between 131st and
 132nd Street on the East side of the avenue. I'm not sure of the name of the store, The Emerald also come to mind.  One side of the store was the meat market operated by her father Jim and the other side of the store, the grocery, was run by her mother, Betty.
The Corcoran's lived at 128 Convent Ave. Mrs. Corcoran's sister, I forget her name but, of course,  we called her Mrs. Gallager  Her husband and their two children, Jerry and Mary Elizabeth, lived with them. They were the Gallagher's. Mr. Gallagher worked for the Fifth Ave. Coach Co. Mrs. Gallagher ran the household.  The Gallagher's and the Corcoran's shared the one apartment, all ten of them. On top of that they had one of the first televisions in the neighborhood and Jimmy always invited  Jackie Hayes, Junior McGoldrick, Jimmy Bradley, Vinnie Nyholm and my brother and me to the house to watch the TV. Many times there were many more guys there. I think the TV was  a ten inch De Walt. It had a magnifier in front of the tube to make the picture look bigger.
 We were always very welcome, very well fed and ,with the TV, very well entertained. Mary, Cathy,Billy and Jimmy treated all of us as if we were part of the family. Even Jimmy's dog Fuzzy was very welcoming. The Corcoran's also had a summer home in Edgewater, NJ. It was in a place called "The Colony" . It was right on the river. Of course we were always welcome there as well. We all swam in the Hudson and there was actually a little beach there.
The Corcoran family was another one of the families that made Vinegar Hill the great neighborhood that it was. Mr. Corcoran was one of the oldest original residents of the area. I believe he was born somewhere around 131st Street. He was in the neighborhood until the sixties, when the family moved to Fort Lee, NJ. The Gallagher's moved with them, to a two family house.