It was 1984 and the Irish economy was in the doldrums when Angus McCarthy decided to go to America. New York was his target but his mother had watched The Streets of San Francisco and liked the city's rolling hills and stunning views over the bay. So that was where she sent him, saying: "You can walk to New York if you don't like San Francisco."
“I didn’t have a plan really,” he says, looking back on his decision to leave Ireland. “I had a job at Dunnes Stores but there was a sense that there was no opportunity to improve and move on and expand. And there wasn’t the luxury of other jobs you could look at.”
With a hankering to leave but without the money for a flight, he turned to his mother for a loan. “She thought San Francisco looked European, not like your typical American city, not like New York. I know now that her decision was absolutely right. She is always right.”
McCarthy, from Gort, Co Galway, had little money and no contacts when he arrived on America's western shore. In the mornings he would line up with other labourers, hoping for a day's work on one a city building site. If you didn't get work, you didn't get paid.
In the evenings he would sleep on a couch in his cousin’s apartment – his one connection in San Francisco. When the couch was unavailable, or he felt he had outstayed his welcome, he would sleep rough in the Golden Gate Park.
“It was tough and it was frightening. I was 21 years of age. You’d be told there was work going and to be at some location in the morning and you’d get there and wait for hours and nobody would show up. Other days you’d get work and make $40.
“But I had a strong sense that I could not surrender. I felt this is something you have to do and if you go through this to get to a better place, it would be a small price to pay. It was a struggle you inherited when you came here and I couldn’t go back because I had nothing financially. I knew that going back was probably going to be a lot worse than the pain I was in now.”
As weeks and months passed, his network grew, along with his confidence and his earnings. “Baby steps became larger steps and the thing I noticed here is that if you gave the sense that you would work, you would get the opportunities.”
His first steady job was at a furniture warehouse, where he worked for about five years, rising to senior management. Following the 1989 earthquake, the furniture industry hit a downturn and, by 1991, the business had closed.
After that, McCarthy became an independent salesman, selling windows and doors to construction sites. He also opened a bar – the Black Thorn Tavern.
“It was a hugely successful pub,” McCarthy says, “but I was the worst bar owner who ever walked the face of the Earth. I enjoyed too much dancing and partying rather than working behind the bar. It was a great life experience, a way to learn about people and gain friendships that I still have to this day. ”
He learned much about the construction industry. He studied zoning regulations and discovered there were opportunities to build home/work spaces, artists’ studios with living quarters to accommodate San Francisco’s artistic communities.
“The city is so diverse, with different needs, but it always had a huge artistic population, people who live and work in the same place,” he says. “The city passed a zoning that allowed creative people to build a space and live and work in it. There was a huge expansion of these kind of buildings and I was one of the people who started that in the mid-1990s.”
The company he created, A McCarthy Engineering Inc, is still going today.
By 2008 McCarthy’s business was well established, but like so many in that sector, he was over-extended when the crash hit. He struggled but kept the business afloat and is now enjoying the benefits of California’s resurgence. Silicon Valley, in particular, is booming.
“The city is prospering and we are trying to rebuild what we lost in the collapse. We are in no way back to where we were but we are on our way back. The town is back, work is coming back, industry and housing demand is on the rise again.”
McCarthy has been appointed to head up the city’s Building Commission and he is a member of the Irish Immigration and Pastoral Centre. He has been a member the Immigration Rights Commission and represents small immigrant builders through the Residential Builders Association.
“It’s an upside down statement, but it’s true,” he says, reflecting on his experiences as an emigrant and businessman. “You have to understand failure to be successful and deal with failure and understand that you will probably have more bad days than good, make more bad business decisions than good ones, but eventually you will learn from it. It’s okay to fail, but it’s never okay to quit.”
