Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

Just another snippet on that Thomas Street/Meath Street corner which shows up how difficult it can be to interpret buildings sometimes:

The Victorian corner building [the present Cash Converters premises] can easily be identified as the same in both views, but in the grainy 1891 view [bottom], the two adjoining houses are [reasonably] clearly shown to have been originally four storey structures, despite having an identical parapet height to their three storey manifestation today [top picture]. Clearly somebody [presumably ‘The Carpet Mills’, or their predecessors] at some stage decided to sacrifice an upper floor in order to gain higher and more impressive retail space at ground floor level and possibly also equalize the upper floor levels with those in the adjoining Victorian corner building, which they still appear to occupy, in some distinctly low grade manner, today.

You’d be a long time trying to figure that one out without the benefit of the 19th century photograph 😉