O’ Connell Street, Dublin

Yes you’d think that the street’s status would’ve prevented this kind of stuff.
I really hate these banner yokes – they’re terrible eyesores. As is mentioned, the Cornerstone Bar is a particularly nasty offender also.

Not that even the most dignified of stores are immune from them – Clery’s has been known to put the odd Sale one up stretched across the lower central part of the facade – albeit more muted in nature.

As for the traffic lights, it’s a sad day, another Dublin institution swiped from under us in the cover of darkness.
To think pedestrians can now cross the road in comfort and safety. A sad day indeed :rolleyes:

As the bad old days was mentioned there, perhaps I’ll post this now.
Don’t know if it’s of interest, but below is an extract from a wonderful book entitled ‘Dublin’ which was part of the ‘The Great Cities’ series published in the 70s, and was written by Brendan Lehane. Some may have it; it’s something of a 1970s version of the glossy ‘Dublin – A Grand Tour’ 🙂

It’s still available if you search – but it is the most extraordinary book to read during these times, as it captures the capital when it was probably at its lowest point, in 1978, both in text and photographs.

Written 7 years or so before the Destruction of Dublin, and long before all of that Millenium hullabaloo, there is a sadness woven through much of its text, and virtually every photograph is as glum and depressing as one could imagine. There is a decaying Dublin captured in time, and so many sights and customs and traits that have long disappeared, some for the best, some not so.
Suppose it was my first real introduction to the Dublin, and is the book that sparked my interest in the city.

Anyway, here’s an extract describing O’Connell Street in 1977/8, painting it very much so as a place for young people. There’s so much you still recognise, and other elements that have long gone – lovely piece of writing.

By Brendan Lehane:

One of the great contrasts of Dublin is to pass from O’Connell Bridge to its wide and eponymous street. On the bridge, ragged, smear-faced itinerants, women with babes at their breasts, children with wild eyes and matted hair, sit or lie on the cold hard pavements, looking away from the dropped coins, passively anticipating an undernourished, sub-human life that sociologists show will last on average less than 40 years. Half a mile upstream you can glimpse an enchanting skyline of steeples, spires and Byzantine domes above the controversial Wood Quay, and area the Dublin Corporation threatens to choke with concrete office blocks. God’s city, with Mammon at the gates. To me the view in the frost-clear twilight, a red sky behind, with its message of many faiths and much antiquity, is one of the greatest in Europe.

Yet there, at your elbow, is O’Connell Street, a wide and flashy thoroughfare, more hick-town than Irish. In the evenings, it is the resort of the young and unattached. Wind slews round from the river and whistles harshly up the street, disturbing the hair-dos of the girls waiting for their lads outside the General Post Office, chilling the central cordon of statues: O’Connell, massive in bronze, towering hugely over the more life-size figures of heroines and angels; William Smith O’Brien, who led a disastrous rising in 1848; Parnell; the 19th-Century temperance leader, Father Matthew. Buildings still raw from their hurried construction after the Troubles 60 years ago house the features of a debased, third-hand American culture: amusement arcades, burger-bars, and arena-sized cafés selling fried potatoes and chicken under the spurious image of some Kentucky patriarch.

Several men click cameras at passers-by and hand them cards, and the willingness of many people to be caught, here and now, on film, seems to underline the fleeting nature of this stage of their lives. O’Connell Street represents a short eruption of romance in workaday lives. It offers dance-halls and snack-bars to meet in, shooting-galleries and poolrooms to bring out manliness, chocolates and films to woo with, ring-shops to usher in the terminal contract. Everywhere there is music or muzak, synthetic melodies programmed to touch vulnerable emotions like steel on a raw wound, facilitating the holding of hands, the looking of looks, the meeting of lips. Even the Irish, with their inestimable gift for small-time chatter, need active solvents to dilute their shyness, as boys from garages and schools and banks eye the wallflowers at Conarchy’s or Barry’s dance parlours – nurses from the Maternity Hospital or students from local colleges or hostel-dwellers from Mountjoy Square – and pluck up courage to ask for a dance.

There are many incongruities on O’Connell Street: the grandiose sculptures, a waxen Christ encased in glass on a plinth; a stocky, bald evangelist with a face like Santa Claus’s shouting his message of salvation against the drone of traffic: “I say to you friends, that here, today, there is the glorious saviour Christ, who on that hill in Calvary paid with his life for all our sins….” And there are wagtails, black and white birds that have wintered in a huge flock among the central plane trees for as long as anyone can remember, regardless of the razzmatazz and the curious whine of the buses and the endless passing of cars and people. I often used to watch them in the bare branches, each in a constant fidget to find the fulcrum beneath its body and that long spatula tail. Occasionally one would fly quickly to the next tree, its white belly lit momentarily by the street lamps below. Why that bird, and why to the next tree were unanswerable questions.

But I have wondered whether the bird’s move ever proved as momentous, as it unruffled its feathers beside two new neighbours, as that of the lad who a few yards away was crossing the floor of Barry’s, to ask another sort of bird to share the next dance, and perhaps the next; and then to buy a soft drink, and later perhaps a vodka in the Parnell Mooney’s or Granby Bar; and a few months afterwards, to pop the question that O’Connell Street, with its lights and chords and dazzle of moving colours, had been prodding him to ask; and finally, some months after that, to call out his and her relations in their dark, becoming suits, their toiles and crêpes and hats of raffia with plastic Easter roses attached, to watch her pledge her life to him and him his life to her before leaving the limelight to new generations, moving into some murky suburb and a whirlpool of mortgage and gas bills, with only one fading photograph, taken by a working photographer under the pillars of the GPO, to bring back the good times of their youth.

My fingers hurt 🙁

That’s a shame to hear about the four corner bars, never knew about them.
The Cornerstone is a really lovely building, with red brick on the upper two floors while the ground floor is made up of Portland stone arches – somewhat WSC style.
I was going to take a picture today but didn’t want to add impetus to Tommy Hilfiger’s campaign – damn, just have…