O’ Connell Street, Dublin

Yes eerie is an appropriate description, including the daylight hours! It is a most bizzare place now: not a main street, but not a secondary one either, located just off a major thoroughfare yet recieves little to no traffic. It’s more of a leftover space than a street.

It’s in a prime loaction yet there’s absolutely nothing on it – including people! Do you ever get the feeling walking along here that everyone’s very hushed and slightly nervous cause the street just feels so silent and weird?!

Agreed about the Luas works not finishing the place off properly; whereas the lack of traffic is great – it’s now one of the most pedestrian friendly streets in the city – some landscaping is badly needed. Not to go on about the linear thing again, but considering there’s no breaks on Middle Abbey St at all save the Arnotts car park, a very impressive avenue of trees could be planted here that’d really look fantastic.

Something along the lines of the beautiful species of tree on Talbot St of all places – anyone see them?
They probably get mostly ignored due to people walking with their heads down along here for obvious reasons :), but they’re very attractive, esp when ‘leafing’ if there’s such a word, in spring.
I’m sure Peter knows what they are…:

Regarding O’Connell St, agreed about the median not being a fiasco. From a functional perspective it’s simply the bikes that are causing the problem – get rid of them and all is solved in that respect, though considering the attention to detail in the manner they were put down it seems they’re permanent… The fact as J. Serski pointed out that the median is now narrower than the old does not help either in fitting the bike parks in, whatever about the appearance.
Abbey St should be able to absorb a lot, as well as Cathal Brugha St for the northern end.

It’s a pity the Luas sub-station could not have been sunk; its sheer scale is going to significantly bulk out what is supposed to be a simple kiosk, not a dominant structure. Judging by the pictures though it will be finished off very well.
And just on the sinking of services, why was this 80s signal box dumped back down from space into the middle of the Eason’s pavement?!

A year for repaving is pushing it, not least considering it’s much more than just a paving job, but certainly two-three years is not an unreasonable expectation. The pace has been exceptionally slow considering less than half has been completed in that time alone – remembering that the south-eastern section has yet to be dealt with in any form. The time taken thus far would not be so disagreeable were it not for the six year delay it took to get physical work started on the street in the first instance, as has been said so many times by so many people. And this in turn after proposals since the 1980s to get something done about the street!

To reminisce also – I remember standing under the vast canopy of the lower median trees next to a mock-Victorian iron seat in freezing November of 2002 and thinking of how amazing O’Connell St was going to look upon completion in a few years time.
It was impossible to imagine the thoroughfare without the trees – what it would look like minus their canopy, without the trademark heritage lampposts, without the traditional seating, without the red brick-edged wide median, without the man who used to always sit on the seat opposite Eason’s.
It was exciting that O’Connell St was going to be cleared out of mismatched elements and a cohesive scheme for the whole street, the whole street, was to be constructed from scratch.

The plaza element has materialised as expected, and hugely successfully save perhaps its median area being a bit strange.

The side pavements have materialised as planned, again very successful.

The quality of the works promised has materialised, the attention to detail superb: for example the way the paving elegantly slopes down at crossings to meet the road level as if lightly pressed down like modelling clay – really exquisitely executed.

The exposure of the monuments has materialised to great effect – now once again central features of the street.

What has not materialised, what as I and most people I know were most impressed about was the Champs Elysées-like order intended for the thoroughfare – the bold, radical even, but nonetheless simple planting arrangement for the median space.
Likewise the street’s symmetry has been diluted with granite paving spilling over for no reason from the plaza onto the roadway, and the plaza into the median-proper due to a lack of tree definition.

The very first aim of tree use on the street that the IAP sets out is to ‘create a high level of spatial definition’.
It also states at the outset of the Public Domain section ‘How often have we witnessed…street-planting which is inappropriate to its location, all contributing to a feeling of clutter and over-design on an ad hoc and unintegrated basis.’

Also: ‘A properly constituted strategy for the creation of a visually cohesive and coherent public domain will be based on the identification of precise needs for each component of the urban fabric…’
Unfortunately it doesn’t identify the layout and form of the street as a one of them 🙁

Of course most of this is entirely subjective; one person’s cohesiveness is another’s chaos – and yes the ordered symmetry has materialised with the side pavement trees, but the median ones just dilute their impact to a degree that is detrimental to the cohesive design intended. I feel the street very simply is too narrow and too fragmented, especially the lower end, to accommodate so much variation.

Isn’t it – a poignant reminder to pass every day. Just a pity about the inevitable bunches of flowers smothered in disgusting plastic that are often laid at its base. I can never understand how people can leave such muck, often wrapped in reams of sellotape at the scenes of disasters, accidents or memorials; such materials are an affront to dignity.
And these personal affectations assume the role monuments are built for; they ought to be restricted to the annual laying of wreaths and floral tributes – of course being mindful of what it means to people, but it is in the common interest to adhere to such a policy.

On O’Connell St I think it’s important not to let comparitively niggly issues like the bicycles get the the way of what has broadly been a successful scheme thus far – though just on the issue of the sub-station I do think its placement in that location broadly highlights the esteem in which the median space on the street is now being held.
There is no way in a million years such a feature, regardless of how it was to be ‘decorated’, would have been allowed on the median in the 1910s & 1920s reconstruction, or the 19th century for that matter – directly behind O’Connell Monument. No way.
It’s just that the myriad of poles and trees and bikes and bollards here has ‘urbanised’ or cluttered the space to such a degree that its alien presence won’t be noticed nearly as much – they ‘cover for it’ as it were.

If you want to see a comparison between the new and old widths of the median go up to Upper O’Cll St just opposite the Royal Dublin Hotel. The new median footprint has been outlined in red spray-paint on the existing median; it’s interesting to note the different scales – the new version being reduced in size by 2.5 – 3 feet on each side, overall a reduction of just under 6 feet it would seem.
In light of this one wonders as to the wasted space given over to the cycle path on the inside lane of the new western carriageway – it is rarely availed of as few cyclists are stupid enough to put their life in their hands using it.