York Street
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25/1/2006
They’re moving in 🙁
Hardly the Fitzwilliam Street of the 21st century, but a sad event nonetheless.
Apologies for the woeful quality of these images. Didn’t have much time, but mainly because for whatever strange reason, rather appropriately, it was the darkest the street has ever been, in spite of it being broad daylight. Quite extraordinarily dar, and almost completely washed of colour.Many of the interiors have already been gutted:
…revealing a fascinating tapestry of many people’s lives…
…and some remarkably bad taste in wallpaper 😮
As suspected, lightwells do indeed penetrate the heart of the terrace – here you can see one complete with cast iron soil pipe:
Aerial imagery reveals the same much better – a fascinating hangover from the Victorians in the heath and sanitation obsessed 1930s and 40s:
What really makes you smile is the fantastic array of 1940s fireplaces on display; some modest bedroom models, and others more elaborate in reception rooms.
A nice little bedroom one here:
And the same model with an inverse colour scheme:
More elaborate decoration here:
A wonderful glossy-tiled Art Deco inspired surround:
And what seems to be a magnificent Bell fireplace, who were based in Glasnevin. They still seem to be there today on Botanic Road. What a fine piece – the design and tiles used match precisely the late 1940s date of these buildings.
Unfortunately it seems none of these fire surrounds are being salvaged, not even the finer ones, as the floors have already been knocked 🙁
It seems the floors in the original Georgian sections as pictured below have timber joist floors and ceilings while the wholly 1940s-50s sections at either end appear to be of cast concrete panel construction. Not 100 percent sure as I didn’t have time to check properly:
Back outside and the 1940s doorcases are being numbered 🙁
As yet there is no numbering on the 18th century doorcases.
Just looking at an aerial view of the area, it is interesting note how this whole part of the city was earmarked for social housing, built up over the course of thirty years in a range of architectural styles, no doubt replacing many a tenement not least on York Street itself.
How depressing that Mercer House and York Street, built during the depths of economic stagnation and some of the worst times this country has experienced, still stand as the highest architectural achievement in the midst of everything else that has been built in this area in the intervening sixty years.
And York Street is the first to be demolished.
@Graham Hickey wrote:
And York Street is the first to be demolished.
Half of these were gone today as I walked past.
@Andrew Duffy wrote:
They aren’t Georgian, they are 1940s replicas. It is possible that some of the doorcases are original.
If it means bringing new life a run down nook of the city then tear away.
The doors are nothing special: they are narrow and very plain. And the photos show that the insides had nothing of interest. We can’t keep everything. Stick to saving original things! Too much nostalgia and we would get nowhere!
Has anyone seen the skeletal remains of the buildings? With the windows and floors removed the newly exposed interior walls are a bizarre patchwork of very strong primary and vibrant colours,…. indicative of their time or?….. anyone for a lime sittingroom.
I would just like to say that the new building to replace the York Street flats is (in my humble opinion) a very fine proposal to re-house the exisitng tenants while providing modern standards – fire safety central heating etc. The exisitng buildings had single aspect flats – the new scheme will provide much brighter and airier accommodation.
The scheme is by Howley Harrington (not sure which half is now doing the scheme as Howley and Harrington have gone their separate ways) and also includes the retention of the park / garden area at the back and the addition of some sheltered housing on the other side. I hope the architect has managed to hold on to the good ideas in the face of Local Authority bureaucracy and miniscule budgets .
Thanks hell- I didn’t know it was them. HH have a pretty good track record with this kind of thing afaik.
I hadn’t heard they’d gone their separate ways. Do you know when and why?
Good to hear HH are the architects;
I wonder will the sheletered housing be anything like this:
http://www.hharchitects.net/Project%20pages/Social/City%20Centre(Sandwith)/SandwithPage.html
@Today’s Irish Times wrote:
York Street social housing the smartest in town
Royal College of Surgeons students newly arrived from abroad and looking for digs may be casting admiring glances across the road from the college at the new block of apartments nearing completion on York Street.
It looks as though it might have been designed for the college as suitable accommodation for would-be docs, but in fact the spanking new block is social housing, designed to replace a block of flats demolished by the council some years ago to a certain amount of hue and cry, because the flats looked like quaint Victorian tenements but had in fact been built in the 1950s. The block, designed by Seán Harrington Architects, will house 66 families, most of whom lived in the old flats. They will move in this autumn. Meanwhile the council is so pleased with the design that it plans to open two show units in the development – to show others how it should be done. Watch this space for opening times.
Meanwhile college of surgeons students will have to look elsewhere. Mind you, they are firm favourites around the corner in the Adelaide Square apartment complex, carved out of the old Adelaide Hospital, which has more medical tenants per floor than any other scheme in town.
© 2008 The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/property/2008/0828/1219680141542.html
That was a very interesting little thread.
With the loss of York Street, ‘Georgian’ Corporation flats must now be almost extinct in Dublin. I vaguely remember the great, but fearsome, terrace on Summerhill and there were more on Sean MacDermott Street too, I think.
The last two Corpo Georgians, that I know of, are on Gardiner Place on either side of an archway leading to the back of Temple Street Hospital. At this juncture, it might be useful to note that one of the better attended museums in Glasgow is ‘The Tenement House’, an ordinary terraced building (a couple of street beyond the College of Art), which preserves a record of tenement life in the city, complete with dodgy wallpaper and mind-boggling occupation statistics.
Just a thought.
gunter,
A few pics of the Tenement House (or ‘hoose’ as we say here); NB ‘house’ not ‘flat’. Very typical of the later type of tenement built c. 1900 up until 1914 (i.e. WW I), in red sansdstone (considered superior to yellow). Very compact housing, generally 6 to 8 to a ‘close’ and almost all rented and ‘factored’ (managed by a property agent). My memory is of this is of a ‘room and kitchen’ (a bedroom and a living room), although tenement houses can be much grander. This is really the Continental model of housing.
Before we get all dewy-eyed, much tenement housing was very much worse than this and has vanished. Good tenements are still popular in the city.I’m not sure you’re compating like with like. In Glasgow the so called tenements were built purposefully to accomodate large numbers of people in apartments, A far cry from sub divided georgian mansions like Henrietta street. What is remarkable about the tenements constructed in Glasgow and elsewhere in Scotland is that they were often built to cater for middle-class families who in Ireland and England would live in suburban semis. The tenement house which Johnglas posted is an example of a middle class flat.
Aparently in Glasgow there’s less than two hundred detached houses – remarkable! But before you get too excited about high density middle class dwelling I thought I’d stick this up!
asmodeus: just a few points.
1. Yes, there were (and are) many middle-class tenements, but there are many working-class tenements left. Most were, as you say, purpose-built, although there were some instances historically of large, middle-class houses sub-divided as tenements, as in Dublin (e.g. grand late-Georgian, early-Victorian houses in South Portland St in the Gorbals, alas long gone).
2. The Tenement Flat (sic) is more accurately intended for the ‘skilled working-class’, and I think it’s a two-room and kitchen flat, so a cut above the basic (but it still has a built-in ‘box bed’ (for the skivvy?) in the 3rd pic).
3. Your figure of ‘two hundred’ detached houses is spurious; there were and are many historic detached houses in the city. In some relatively small areas there is a range of house types from basic to better-class tenement, to terraces and semi-ds, to detached villas (some of which are very grand indeed). This would reflect economic status (and doesn’t it always!).
4. The word ‘tenement’ originally referred to a parcel of land ‘held’ by someone (i.e. ‘a holding’), and later this was applied, without any pejorative meaning, to the building on the land (from the Latin ‘tenementum’). Here, in popular parlance, you lived in a ‘close’ or a ‘building’ (never a tenement) and any blocks of flats built after c. 1914 (usually by the Corporation) were never referred to as tenements (although that is technically what they were).
5. Your third pic actually shows Glasgow Sheriff Court (‘the busiest court in Europe’), equivalent to your District Court, so nobody lives in it (not literally anyway).
I can get some pics to illustrate this, but I’ve rambled on enough. Any pics of the York St development?The figure of detatched houses I gave was related to the ones which still exist as houses – and of course I’m refering to the Glasgow city council area – no Bearsden or Milngavie!
AFAIK the inset beds were generally for children (skivvies did not live onsite) except for the one in kitchen which being the warmest was reserved for the elderly and infirm. They were illegal from 1890 (health issues). It would be interesting to see if they were common in Dublin, they wre very common in country houses
I know the gorbals scene I photographed included the courts, but the combination of that and the tower blocks in the background was one of the most arrestingly hideous scenes I’ve seen in Glasgow – and there’s a few!
Don’t want to hog this with Glesga stuff, but I’m sure there are 200 detached houses in Partick-/Dowanhill and Kelvindale alone (more or less).
@johnglas wrote:
Don’t want to hog this with Glesga stuff, but I’m sure there are 200 detached houses in Partick-/Dowanhill and Kelvindale alone (more or less).
Don’t like to go on and on either, but are you sure you’re from Glasgow?!!! I’ve lived in Clouston St and Muirpark st and know that area really quite well. There are no houses! Even the ones on Kirklee are all flat conversions. Don’t believe me – get on to s1homes and do a search for a detached house in Glasgow – you’ll find yourself in East Renfrewshire. You want to see a detached house in a Scottish city – get the train to Aberdeen!
Regarding johnglas’s pedigree
@asmodeus wrote:but are you sure you’re from Glasgow?!!!
I think if you come from, say, Termonfeckin and you’re a bit ashamed of your humble origins and you decide to pick somewhere exotic to say you came from, I don’t think you’d pick Glasgow!
That wasn’t intended to be an insult to Termonfeckin, it refers to any one horse town.
Coming back to York Street, I haven’t seen the new scheme in any detail, so we’ll leave that alone, for the moment, but on the demolished neo-Georgians, there’s a couple of things I’d like to say.
It’s always easy to scoff at pastiche and ‘Georgian’ doorcases in cast concrete must have made easy targets for the ridicule that I’m sure was poured on them when the redevelopment options were being considered, but I can’t help but have regard for the architects and the Corporation housing officials who fashioned places like York Street flats at a time when their counterparts in Britain were churning out post-war council blocks on a conveyor belt.
Not to go down that route must have taken some bravery and, more importantly, a deliberate decision to repair, rather than replace, a characteristic Dublin streetscape.
If we factor in the shortage of resources available to the city and the scale of the housing problem, that they attempted, at all, to address urban heritage issues is remarkable.
But then, they were only ‘mock-Georgians’ so lets knock them down!
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