gunter

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  • in reply to: Zap the childrens shop – High Street #715795
    gunter
    Participant

    That was the way they used to do scaffolding newgrange, back in the day. Floor joists would be taken out, put on edge and stuck out the windows, the inside end wedged under the floor above and out you went, with your life in your hands.

    The date of that one is slightly wrong, must have been late 1964 at the earliest, because there is a firm date of Sept. 1964 on this Paddy Healy photograph of the same houses from the top of Nicholas Street showing no. 3 High Street (the house with the scaffolding) still intact while the rest of the street looks like a bomb hit it.

    Apologies for adding a couple of years onto ctesiphon’s dad.

    in reply to: Zap the childrens shop – High Street #715793
    gunter
    Participant

    @notjim wrote:

    . . so true to a folkish religion knotted up in quotidian demands of secular life.

    I was just going to say that!

    Here’s another photograph of the east end of High Street in 1963 with, if I’m not mistaken, ctesiphon’s dad on his bike off to buy icecream for the chizzlers in the local shop.

    in reply to: Henrietta Street #712685
    gunter
    Participant

    Had some business in the Planning office today and I got off a few snaps of the Henrietta Street Competition exhibition while I was there.

    Even from a two minute inspection, it was clear that the entries could be broken down into a few distinct categories.

    For convenience, I’ve listed them: Glass, Brick, Mesh and Concrete.

    Here’s one example of each:


    Glass


    Brick


    mesh


    Concrete.

    That last one is off the wall completely. The exhibition seemed to be well worth a look. As usual though, there was no information about how long the exhibition was to be up for and no external banners or anything to entice the public in.

    York Street and Henrietta Street are two threads of a very interesting potential debate that unfortunately isn’t actually happening.

    in reply to: Zap the childrens shop – High Street #715791
    gunter
    Participant

    Thanks for the directions, notjim.

    If this isn’t the right place, it can be moved yes?

    I started a bit of a file on High Street in the early 90s, when I hadn’t much else to do, and I just found it again under something, so before I loose it again, here are some of the photographs I had accumulated.


    High Street c. 1975. The four bay building on the left is the ‘Bedding Manufacturer’ from the earlier (How well do you know Dublin) pic.


    Aerial view of the same terrace from c. 1984

    in reply to: York Street #762217
    gunter
    Participant

    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!

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766431
    gunter
    Participant

    @hutton wrote:

    High Street, from the Cornmarket end – Tailors’ Hall, it’s got to be and would be the one survivor… 😉

    @GP wrote:

    Should we be concentrating on the gables on the right in the first picture? Has a feel of Tailors Hall, second pic is too flat to be Cornmarket.

    ‘Tis High Street from Cornmarket with Taylors’ Hall peeping up as the sole survivor.

    Sorry I had to step out for a spell, I didn’t realize this was still going on!

    A bar of virtual chocolate for Hutton, and I’m afraid, a ‘what could have been’ for GP

    PS
    Does anyone know if there’s a High Street / Cornmarket thread? When I type that into the search box, it jumps around a bit comes back to the page I was on.
    I have more picktures

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766417
    gunter
    Participant

    If you guys don’t get your act together, I’m going to give this to GP.

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766412
    gunter
    Participant

    My money is on GP

    Pretty sure the buses are a 78 passing a 21.

    If Busman wasn’t resting, he’d have the two routes analysed by now and pin-pointed their intersection!

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766403
    gunter
    Participant

    I’ve got to go bluff my way through a meeting.

    Here’s that other pic (with the clue).

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766401
    gunter
    Participant

    @GrahamH wrote:

    Looking down The Coombe/Dean Street from outside the Widows’ Almshouses with the gabled school to the right? All buildings to the left on the current site of the convent et al?

    That would have been my guess, if I was in your position.

    But no!

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766398
    gunter
    Participant

    Correction:

    One building (just visible) survives today!

    ctesiphon: It’s identifyable by the degree to which it is unrecognisable

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766396
    gunter
    Participant

    Not Cuffe St. not Parnell St.

    If you’re going to do an A – Z you’ll eventually get it.

    I have another picture (almost the same) but with a clue in it. Might think about posting it, if I feel you’re making a genuine effort.

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766393
    gunter
    Participant

    No right answers yet.

    I don’t think that one single building in this photograph still stands.

    That does add to the degree of difficulty 🙂

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766389
    gunter
    Participant

    Following the success of the Swift’s Alley Church . .

    Here’s another oldie. Would anyone like to have a stab at naming this location?

    This was about 1955, when billboards were billboards, none of your wimpy JC Decaux two foot square jobs.

    in reply to: York Street #762210
    gunter
    Participant

    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.

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766388
    gunter
    Participant

    Just in the interests of not spreading bad information, I checked Douglas Bennett’s Encyclopaedia of Dublin (1994).

    This is his entry for Swift’s Alley Church:

    A Baptist meeting house was built in 1653 in an alley between Francis Street and Meath Street with a lease from Goodwin Swift after whom the Alley is named. The building was demolished and a new one built in 1738. In 1835 it was leased as a chapel of ease to St. Catherine’s Church, when £3,000 was spent on refurbishing the building. Swift’s Alley Church was closed in 1891.

    So Baptist, not Presbyterian, I knew there were Bibles involved, and not 300 years old, 270 years old.

    I don’t suppose there are too many Baptists at large in the city any more.

    It’s interesting to reflect that the Liberties was probably Dublin’s first multi-cultural quarter, with large numbers of Hugenot French, English settlers (such as Swift’s parents), colourful weaver types and exotic religious sub-groups. That would give modern day Parnell Street a run for it’s money.

    I see that DCC are advertising for submissions on a ‘Draft Local Area Plan for the Liberties’, (deadline 10th Sept. ’08).

    *must put together an outraged rant*

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766387
    gunter
    Participant

    @gunter wrote:

    Around the same time, a Zoe apartment scheme was built opposite the Iveagh Markets on Francis Street that wrapped around the corner into Swift’s Alley and I not sure if the church site wasn’t incorporated into that site.

    No, I just checked. The church site is marked by a new high reinforced concrete wall on Swift’s Alley, with building materials peeping up on the other side. The Zoe scheme adjoins that site to the east.

    I think the church was demolished about 10 years ago, which probably means it was 15 years ago.

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766386
    gunter
    Participant

    The church was just behind the boundary wall on Swift’s Alley at the back of Chadwick’s yard (Dublin Saw Mills).


    1986 revised edition O.S. map

    The way I remember it, the roof and gables had been taken off and a large concrete top storey added (in the 30s ?). It either had a flat roof, or possibly no roof at the time that I became conscious of it. Forklift trucks used to whizz around it and a number of other interesting timber roofef sheds at the back of the builders providers, and then one day it was gone.

    Around the same time, a Zoe apartment scheme was built opposite the Iveagh Markets on Francis Street that wrapped around the corner into Swift’s Alley and I not sure if the church site wasn’t incorporated into that site. That Zoe development was stalled for years in a half built state and there was talk of planning problems, but I doubt that the church was any part of these problems.

    The similarities with St. Mark’s struck me too and the similarities would lead one to conclude that the simple over-hanging gutters and the little stone eaves brackets at St Mark’s may have been a Victorian alteration replacing parapet walls, as here at Swift’s Alley. The parapet walls do reduce the barn like dominance of the roof, which is a bit of a characteristic of St. Mark’s.

    in reply to: How well do you know Dublin? #766383
    gunter
    Participant

    The attrition rate on Presbyterian churchs in Dublin seems to be particularly high. Is there not some Presbyterian Preservation society? or are they all too mean to buy postage stamps for protest letters?

    in reply to: New street and redevelopment for Dublin ? #764640
    gunter
    Participant

    @GrahamH wrote:

    The central Abbey Square is to be substantially increased in size, with the building line on the Abbey Street side pulled back by a considerable ten metres to enlarge the square.

    From what I have seen of the two proposals, I find the Arnotts scheme head and shoulders above the Carlton development.

    That central square in the Arnott’s proposal is a key difference between the two schemes. In this regard there is an interesting, and puzzling, comment in the Planner’s Report on the Carlton site.

    Where Kearns is talking about the merits of the opening onto O’Connell Street, (the supposed ‘new square’, or ‘room off a room’, that he wants the developers to go off and make more formal), he summarily dismisses the Arnott’s type solution, favoured by several posters to this forum, of a generous square within the body of the site as an alternative to hollowing out three existing streetscapes, O’Connell St., Henry St. and Moore St, to create three half-assed ‘squares’ with the loss of a considerable amount of decent building stock. He states:

    ‘It should be noted that the provision of a largely internalised shopping square at the heart of the scheme arguably has more ‘commercial’ rationale for the proposed development, if narrow commercial considerations were governing the location, scale and opening of this space’.

    Whether it’s commercially driven or not, the making of an entirely new square ‘at the heart of the scheme’ is exactly what is most appealing, and most civic minded, about the Arnott’s scheme, and you would have thought that the bigger Carlton site would have had even greater scope for the creation of something even better again.

Viewing 20 posts - 321 through 340 (of 477 total)

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