All Photographs Supplied By William Murphy
AT WOLFE TONE PARK 5 MAY 2023
The feel of the area has greatly improved as a result of the greening of Wolfe Tone Park. This is now a well located and maintained docking station … of course all are well maintained but some locations are better than others.
MARCH 2023 USING AN iPHONE 12 PRO MAX
If you use this docking station it might interest you to learn that at the corners of Sandwith Street and Fenian Street there replica of the former Archer’s Garage, designed by Arnold Francis Hendy and completed in 1946.
On the June bank holiday weekend, 1999, the art deco, grade 1 listed garage on Fenian Street was illegally demolished by contractors working for the O’Callaghan hotel group. A public outcry followed, and while developer Noel O’Callaghan claimed this was the reason why he reconstructed the Garage, he was in fact ordered by Dublin City Council on threat of a €1,000,000 fine and/or imprisonment. The reconstruction is far from accurate to the original and I was more than a little disappointed having lived close to the original for about seven years.
PHOTOGRAPHED 18 MARCH 2023
This is not where I would have expected East James Street to be located. Anyway, the docking station is beside Miesian Plaza on Baggot Street.
In 2015 Dublin City Council granted permission, at the end of January, to ESB Commercial Properties Ltd for plans that included demolition of all 20th-century buildings on the block, the renovation and reuse of nine Georgian houses, and change of use of part of another.
The three-acre site comprises a city block, bounded by Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Upper Mount Street, James’s Street East and Lower Baggot Street, and includes ESB’s headquarters. To the best of my knowledge the original houses on James Street East were demolished in the 1950s.
