Map
section courtesy of Ian Gunn
Burke’s public house was situated at the corner of Holles street and
Denzille street (Fenian street after 1924). Like O’Rourke’s house, which still
exists at the corner of Dorset and Eccles street, it had a corner-porch
entrance. There was also a side entrance into the dwelling where the owner lived
on the upper floors.
Public
house at the corner of Dorset and Eccles Street
Photograph:
William York Tindall, The Joyce Country (1960)
John Burke, tea and wine
merchant (he uses the term “grocer” in the 1901 census), had taken over the
premises as advertised below from William Donnelly in 1874.
17
Holles Street as advertised in 1874
(Freeman’s Journal, 30 March)
The 1901 census shows John Burke,
50, grocer, unmarried, living at 17 Holles Street with three assistants and a
housekeeper. After he retired from business he lived as a boarder at the
Adelphi Hotel in Anne Street where he died on 7 September 1914, aged 63.
He had sold 17 Holles Street in 1905 (roughly one year after the action
of Ulysses) to P. C. Martin, who kept
it another 20 years. It was on the market again in 1925 advertised as
“Important corner Licensed Premises”, along with the adjoining property, number
16. By 1935 it was vacant, but still advertised as “Well-situated Licensed
Property” in 1937. Number 16 was a tenement by that time.
In 1966 the building had become derelict
and was demolished in the following year. It was only then that a photographer
found its disappearance a subject of interest, its remaining “good lofty
cellarage with arched vaults” newly filled with rubble.
The corner of Holles and Fenian street. Picture:
Irish Architectural Archive
Unfortunately, when Tindall systematically photographed the sites of
Joyce’s stories and novels he missed the chance to make a view of the building
available to posterity when he took pictures of the Holles Street Hospital in
the 1954. He may in fact not have known where to look for what used to be Burke’s
public house. Earlier Frank Budgen, who visited Dublin and some of its boozy Ulysses locations like Davy Byrne’s, the
(new) Ormond Hotel and Barney Kiernan’s in 1933, had also missed the place it
seems.
Harald
Beck
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