The demise of Ithaca

Why was No. 7 Eccles street demolished in April 1967? I wish I knew for sure. What does seem likely is that No. 7 was hit by a perfect storm of issues that came together just before the cultures of Joyce, architectural conservation and tourism in Dublin were starting to change.

So, briefly, as the endgame is our main concern here, the process towards creating the fabric of Eccles street, Dublin started on 6 March 1769 when Isaac Ambrose Eccles leased off three parcels of land at the east end of Eccles street at Drumcondra Lane (Dorset street). On the North side the land covering Nos 1-5 was leased to John Darley, stone-cutter and Nos 6-8 to Daniel Goodwin, carpenter. The south-side land covering what is now Nos 76-81 was leased to William Adair, carpenter.³ As can be seen by the still extant Nos 76-81, this initial set of houses was of modest construction, being three storeys over a basement and having a 20-foot width. Later building in Eccles street added additional storeys and had wider plot sizes.

The impression is that Daniel Goodwin and John Darley knew each other and probably matched their skills to help realise the construction of their houses. No 7 was built and occupied by 29 April 1771, when Daniel Goodwin passed the property to a Margaret Reed.

Now fast forward to 1938, and things are changing for No. 7. From around the mid 19th century there was a steady drift of gentry and merchants from the inner Dublin Georgian terraces out to large villas and landed estates in the suburbs. This migration exposed the original Georgian properties to new economic realities, and there was a general deterioration in the upkeep and condition of the housing and a growth towards multiple-occupancy housing.

Editions of Thom’s directories document the growth of the designations ‘let in flats’ and ‘Tenements’ into once grand Georgian streets. No. 8 Eccles street was designated ‘Tenements’ in the 1932 Thom’s directory, with No. 7 acquiring that label in 1937. This made Patrick Joseph Wade in 1936 the last-named occupant of No. 7 in Thom’s. The terms ‘let in flats’ and ‘tenements’ appear to be used interchangeably in the directory but with ‘tenements’ being usually the final occupied stop before dereliction and demolition.

… in Ireland the word ‘tenement’ is always in a pejorative fashion to mean somewhere very poor …

Erika Hanna, email to author, 7 June, 2015⁵

This fall from grace coincides with a change of ownership in December 1938, when Edward Spierin acquired the ‘plot of ground upon which the dwelling house now known as Number 7 Eccles Street in the Parish of St. George and County of City of Dublin now stands’⁶ from John Clinton, who had acquired the estate from his brother Michael after he died intestate in July 1938.

The photograph commissioned by J. F. Byrne for the frontispiece of his book Silent Years very likely shows members of the O’Connor family at the first-floor window.

This room was home to my parents and 5 older siblings during the 1940's. 1939 when my parents married until 1949 … at the window would probably be my three older sisters or maybe my older brother. The house would have had 2 families on each floor and one in the basement, making seven families in total. It was known as a 'closed hall door tenement’.

Liam O’Connor, email to author, 4 January, 2012

The break-up of Joyce’s Ithaca continued apace when in August 1946 Edward Spierin sold off the garden at the rear of No. 7 to James Whelan, draper.

My granny used to live in the above place, in the basement at the front of the house, her name was Elizabeth Whelan and when we were over from England we would visit her, I remember there being a staircase going down to her place, I am sure it was on the right as you went in, I was born in 1951 and must of spent a lot of time there before we moved to England, I remember my dad having a motor bike with a side car which I have seen and it looks like one I have seen on a picture of the house.

James Whelan, email to author, 3 January, 2013

The picture (here) taken by Philp Phillips of 7 Eccles street⁸ clearly shows the motor bike with side car.

In the 1950s, the building and its occupants would see a growing procession of Joyce pilgrims gathering in the street to stare at their building and take occasional pictures. Some were bolder and would attempt to explore the interior of the building.

One of these was Clive Hart who visited in 1958:

… by then it was occupied by 7 families of down-and-outs and had been much degraded.

Clive Hart, email to author, 19 June, 2003

According to the chap who kindly let me into the building all those years ago there had been streams of visitors who all wanted to see, among other things, the backyard. Which convinced him that all this James Joyce stuff was a blind and that we were all looking for hidden treasure.

Clive Hart, email to author, 3 September, 2004

In March 1963 Edward Spierin died, and by 29 June 1963 his son Denis Spierin had been granted probate and the ownership of No. 7 Eccles street. Between these two dates an event happened that would make this bequest much less welcoming than would initially appear. In early June 1963 a tragedy happened in Dublin that would have an impact on properties such as No. 7 Eccles street. Two children died when two four-storey houses collapsed in Fenian street on 12 June 1963.⁹ The event happened ten days after an earlier collapse in Bolton street, and caused an outcry for action.

The successive collapse or disrepair of houses in Bolton street, Dominick street and now Fenian street may not represent a fair average of the extent and rate of the city’s decay; but in the absence of any other published statistics, it is inevitable that there should be grave public disquiet.

'Lethal Collapse', Irish Times (1963), 13 June p. 9

The corporation was spurred to survey the buildings and discover the perilous state of much of the inner-city housing, and the scares went on.

Thirty-four people evacuated 91 Lower Gardiner street, Dublin, when a portion of a derelict building adjoining the five-storey tenement house collapsed last night.

'Dublin house fall', Irish Times (1964) 17 June p. 1

The subsequent condemnation of many buildings, causing an instant housing shortage, would seem understandable in the circumstances, but a hint at a more cynical motive is flagged up by the Irish Times when it refers to an article in the October 1964 issue of the Irish Architect and Contractor.

The condemnation of a building the journal claims, especially in the last year, has been an inexpensive method of site acquisition, and a method quite ruthlessly used by Dublin Corporation.

'Corporation said to have condemned safe buildings', Irish Times (1964), 25 November p. 7

This is an interesting point in light of what happens in Eccles street, where Nos. 6-9 are very quickly demolished and existing plots live on like a gap tooth in the street for many years, as the plots were bought up piecemeal by the Dominican College. However the collapse of the Dublin tenements is still highly likely to have precipitated the de-tenanting of No. 7 Eccles street in early Autumn 1964.

I wish to refer to the phone call which I had from your office on the 4th inst. and to confirm that a Dangerous Buildings Notice was issued in respect of the premises No. 7, Eccles Street some months ago. The Notice was in respect of the back wall of the premises and, as a precautionary measure, the house was de-tenanted. It is at present vacant, as far as is known to the Corporation.

Letter dated 6 January 1965 from H. P. Byrne, Assistant Principal Officer, Dangerous Buildings Section, Dublin Corporation.¹⁰

Anthony Burgess and a BBC film crew, with director Christopher Burstall, filmed in No. 7 Eccles street during 3-5 February 1965, for part of what was to become the Silence, Exile and Cunning “Monitor” programme on James Joyce. In the film you can see gaps in the roof and open and gutted windows at the rear of the property. It is obvious from this film and from the pictures that appeared in The Listener magazine that the building was being stripped of salvageable timber.¹¹

Without tenants, No. 7 became uneconomic and prohibitively expensive to repair, especially as the surrounding properties were also in multiple occupancy and disrepair. It was put up for sale by auction on 12 July 1965 by Messrs. Jackson-Stops and McCabe.¹³ Its description as a ‘Four-storey city house needing repairs’ is a marked understatement.¹⁴

All this is far too soon for any white knights to appear in early 1960s Dublin, and the next headline we see is ‘“Bloom’s House” Not Sold’.

No. 7 Eccles street, Dublin, the house chosen by James Joyce as the dwelling-place of his Ulysses, was withdrawn from public auction in Dublin on July 12^th without reaching the reserve. The highest bid for the house was £1,750.

Irish Times (1965), 23 September p. 18

The house is shut down and goes into a decaying limbo. A few people manage to gain access. Paddy Tutty and Vivien Igoe (Veale at the time) visit and Vivien manages to salvage the grate from the fireplace in the fictional Molly Bloom’s bedroom. Fred Seiden of New York, touring Europe, pops by Eccles street and prises the knocker off the door on 8 July 1966.¹⁵

The condition of No. 7 Eccles street started to draw the concern of new Dublin residents and visitors. In a letter to the Irish Times in May 1966 a Mrs Angela M. Aspinwall writes:

Upon taking up residence in this country last autumn, and as a keen admirer of the work of James Joyce, I spent many pleasant hours discovering for myself some of the localities and buildings that feature in his books. … but not all the discoveries were agreeable ones. No. 7 Eccles street … is now all but a ruin. Flanked on either side by derelict houses in as bad or worse condition, No. 7 displays to an indifferent Dublin the faded remnants of an earlier elegance. For months its windows have gaped to admit the dank air of a Northern winter, and rubbish has accumulated in its mouldering basement.

…

I understand that a tour of Joyce’s Dublin is now one of the city’s summer attractions, but if the itinerary takes in No. 7 Eccles street the effect produced upon visitors must be highly displeasing.

'Dublin Ithaca', Irish Times (1966), 5 May p. 11

She goes on to suggest a ‘Joycean town centre, complementary to the Martello Tower at Sandycove’, a point taken up by visiting Joyce scholar Fritz Senn from Switzerland, who found himself quoted in the Irish Press in July 1966:

After saying a lot of nice things about our contemporary poets, playwrights and authors the hard-headed Swiss came to the surface. "What are you people going to do about preserving Bloom’s house in Eccles street … I went along to see it and I thought it a great pity to see it decayed and neglected …"

His idea is to launch a public fund, buy the house, and turn it into a sort of central Old Dublin academy with a Joyce room, a Swift Room, a Wilde Room, etc.

"You’ll need something like this for scholars coming here. At the moment anyone interested in Joycean Dublin is completely lost in the city unless he has made contacts beforehand …" [ellipses in original]

'The man who thinks there is too much literary talent in Ireland', Irish Press (1966), 29 July p. 10

So why is it outsiders calling in the press for something to be done, and not local Dubliners? This is where we have to look a bit more closely at the culture of the times.

Large swathes of Georgian Dublin were in decay, and concern was being voiced about ‘Dublin’s Rotting Heart’, with Donal Dorcey writing a four-part series of comment in the Dublin Evening Press in September 1965.¹⁶ There was also an established Irish Georgian Society founded in 1958. Unfortunately there were so many buildings at risk, and understandably attention was focused on the bigger, grander houses with notable features to save. No. 7 was a modest house by Georgian standards, of no great architectural value. Its claim to fame was literary, and, worse still, based around a fictional character. As a result it was only literary people who noted the problems, and the tourist value hinted at above was not at that time recognised by the wider population. The first James Joyce Symposium in June 1967 came too late for No. 7, and even that event was looked on as something of a curiosity by Dubliners and the local press. It wasn’t until the James Joyce centenary in 1982 that Joyce started to be fully accepted as a possible Dublin asset.

Politically the ‘modern’, with its association of progress and rationalism, was seen as the goal of Irish planning, and the Georgian legacy was viewed by many in the circles of power as a ‘foreign landscape on native soil’¹⁷ and a colonial relic best done away with.

There was money to be made from new office buildings, and prime inner-city sites were in demand for speculation and investment. The firm Demolition Ireland Ltd captured this culture in a series of advertisements in the Irish Times, with eye-catching headlines such as the self-explanatory one in Figure 8 below.

The law on demolition also seems to have encouraged a speculative approach to property, with little regulation of what was happening.

Dublin City Council unanimously agreed to call on the Minister for Local Government to amend the regulation made under the Planning Act 1963, whereby demolition of houses may be carried out without reference to the Council.

Mr J. Barron, who proposed the motion, said speculators who had no respect or regard for our city bought property and proceeded to demolition. They then presented their plans for a "vacant site" and the planning authority had little alternative to granting them, although if they had the power they would not have granted permission for the demolition in the first place.

'Georgian houses row: new move', Evening Herald (1967), 4 April p. 3

This was all against the swift-flowing tide of property development which is neatly captured in a passage by Erika Hanna, in her essay ‘Dublin’s North Inner City, Preservationism, and Irish Modernity in the 1960s’.¹⁸

More influential even than road widening in the destruction of the fabric of the Gardiner estate was the dangerous buildings policy of Dublin Corporation. After severe storms in the first week of June 1963, two eighteenth-century tenements collapsed killing four people. The day after the second collapse, the minister for local government, Neil Blaney, ordered a public inquiry while inspectors evacuated fifty houses for demolition as an emergency measure across the inner city. When the inquiry reported, it largely blamed the weather and unseen burnt-out chimney feathers for the collapses; hence, it suddenly became possible that any house in the city of a similar construction could have been equally affected. Thus, during the eighteen months which followed the deaths in Fenian and Bolton Streets, around 1,200 of Dublin’s Georgian terrace houses and mews were destroyed, predominantly in the north and west of the inner city. Longstanding residents were swiftly removed in a panicked fashion; notices were nailed on doorways informing residents that the buildings were condemned and they must leave within seven days. This process was accelerated by the latterly notorious Exempted Development regulations of the Local Government (Sanitary Services) Act 1964, which, in an attempt to speed up the removal of dangerous buildings, removed planning permission requirements for demolition. The Sanitary Services Act also allowed landlords who had previously not been receiving an economic return on their property due to the provisions of the Rent Restrictions Act to remove longstanding tenants, clearing newly expensive sites of uneconomic buildings and their inhabitants, ready to be redeveloped as offices. Much land in the Gardiner area was cleared of buildings and tenants in this way, in expectation of an office boom which never reached this part of the city.

'Dublin’s North Inner City, Preservationism, and Irish Modernity in the 1960s' by Erika Hanna, Historical Journal 53.4 (2010), p. 1021

The writing was on the crumbling wall for No. 7 Eccles street. The Dominican College had been slowly encircling the house, by purchasing No. 8 in December 1965, No. 6 in January 1966, and the areas to the rear of Nos 6-8 in December 1966. There is no doubt this time that there would be an interested buyer for No. 7 Eccles street.¹⁹

There is no exact date given for when the demolition of the main building took place and nothing in the local press highlighted the event taking place. Sometime around the week of 10 April 1967 seems likely, and we have to rely on the tales of the retrieval of the door of No. 7 by John Ryan and company for information on the event.

The house itself was demolished in April, 1967, and only this door remains, preserved in the vestibule of The Bailey, Duke street.

Ulick O’Connor, The Bailey, The Story of a Famous Tavern (Dublin: The Bailey Ltd.: 1967), p. 23

In a piece in the Sunday Independent in January 1995, Leslie Mallory attempted to give a definitive account of the rescuing of the door.

On a Sunday after midday in 1967 I called into the Bailey … John told me the bulldozer and steel-ball brigade would be arriving to finish demolishing No 7 Eccles Street next morning. The neighbouring nuns were expanding their educational empire.

Sunday Independent (1995), 15 January p. 14L

Mallory then goes on to detail the rather fanciful story of the negotiations with the nuns and the salving use of a cheque-book. It makes a good story, but No. 7 Eccles street did not become the possession of the Dominican College until the deeds were signed on 12 June 1967. Until that time No. 7 was owned and therefore demolished by the current owner Denis Spierin. Negotiations on the sale may have been going on for a while, so John Ryan’s alleged visit to the nuns may have been more of a courtesy call than a necessity, or perhaps the state of the purchase process required him to deal with all parties. This is hinted at in a statement in the Irish Times of 2 May 1967 where John Ryan has:

… become the proud possessor of another even more legendary souvenir; the door to No. 7 Eccles street. This he acquired after negotiations of bewildering complexity …

'The Open Door, in 'An Irishman’s Diary', Irish Times (1967), 2 May p. 11

This suggests a more torrid and semi-legal process than the more engaging cheque-book tale and we are left to speculate on what really did happen.

All this happened within weeks of the first James Joyce Symposium in Dublin in mid June 1967, where delegates from around the globe were bused down Eccles street to look at the dust settling on the single-storey facade. The cavalry had arrived too late.

This gap-tooth view of the street was to remain the same right through until the Mater Private Hospital was built and then opened in 1986.

By 1972, the Dominican College appears to have given up its plans to expand into lower Eccles street, and the plots of Nos 6-9 Eccles street are put up for auction by Jackson-Stops & McCabe on 16 February on behalf of T.T.L. Overend, McCarron & Gibbons, 9 Upper Mount Street. Exactly what happened at that auction is unclear as the plots appear again a year later for auction on 7 March 1973.²⁰ However the Dominican College was still in possession of the plots when they are finally sold to the Mater Hospital Pools Society Limited in July 1975.²¹

6/9 ECCLES STREET – This is an outstanding site of 15,300 sq. ft. with a frontage of 102' 11" to Eccles Street and a rear entrance from Eccles Place. The area is zoned residential and the site must have considerable appeal for those who require a central site within a short distance of O’Connell St. and immediately off Dorset St.

'Jackson-Stops & McCabe', Irish Times (1972), 21 January p. 20

Could No. 7 have been saved? Well, yes - this wasn’t an act of God – but too many factors were working against it. It was in decay, uneconomic, of no great architectural significance, had a literary link to a rather notoriously unread book - so where was the incentive? It would have needed a white knight with resources, but the people with resources were looking the other way and making good money knocking down buildings and erecting office blocks and roads for cars. Even the Joyce scholars themselves escaped off into literary theory in the 1970s, and such things as bricks and mortar became rather unimportant.

It is easy to see now in the modern Dublin, with its outward-looking approach and strong awareness of tourism, how much more could have been made of the house today. Maybe providing a final goal and shelter for those pilgrims, standing across the street, in the rain outside No 77 Eccles street for a start.

Perhaps the last word should go to Brian Spierin, the son of the last owner of the full-standing house:

I had a school friend who had a hotel just up the street, The Montfort, now also part of the Mater Hospital. It was he who told me that all the kids in the area believed it was haunted.

Brian Spierin, email to author (2013), 26 March

You can imagine children catching muddled cryptic references to the house and observing the many curious visitors, and concocting a story about the place being haunted… and, I suppose in a way, it was.

Ian Gunn