How my neighborhood is a-changing
My neighbourhood is old and gloriously worn with Dublin life, the city's history writ everywhere in the streets and in landmark buildings.
Beggar's Bush Barracks (built in 1827 for infantry soldiers) is metres from my doorstep. The Grand Canal Dock (completed in 1796 as a traffic route to the west) is a short trot in the other direction. Ball's Bridge (rebuilt after a storm in 1835) is just around the corner.
The brown waters of the Dodder flow through it all and the barber's pole chimneys at the Pigeon House belch merrily above it all.
Nowhere in town do houses in such variety sit cheek by happy jowl. My cul-de-sac of modest, latterly much extended and sought after two-up-two-down houses was built c 1924. Named after Michael Malone - who died in the siege of nearby Northumberland Road in 1916 - they've grown comfortably with the neighbourhood.
So too have the houses in O'Connell and Derrynane Gardens, built around the same time. Bath Avenue, our elegantly eccentric main boulevard, was the first road built after the Dodder delta was reclaimed in 1792. Vavasour and Havelock squares are Victorian jewels. The list goes on but I will rest my case.
There's a life and neighbourliness second to none. There's a beat in the streets and a sense of itself you couldn't buy for love but which, with frightening speed, looks like its being bought for money.
Because, though our proximity to town is a joy and undoubted advantage, it's also a liability, depending on how you look at things.
Developers, development and a growing city have seen and seized the proximity advantage and things are a-changing, massively.
That the same is true of every close-to-city-centre neighbourhood like ours worldwide is a comfort, but a small one. It began about a decade ago, slowly at first but with an increasing and intimidating speed that's left us at odds with the buildings rising all around, fearful for what's being lost and of being lost ourselves in the shadows of the towering concrete and glass buildings housing apartments, offices and leisure facilities.
Which is not to say all is negative; just that the scope (and height) of the changes are as awesome as they are impressive and, in some cases, quite beautiful.
" The thing I want to know," a neighbour puts the question everyone
wants an answer to, "is when is it all go
going to stop? When there
isn't an ounce of space left for us to live and breathe in? And where's
the scale model? And where are all the cars going to go? We get information
in bits and pieces and don't know where we are."
One of the first buildings to change the skyline was the Millennium Tower on Charlotte Quay. Since then the Grand Canal Dock has been changing daily and the area around South Lotts Road and Shelbourne Road dog track transformed. We live these days with the boom in Barrow Street, where the city's major developers forge ahead with the building of architecturally fascinating office and apartment blocks.
We've got used to regular updates through our letter boxes from the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.