The ground beneath this stretch of the south Liffey bank was once the working heart of the city's port trade, and the building that stood here was not the landmark Custom House that most Dubliners know downstream, but an earlier, now largely forgotten one that preceded it by well over a century.

The site was developed under James I in 1620, chosen, in the words of the original documentation, as a place in the port of Dublin found convenient for erecting a crane and making a wharf. The plot was substantial: 160 feet in length by 106 feet in breadth, running north to south from the high tide shoreline of the Liffey down to what is now Essex Street, and east to west from Crane Lane, a name that preserves the memory of the crane that once operated here, to a line east of modern Crampton Court. A narrow lane, just 18 feet wide, connected the complex to Dame Street and eventually gave Crane Lane its enduring name. A wooden quay had been constructed on the site by 1625, and by 1660 a Council Chamber had been added. In the early eighteenth century, the architect Thomas Burgh, better known for his work on the Old Library at Trinity College, designed a replacement building in limestone and brick, three storeys high and roughly 39 metres long. A drawing made in 1753 by Joseph Tudor shows this later Custom House still standing beside Essex Bridge, the predecessor of the current Grattan Bridge.

The site is recorded in the Record of Monuments and Places as the Custom House Site, and while nothing of the original structure survives above ground, the street geography still carries traces of it. Crane Lane runs today much as it did when cargoes were being weighed and duties levied a few steps from the Liffey. The block between Wellington Quay, Essex Street West, Crane Lane, and Crampton Court corresponds closely to the original plot as described in the seventeenth-century sources. Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin and Brooking's 1728 map, both reproduced in the Irish Historic Town Atlas, show the building in its urban context and reward a closer look for anyone curious about how radically this part of the quays has been reshaped over the intervening centuries.