The loggia, a colonnaded or arcaded walkway open to the air on one side, gives the building an almost Mediterranean quality that feels quietly out of place among the grey northside streets. This is Skiddy's Almshouse, a structure that survived into the twenty-first century largely because enough people in 1966 decided it was worth fighting for.

The almshouse takes its name from Stephen Skiddy, a Cork-born wine merchant who, in 1584, established a charity to provide care for the elderly poor of the city. More than a century after Skiddy's death, the building that would carry his name was constructed in 1718 to 1719, positioned on the northern side of the Green Coat Hospital, a C-shaped three-storey building that itself was demolished in 1955. The pairing of a philanthropic endowment from the late sixteenth century with an early eighteenth-century building reflects a pattern common in Irish and British urban history, where charitable foundations outlived their founders by generations before finding a permanent physical form. What Skiddy set in motion in the Elizabethan period eventually produced one of the more architecturally distinctive corners of Cork.

By the mid-twentieth century, the almshouse faced a fate similar to the hospital it had once adjoined. In 1966, plans for demolition were met with widespread opposition, and the Cork Preservation Society intervened to save it. The building was placed under a preservation order and is now in residential use, its loggia still intact, its history compressed into a relatively modest facade on the edge of a graveyard that most people pass without stopping.