Known variously as Hogges Gate and, later, the Blind Gate, it marked the eastern boundary of Dame Street and the point at which the street gave way to the open ground then called Hoggen Green. By the time it was demolished around 1662, it had acquired the second name precisely because it served no defensive or navigational purpose: it was, in the words of citizens petitioning for its removal, "wholly useless" and "no strength or ornament to the city." The passage beneath it had become so narrow and the structure so unstable that the House of Commons wrote formally to the Lord Mayor urging its immediate demolition, noting the danger to anyone "going by that place about either public or private affairs."

The gate appears by name as early as 1577, when it was listed among the official gates of Dublin and its suburbs. By 1600 the Dublin Assembly Roll records a lease granted to Walter Dermot, a saddler, for a tower above the gate, at a yearly rent of six shillings and eight pence, on condition that he install proper fastenings and keep the gate open and closed at suitable hours. Two years later, in 1602, alderman Philip Conran petitioned to use ground just outside the Blind Gate, sixty feet in length and thirty feet broad on its southern side, to build a hospital. In 1604 a further petition sought land on Hoggen Green, measured from the gate northward, for the construction of a Bridewell, a type of house of correction common in early modern cities. These records sketch a gate that, far from being a grand civic monument, was already functioning as little more than a landlocked threshold, its surroundings being parcelled out for charitable and correctional institutions. John Speed's 1610 map of Dublin shows it clearly at the north-western corner of College Green, east of the crossroads with the streets now known as South Great George's Street and Temple Lane South.

No physical trace of the gate survives, and its precise location has not been definitively confirmed, though researchers have noted that the angle at which Trinity Street branches south-east off Dame Street corresponds suggestively with the boundary line running from the gate's southern side on Speed's map. Trinity Street also connected Dame Street with the Nunnery of St Mary de Hogges, which gave the green its older name. Anyone curious enough to look can consult Speed's 1610 map of Dublin online through Cambridge University's digital library, where the gate appears as a small but legible feature at the end of Dame Street. Standing at the junction of Dame Street and Trinity Street today, with College Green opening out ahead, it is possible to trace, at least in outline, where the medieval city once decided to put a wall.