House - indeterminate date, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
At the corner of New Row and the Blackpitts in the south inner city, there once stood a building that would have looked immediately out of place even by the time it was demolished in 1903.
A double-fronted Dutch Billy, it belonged to an architectural type that had largely disappeared from Dublin's streets long before the twentieth century arrived to finish the job. That it survived as long as it did makes it something of an anomaly, and the details recorded before its demolition offer a rare glimpse into a domestic building form that once defined large stretches of the city.
The Dutch Billy was a style of townhouse, characterised by a stepped or curvilinear gable facing the street, that became common in Dublin during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, influenced by Dutch and Flemish building fashions arriving through trade and the movement of Protestant craftsmen and merchants. The house at New Row and Blackpitts was documented by Walsh in 1973, drawing on earlier records, and the details he preserved are telling. The building had plain doorways, semi-circular segmental relieving arches, and string courses, the shallow horizontal bands of masonry that divide a facade into tiers. Its fireplaces were set into corner positions within a massive central chimney stack, an arrangement that reflects a practical and spatial logic quite different from the later Georgian terraced house. The shuttered winch, a hoist mechanism built into the facade for lifting goods, points to the commercial character of the Liberties district, where weaving, tanning, and small-scale trade shaped the built environment for centuries.
The site at the junction of New Row South and Blackpitts is in the Liberties, one of the oldest and most densely layered parts of Dublin. Nothing of the house survives, and the junction today gives little indication of what once occupied it. For anyone interested in what the building looked like, Walsh's account in the 1973 publication remains the principal source. The broader Liberties area still contains fragments of earlier building phases if you know what you are looking for, but this particular corner is a gap in the record, a place where one of the city's rarer surviving house types stood long enough to be documented before vanishing entirely.