Lord Mayor's Column: Revamped Cork City quarter has stories to tell

The Power of Place:

Stories have the power to impress, and to make one question, wonder, dream, remember, be disturbed, explore, and forget; a series of emotions. In a historic city, such as Cork, there are many stories and many emotions.

The more one studies the many narratives of Cork city, the more they pull you in to study them more. The more they pull you in, the more our city reveals itself; one becomes even more enthralled by the narratives that created our beautiful city.

Two events at which I recently spoke reconnected two locations to their history.

A Bridge Through History, Vernon Mount Bridge

The opening of the Vernon Mount pedestrian-and-cycling bridge has been anticipated for many years and it came to be because of the dedication, ambition, and vision of the community in Grange, in particular on the northern ridge here.

Indeed, the call for a new bridge has also been bound up with the strong sense of pride and place in the area.

The new bridge now connects the proud neighbourhoods of Grange and Ballyphehane and Douglas and Turner’s Cross. In the past, before the motorway, you could wander across the Tramore Valley river plain via the many informal pathways.

Indeed, there are many stories embedded in the local landscape and the story of Ballyphehane townland, where Tramore Valley Park stands.

‘Baile an Feitheáin’ means the townland of the sharp grass or marshland; the story of the public commons land on this swamp in the 18th century; the story of the sailcloth factory, which created Douglas village in the early 18th century; the construction of the beautiful Vermon Mount House and estate by the Hayes family in the mid-19th century, the story of the adjacent Cork Union Workhous in the late 19th century, and the advent of the two railway lines, Cork Macroom Railway Line and the Cork Bandon Line, and how they were built on raised platforms through one side of the swamp.

Stories abound: In the early 20th century, during the War of Independence, Volunteer training went on here and there were Civil War executions; stories of recreation, of wandering, hunting and courting here in the 20th century; of the Traveller community; of the landfill from the 1970s for more than 40 years, of Tramore Valley Park and the Creative Ireland Kinship programme, which explores the natural environment through artist and community participation.

Several of the locations around the new Vernon Mount Bridge possess a strong sense of character, sentimentality, place and belonging, and are a source of inspiration. Cork people deem such sites as appealing, timeless, ancestral, eternal, enshrined, or sacred in conjuring a sense of place.

A Street Through Time, MacCurtain Street

Similarly, the recent revamp of McCurtain Street allows us to contemplate, for the first time in decades, through widened footpaths in particular, the heritage and memories of the street and its place within the broader narrative of the city.

The DNA of this corner of Cork is rooted in the story of an emerging city in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when it was branding itself the Venice of the North and the Athens of Ireland, in terms of cultural output.

When the Corporation of Cork invested the time in planning St Patrick’s Bridge in 1787, it opened up this quarter for development. The 1790s coincided with the creation of St Patrick’s Hill — a hill-up avenue from Bridge Street, which aligned with an old windmill, the foundation of which is now incorporated into Audley House.

The decade also coincided with an early iteration of MacCurtain Street, back then known as Strand Street and later King Street, named after MP Robert King of Mitchelstown House. The earliest 18th century buildings can still be seen at the western side of the street.

One by one, some of Cork’s greatest architectural structures were added to the area. Between 1801 and 1832, Summerhill North was built, as well as a myriad of new residences.

In 1855, the Cork-Dublin terminus and tunnel opened. In its day, it was one of the major features of engineering in Western Europe and part of a plethora of railway networks beginning to appear across the continent. In 1861, Trinity Presbyterian Church was opened at the foot of Summerhill.

In the 1880s, the former Ogilive and Dobbin Wholesaler buildings were revealed and are now the Greene’s Restaurant and Isaac’s Hotel complex.

About the same time, the elaborate, 12-bay, five-storey building that hosted Thompson’s Bakery emerged, as well as the seven-bay, three-storey Victoria Buildings.

In 1892, the Baptist Church building was opened. In 1897, Dan Lowry opened the building as a luxurious new theatre, called The Cork Palace of Varieties.

The energy of all those sites led to the development by the brothers Stuart and Thomas Musgrave of the Metropole Hotel, designed by Arthur Hill in 1897.

The prospectus for the hotel in 1897 sold its luxuriousness and embraced the brand of modernity: A modern hotel for a city of modern vitality.

The Coliseum Cinema opened in September, 1913. By the time the street name was changed, in April 1920, from King Street, to commemorate the then recently martyred lord mayor, Tomás MacCurtain, the street had an enormous array of services and a set of buildings with diverse functions and narratives.

Of course, I haven’t mentioned the people involved in creating these sites and their background and ambition.

I haven’t mentioned the architects, the business people, the old families, the old shops, all of which we can glean from old street directories or even legacies of great musicians like Rory Gallagher, immortalised in this historic premises.

MacCurtain Street is full of places of tradition, of continuity, change and legacy, of ambition and determination, experiences and learning, of ingenuity and innovation, places of nostalgia and memories, places that are cherished and remembered with fondness.

All such places, Cork needs to mind in its future as well.