When 14 Henrietta Street was built in the 1740s, it was one of the best addresses in Dublin, then the bustling capital of the Kingdom of Ireland, whose king also happened to be the King of the United Kingdom. Its first occupant, like his neighbors in the newly-built street, was rich and powerful.
Some of the rooms represent the lives and luxuries of the original owners
In fact, the first occupant was Field Marshal Richard Molesworth, 3rd Viscount Molesworth, the commander of the British Army in Ireland, a member of the Irish Parliament and a friend of the Duke of Marlborough. After him came the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and then the Bishop of Clogher.
Robert, Lord Molesworh
But by the time the elegant five-story house was sixty years old, it had started a long slow decline during which it was divided up into lawyers' offices, and then a barracks for militia, and finally a warren of slum apartments, some with large families living in single rooms.
By 1911, there were over a hundred people living in the building, a good number of them working at trades in their rooms as well as living there.
Generous proportions of the entry foyer were designed for the wealthy. But the religious picture that hangs there comes from a family with thirteen children who lived in that space until 1950.
By 1970, when the last tenement residents left, the building was in such poor condition that it was a question which would come first: collapse or demolition. And the answer turned out to be public purchase, stabilization, conservation and a new life as a fascinating museum of itself and of Dublin's life. The Dublin City Council voted in 2000 to acquire the house, a process that took until 2008.
A detailed model of the building, in an elegant room, starts the tour
Then the work began; it took ten years to save the building and prepare the museum. Among the problems were both dry rot and moisture, rotted joists, collapsing staircases and dangerous 19th century alterations which had left some parts of the floors unsupported. Surprisingly, though, most interior wall surfaces were intact.
Projections of old images, videos and maps in different rooms highlight the changing conditions of the city and the building's tenants
The museum, which is only available with guided tours, follows the social history of Dublin through its years. It's not a restoration of the Molesworth years, though some rooms show that; neither is it a 'tenement museum' of only the poorer classes who passed through it. The museum aims "to protect, share and add to the cultural life of the city. We tell stories, make connections, and uncover history."
A glance at the houses across Henrietta Street, all built in the same era. A NY Times article a few years ago highlighted several of them.
The contrasts in the condition of different rooms in the house is intentional; it does not represent incomplete restoration, but rather how the residents would have seen the building at the times they lived there. The 'Reckitt's Blue' walls were tinted with laundry bluing; it was believed to be a disinfectant. The 'raddle red' color supposedly deterred vermin.
The stairways and hallways serve, in effect, as passages through time.
In the center picture above, Richard Brannigan visits the museum's reconstruction of his family's one-room basement apartment at 14 Henrietta Street. A number of former residents were instrumental in supplying family mementos and oral histories as the project developed.
Large numbers of Dublin's worst slums, many of them in significant Georgian-era buildings, were swept away in the 1960s and 1970s, replaced by modern buildings like the one modeled above.
Despite the crowding in most of the building, and the desperate condition of basement spaces, some families were fortunate enough to have a few rooms and a modicum of modern conveniences, and in one case even an Art Deco fireplace, but the condition of the building continued to worsen.
I first heard about 14 Henrietta Street on visits to Dublin in 2017 and 2018, but it only opened a few weeks after my last visit, so it was top-of-mind when I made plans for Dublin again this year. I'm glad I did... and I think I'll need to visit Dublin again, with the lessons and history of Henrietta Street in mind!
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