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SEVENTEEN FAMILIES ONCE lived at Number 14, Henrietta Street in Dublin’s north inner city.
The old Georgian building was first converted into a tenement in the late-1800s. The large spacious rooms were partitioned into smaller ‘compact 3-roomed flats’.
These ‘flats’ commanded hefty rents at the time, and entire large families would all live in each one. In one case 13 family members lived in one flat in the building.
The 1901 and 1911 census records show 100 people living in the building.
There were two toilets between these 100 people to use. The building had no internal plumbing and there was just one water supply for tenants in the basement.
“Imagine living on the top floor and having to bring a basin of water up to wash clothes or do anything,” says Charles Duggan, heritage officer with Dublin City Council.
It would be no easy task.
The last families left the No 14 Henrietta Street in 1979, by then the building had fallen into disrepair.
“Effectively the tenement history ended at that point,” says Duggan.
Restoration
No 14 Henrietta Street is due to officially open this summer as a museum charting tenement life in Dublin.
The old four-storey Georgian building has a long and interesting history, and conservationists hope it will be the ideal location for an interactive museum experience charting Dublin’s past.
“The museum seeks to deepen the understanding of the history of urban life and housing in Ireland and more specifically in Dublin through people and memory,” says Duggan, who has been one of the key people behind the project.
Historical exhibitions, re-creations of individual flats, recorded testimonies and collected belongings of people who have lived in the building will all be used to paint of picture of tenement life in the building.
“Our collection is the building and the memories that are contained in it,” says Duggan.
The museum will also use No 14 as a jumping-off point to explore the social history of Dublin more broadly in the period covered.
Much of the original building still remains along with fittings and fixtures that have been added throughout the centuries. Things like the floorboards and the wallpaper tell the story of the building in different time periods.
Charles points to one example of how lifting the original 18th century floorboards uncovered a wealth of historical objects.
“We lifted all of the original floorboards from the house as we had to do a huge amount of structural work to the floors themselves to make them safe for museum use.
And we found a huge number of objects that peopel had just discarded over time and that just fell between cracks of the floor.
A betting slip from the 40s, a Christmas raffle ticket from 1927, somebody’s old Maths homework, lots Guinness bottles and shoe polish are just some of the objects found which tell the story of the building.
It’s just incredible the amount of material we have just found accidentally under the floorboards.
Restoration
The road to opening the museum has been a long and difficult one, with the building requiring years of painstaking work to bring it up to where it is not.
Following the last families moving out in the late-1970s, the building went into the disrepair.
Due to the historical importance of the building and the street, Dublin City Council were prompted to put a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) on the building and acquired ownership of it in 2001.
From there, a conservation report was published for the entire Henrietta Street area due to its important historical and cultural heritage. Henrietta Street is known as one of the first Georgian Street in Dublin and possess a heritage and importance because of this.
Emergency works undertaken by Charles and his team involved completely dismantling the basement and rebuilding it, repairing the roof structure, cutting a repairing rot in the walls and more.
The design of the museum was undertaken by Shaffrey Associates and it is curated by Dr Ellen Rowley.
Charles says that the goal of this work has always been The purpose of this work has always been “to do as much as necessary and as little as possible” with the building.
The work has been documented via photographs and video and the work can be followed on the 14 Henrietta Street Facebook page.
“It’s a privilege to work on and when the museum opens that’s really just the beginning of our story,” says Charles.
“The hope is that people who do have connections to tenement life in Dublin will come forward and help inform us in how we develop further exhibitions down the line.
The walls talk, is term we’re using about the building, but they only talk so much.
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Great idea, well done to the people who thought of and created this. I hope to be one of the visitors to this when it opens. It’s human nature to forget the past and look to the future but its also important to understand the hardships and sacrifices of previous generations if you want to avoid repeating them.
It makes a nice change ..usually they’re tearing everything down.
@lazlo Saint Pierre
It’s still happening. People are being forced to sell homes and live with parents. I hope this museum shows photos of the , then, landlords and puts them beside the pictures of logos belonging to the present day vulture fund directors such as Pepper and their like. IT’S STILL GOING ON. let’s not dwell on this ideology that our history was so bad and we should REMEMBER it with such reverence. Nothing has changed for so many people and it’s about time someone actually did something about it instead of just remembering the bad ‘Auld’ times.
Brilliant, can’t wait to see inside. My great grandfather lived here and next door too for a while. Well done to all involved!
Well done to all involved. A magnificent street and example of Georgian architecture. Appalling conditions for the poor of Dublin at the time and this museum should serve as a great reminder that no matter how bad we think we have it now it’s nothing compared to the squalor that these people lived in.
Meantime landlords in Dublin have continued to fulfill the tradition of tenement quality accommodation all over the city and county at the naturally exorbitant “market rates” of rent….nothing ever really changes….
You have to be joking? Tenement quality, You wouldnt last a second in the conditions those people had to endure.
Your comment is very insulting to the people who lived in the tenements back then. .where are these tenement quality accommodation that you’re speaking about ?
A good news story! And a timely reminder of how Trump supporters want to crush the working man, if this happened today Trump and Breitbart would imprison these people, such is their hatred for the working & middle-class
tenements do still exist and are becoming more common as people are not being paid well enough to get a place of decent quality and ate being exploited by greedy property owners. go to daft and see for yourself
The same way your beloved enda and gang imprisoned protesters here using their public paid enforcers…
fact is a lot of these so called tenements where owned by irish landlords not the brits as they went back to london in the 1890s, nothing changes!!
Yes Stephen and it was those Irish landlords who were the make up of Dublin Corporation. They made sure their tenants were the ones who got jobs so as to enable them to be able to pay them the rent.
Guinness bottles and maths homework hidden under the floor boards from 100 years ago…good to see some things don’t change in the life of the Irish child and adult!
In 100 years time we’ll have an exhibition of the hotel rooms families had to live in due to the homelessness crisis. How many thousand children are officially homeless in this country today?
Didn’t need to spend money to remind people when we have the same dickensian edifices to bad planning gombeen half wit planners decisions still visible. Tower blocks in Ballymmun to Inchicore facing St Pats Ground. British to Irish rule shows nothing has changed for the people who’s families lived in the worst housing in Europe bar none. Now an Irish governments from the 1970′s onwards decided that doesn’t build any homes and “let the market ” sort out the problems has failed in modern Ireland people cant get homes or even afford rental accommodation to live. Tenement conditions would appear to be heaven for the current homeless that are on the streets or on the so called “housing list” the Dublin City council and its Irish political establishment prefer to ignore for Irish people but the migrants have no issues in getting housing and more to come form the backwaters of the middle east and further afield.
Is there a link or a website yet to book or see the opening schedule?
Do you not mean Dublin’s north central quarter
The New York one is good they will probably model off that. In one of the rooms they had an Irish woman keening over an infant coffin.
Go Enda Go
If anything as good as the tenement museum in New York should be great. I’m pretty sure members of my family may have lived in Henrietta Street for a while in the past great grandparents. As soon as it opens I’ll be in for a look.
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