THEY CALLED IT the Doll’s House, and it was a beautiful Georgian building that was at one time home to a City Sheriff.
Where was it? On the corner of Bachelor’s quay and Grattan Street in Cork city, until it was demolished on 18 July 1966 due to being deemed to be unsafe.
A building that looks quite like the Doll’s House is located next to the Opera Lane shopping area, on Emmet Place.
As Cork Past and Present tells us, attempts were made to save the original beautiful house:
The last owners of the house, which was by then in a state of disrepair, had offered the house to the Irish Georgian Society and Cork Corporation for the nominal rent of one shilling per year. Both bodies refused the offer as the cost of restoring the house was estimated at £30,000, an enormous sum of money in those days.
Bachelor’s Quay was widened after the house was demolished
In Frank O’Connor’s novel The Saint and Mary Kate, Mary Kate is brought up in the Doll’s House. It is described as a “huge shabby tenement” in a review in the Salt Lake Tribune in 1932.
For more photos like this, visit Cork Past and Present, run by Cork City Libraries. All pics from Cork Past and Present/Cork City Libraries.
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