Tenement Tours

Hallway at 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin

Want to know more about how your family lived? Why not visit a museum that tells you more about dwellings like those they may have lived in? While in Dublin I went on a tour of their tenement museum. The tour and exhibits there focused on 14 Henrietta Street’s history. Like many other buildings in inner cities, it started its life as the home of the well-to-do with well appointed rooms for the public eye and more basic accommodation for the necessary offices, such as kitchens and servants’ quarters.

But times and neighbourhoods change and what was a fashionable address in earlier years may fall out of favour. What happens to those once great houses? They get repurposed and go down in the world. A lot of them end up to be tenements in slums like those on Henrietta Street in Dublin. After the fashionable set moved on, 14 Henrietta Street was taken over by businesses, then housed soldiers for a while. It wasn’t until an enterprising man thought to partition the rooms and rent out every part of the building that Henrietta Street became a true tenement. As many people as possible were squeezed into the place.

There was even a family of thirteen occupying the area of what is now the reception area of the museum. It was smaller but less dank that the basement they had occupied and offered more light. Lack of light was a problem in the buildings. There was no lighting on the stairs which made coming home after dark tricky. Hallways must have been gloomy places but maybe it was better not to see the walls painted in their distinctive red and blue and notice the true state of the place or the vermin which shared the accommodations.

I still haven’t been able to find out where my Cavanaghs came from in Ireland. I am not sure if they lived in Dublin but looking at the changes that were wrought in the building on Henrietta Street gave me a better idea of the surroundings my ancestors in East End London found themselves in.