Working class housing conditions in Irelands capital city were terrible. Dublins overcrowded and decaying Georgian terraces earned it a reputation as one of the most unhealthy, dirty and dilapidated cities in Europe. This photograph was taken around the turn of the century. Note the clothes drying in front of the houses. Jim Phelan, who lived in a tenement, describes how his father overcame the problem of drying clothes: We lived in a single room, in a huge tumble-down slum tenement. Next door a similar vast slum house had long since fallen down ... Living in a tenement, and having no land or garden, nor even a yard, naturally the drying of clothes and so on was difficult. To my father ... that problem was easy of solution. He built two strong spars from the two windows of our place, to carry clothes-lines. Projecting them twelve feet, each carried a cross-piece at the end, with a pulley at either extremity, by which a clothes-lines could be manoeuvred in and out. ... sixty of seventy feet above the ground-level, and on top of a hill, this made a marvellous drying-ground for clothes. My mother was the envy of the slum.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 06:46:25 +0000
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