Elizabeth Street

Elizabeth Street is a continuation of Robert Street, running west from Jones’ Road, Drumcondra. I presume that the street is named for the wife of the builder, William Hall, whose name was Elizabeth.¹

The part of the street nearest Robert Street was laid out sometime in the 1880s; people were living on the street by 1886, as evidenced by a newspaper report,² and its first listing in Thom’s of that year.³

In 1886 sixteen houses were listed on the north side of the street, mostly occupied, but on the opposite side only three houses were occupied, the remaining twelve were vacant. The following year all the houses were occupied, which suggests that the houses only became available in 1885/86/87.

Still listed in 1898,⁴ and shown on the 1897 Ordnance Survey,⁵ by 1899 the houses on the south side were gone,⁶ demolished to make way for the Drumcondra Link Railway. The remaining houses, along with those on Mabel Street, were advertised for sale in 1902.⁷

More houses were to be built on the street, however, on foot of a decision of the Corporation in 1901, to erect ‘workmen’s dwellings’ in the street, on a plot that had been leased to the Drumcondra Urban District Council.⁸

The City Architect duly came up with plans for fourteen two-story cottages and in 1903 a tender for the erection of the housing was published.⁹

These new houses were built by [CHECK THOM’S].

1. ‘Police Intelligence’, in Freeman’s Journal, 2 September 1891, p. 3. ↩︎
2. Freeman’s Journal, 5 April 1886, p. 1. This newspaper report is worth reading for an account of a fight between two Orangemen and a group of nationalists. ↩︎
3. Thom’s 1886. ↩︎
4. Thom’s 1888. ↩︎
5. OS 1897. ↩︎
6. Thom’s 1898. ↩︎
7. See the entry for Mabel Street. ↩︎
8. Reports 1901/194. ↩︎
9. Irish Builder, 27 August 1903, p. 34. ↩︎