Fitzroy Avenue
Running north-west from Jones’s Road, near Croke Park, Fitzroy Avenue was laid out in the early 1900s.
In April 1901 houses on the street were offered to be let at £28 per annum but the street is called Fitzroy ‘Terrace’.1
By the time the street was taken in charge by the Corporation in 1903, at the request of Mr Alexander Strain, the name had been changed to ‘Avenue’.2
The decision to change the name is probably in the Corporation minutes, but I haven’t found it yet.
I have no evidence for the origin of the name ‘Fitzroy’, but it may derive from the builder’s Presbyterian connections. Alexander Strain was a prominent builder, responsible for some of the finest houses in the area (e.g. on Iona Road and Lindsay Road).3 He was an active Presbyterian; could ‘Fitzroy’ come from the church of that name on Fitzroy Avenue, Belfast?
On 5 June 2015 Dublin City Council unveiled a commemorative plaque at 87 Fitzroy Avenue, in honour of footballer Patrick O’Connell.4
- ’James Hills great house property auction’, in Irish Times, 13 April 1901, p. 13. ↩︎
- Reports 1903/15, p. 152. ↩︎
- Daniel Beaumont, ‘Strain, Alexander’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.008350.v2) (accessed 10 March 2025).
↩︎ - ‘Patrick O’Connell (footballer)’ in Plaques of Dublin: a Dublin City Council project (https://plaquesofdublin.ie/list/patrick-oconnell-footballer/) (8 March 2025).
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