The photograph is of the door of an old music shop on one of my favourite Dublin thoroughfares, Capel Street. This is a street dating from the late seventeenth century even though the buildings, for the most part, have eighteenth century facades. These are punctuated, here and there, by Victorian pubs and modern offices. Nothing is particularly out of place and nothing has particularly changed over the past two hundred and fifty years - with the exception that the street has taken a decidedly downmarket air.
In the eighteenth century it was a fashionable parade with dukes and dandys strolling along and purchasing lottery tickets - wealth was a given and the people inhabiting the street led unimaginable lives to the 'mere' Irish as they were known. Along the way gentlemen in frockcoats pranced, ladies sauntered and servants dashed invisible.
Meanwhile five miles in any direction from this spot people lived in abject poverty and suffered a series of famines in the lead up to the Great Hunger of the mid-nineteenth century. This was when over a million people died in five years.
Over the passing centuries this brilliant avenue began to drift from the raffishness of the lotteries to gambling clubs and side street inns. Gradually a middling crowd took over and the great public houses such as Slattery's appeared and provided a convivial pleasure for real working class Dubliners. In between grocers, tailors and merchants plied their wears only beginning to lose ground as the late Victorian suburbs spread outwards dragging the better class of customer with them.
The Rising against Britain, the subsequent destruction of the city centre by the Empire and the catastrophe of the Civil War played out within an ass's roar of the street and pushed the wealth of the area further downwards.
In the 1930s the route was famous for haberdasheries and builder's providers as well as furniture. The Emergency, as the Second World War is known in Ireland, killed off another layer of businesses and the street saw the erection of some new out of character buildings as planning and design were luxuries that the country could ill afford. Emmigration sapped the lifeblood of the island. By the 70s, when I first remember Capel Street, it was reduced to a steady stream of furniture shops, a well-known garden shop and an equally famous tailor. There were some less than salubrious pubs as well. All was snarled up in the beginnings of the angry love affair between Hibernia and the car. Come the 1980s, stripped pine showrooms with bunkbeds lined up on the footpaths became a common sight - readily parked to scoop up the baby boom. Then crazy happened.
Sex came to Ireland! Sexshops appeared, protests began, the church ranted, little old men railed, rosaries were proffered and yet these purveyors of sin survived - albeit dyslexically - Uthopia (and perhaps they are).
But through it all from the 1920s onwards this little shop sold musical instruments. Fiddles to be loved and played and the soul of the street resided in that brass handle as musicians, decade by decade, came to view and buy lutes, guitars and all manner of melody makers.
Now the shop, too, has passed.
