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NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

IMAGINING IRISH SUBURBIA

IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Edited by
Eoghan Smith & Simon Workman
New Directions in Irish and Irish
American Literature

Series Editor
Claire A. Culleton
Department of English
Kent State University
Kent, OH, USA
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh
scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity
and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness
and works that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent
discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and
Irish American culture, among other things, have not only inspired but
affected recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American litera-
ture. The series’s focus on Irish and Irish American literature and cul-
ture contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland,
America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical
spaces between.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14747
 Eoghan Smith · Simon Workman
Editors

Imagining Irish
Suburbia in Literature
and Culture
Editors
Eoghan Smith Simon Workman
Carlow College, St. Patrick’s Carlow College, St. Patrick’s
Carlow, Ireland Carlow, Ireland

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-96426-3 ISBN 978-3-319-96427-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96427-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950514

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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 Foreword

Sing, Muse, of Irish suburbia?

Sing, Muse, of Irish suburbia? If thus invoked, the Muse has not, or
till now at least has appeared not, greatly to respond. When consider-
ing Irish literature we tend to think of wild Atlantic coasts, so important
to Irish romanticism, of the squinting windows of the Irish midlands or
of the tenements of Dublin, Belfast, Limerick, or Cork, sites nutritive to
variant forms of Irish realism or naturalism, or of Big Houses and their
parklands, landscapes hospitable to versions of sunny pastoral or grim-
mest Gothic. But the suburbs? They may have had their minor singers,
but, mostly, they have seemed too featureless to offer much to ‘litera-
ture’, too stripped of distinct identity certainly to qualify as subject mat-
ter for ‘Irish Literature’.
Considerations of suburbia are complicated by the fact that despite
the enormous scholarship on the topic internationally there is no
widely shared minimum definition of what the term ‘suburb’ means.
The English word has been around since the Middle Ages, but to what
exactly does it refer in twenty-first century Ireland? To areas of extended
middle-class habitation on the outer rims of our major cities? To the
winding ribbons of detached housing stretching spiderlike out in all
directions from every small town, village and hamlet in the country?
Are working class ‘suburbs’ simply tattier versions of middle-class ones
or at what point do they become ‘estates’? Do ‘suburbs’ typically take
their meaning from what they possess—green lawns and smart hedges,
­family-friendly cars and home security systems, residence associations and
v
vi    Foreword

dog walkers—or by what they supposedly lack—the rooted earthiness of

the real countryside, the restive excitement of the real city?
In cultural terms, the ‘suburbs’ seem, like the other aesthetics of
place listed earlier, to offer a disposition towards modernity as much as a
mimetic representation of any lived reality. In ‘Glengormley’, maybe the
finest contemporary work of Irish literature on the suburbs—though not
of an ‘Irish’ suburb in any comfortable sense—Derek Mahon ponders
fundamental elements of the affect of suburban life.1 One of these ele-
ments is the suburb’s capacity to offer some version of the posthistorical:

‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man’

Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge
And grasped the principle of the watering can.
Clothes pegs litter the window ledge
And the long ships lie in clover; washing lines
Shake out white linen over the chalk thanes.

Now we are safe from monsters, and the giants

Who tore up sods twelve miles by six
And hurled them out to sea to become islands
Can worry us no more. The sticks
And stones that once broke bones will not now harm
A generation of such sense and charm.

The wryly-modulated, mock-heroic cadences of these opening s­tanzas

suggest that what the ‘suburbs’ really signify on an imaginary level is
some Fukuyama-style sense of having reached the end of history, of hav-
ing done with its antiquated ‘monsters’ of passion and rage, of having
left behind the operatic ‘sticks and stones’ of religious, national, class,
racial or other conflicts. In its most confident modes, this version of
suburbia proffers the luxuriant lassitude of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday
Morning’, where the ‘Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/Coffee
and oranges in a sunny chair,/And the green freedom of a cockatoo/
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate/The holy hush of ancient sacrifice’.
Here, the suburban is secular and worldly and possesses a feminine, del-
iquescent ease and we glimpse the possibilities of a post-Puritan United
States that might have finally left behind the ‘tomb in Palestine’ and the
promises and perturbations of the messianic mentality. Originally pub-
lished as ‘Suburban walk’ in the 1960s, ‘Glengormley’ is all the more
interesting for the fact that it predates the Troubles: its droll sense of
 Foreword    vii

posthistorical suburban sedation conveys a fretted undercurrent of pres-

cient ominousness. Had a ‘generation of such sense and charm’ really left
the history’s worst perturbations behind it? The repressed of the forgot-
ten North would, of course, soon return with a vengeance in 1968. And
sure enough the two final stanzas of ‘Glengormley’ swerve from light
into darkness, releasing slowly the anxieties that always haunt visions of
the end of history and the last men:

Only words hurt us now. No saint or hero,

Landing at night from the conspiring seas,
Brings dangerous tokens to the new era —
Their sad names linger in the histories.
The unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain,
Dangle from lamp posts in the dawn rain;

And much dies with them. I should rather praise

A worldly time under this worldly sky —
The terrier-taming, garden-watering days
Those heroes pictured as they struggled through
The quick noose of their finite being. By
Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.

Suburbia everywhere is Janus-faced, airily idyllic one side, depressively

dystopian the other. If it promises a placid relaxation from history and
a perpetual bank holiday weekend world of ‘terrier-taming, garden-
watering days’, there always lurks in some souls or pysches, or some-
where recessive within us all, the ‘unreconciled’ imagination for whom
this manicured (post)modernity seems scarcely to answer to the visions
of those ‘heroes’ who had in earlier times ‘struggled through the quick
noose of their finite being’ to achieve a better world. Was it really of the
life offered by Glengormley and Killiney, Monetenotte or Ballsbridge
that ‘Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,/All that delirium of the brave’ had
dreamed?
There are, of course, many ways to think about suburbs that fall
beyond matters of affect or aesthetic, though these latter can never easily
be left behind. When scholars labour to show that suburbs are not the
atomised, anomic places they are sometimes reputed to be but are in fact
warmly vibrant with civic community, how do they avoid straying wil-
ly-nilly down the primrose path of suburban pastoral? When others stress
the realities of massive mortgage debt, corrupt development politics, or
viii    Foreword

the ways in which the idyllic vistas of boom time advertising so quickly
slide into the ‘ghost estates’ (never ‘ghost suburbs’) of the great reces-
sion, don’t they simply peel back the paint of suburban pastoral to dis-
close the familiar dystopias underneath? All sorts of questions bristle
then: Aren’t the idylls of suburbia and the nuclear family incestuously
inseparable? Can suburbia ever be detached from the capitalist big lie of
middle-class endeavor, uplift, affluence and eventual ease for all? How
environmentally sustainable are suburbs, with their sliced prairies of par-
cellised lawn, in an age of climate change?
Sing, Muse, of Irish suburbia? In this intelligently-curated, intellectually-
spiky volume, Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman demonstrate that
Irish suburbia has not, despite appearances, lacked its scholars and sing-
ers (saints and sages belong to earlier, veritably-mythical ages). That this
accomplished work should appear now in Irish studies is no accident. For
suburbia is currently, isn’t it, general all over Ireland? As once the country­
side swept or seeped its surplus into our coastal cities, with every up or
downswing of global financial cycles our cities now deposit their popula-
tions into the countryside, so that who can say where one presently ends,
the other begins. Before the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement,
Ireland was still too racked by conflicts between nationalists and union-
ists, Catholic backlashers and liberal progressives, country and city,
unions and bosses, to have escaped history, and therefore it was too early
for ‘suburbs’ to have secured some strong place in the Irish imaginary.
There were, as this volume underlines, suburbs then too, of course, but,
like Mahon’s Glengormley, they were precarious little enclaves of posthis-
tory surrounded on all sides by the noisily ‘unreconciled’ acting out their
increasingly embarrassing turbulent historical rages. Irish suburbs were
then still marooned islands in surrounding seas of mayhem, and Irish sub-
urbanites were often stick figures out of place and out of time, not unlike
O’Casey’s comically-distressed suburban ‘Woman’ in The Plough and the
Stars strayed into the inner-city tenements during the turmoil of the Easter
Rising and asking Uncle Peter if he could possibly pilot her ‘in the direc-
tion of Wrathmines’ so that she might recover her accustomed tranquil-
ity. Have we in post-Catholic, post-Good Friday Agreement, post-class
but not post-capitalist Ireland, finally tiptoed stealthily, the 2008 financial
‘corrections’ notwithstanding, over history’s hard border into the restfully
Western European solaces of suburban posthistory? Or is this merely our
Glengormley dream, our momentary complacency of the peignoir, our
secular suburban Sunday morning slow snooze before the next second-
 Foreword    ix

coming, cradle-rocking world-crisis? Romantic Ireland and Catholic

Ireland dead and gone, Suburban Ireland’s hour come round at last?
Maybe. Whether conceived as good-enough or false utopia, the Irish sub-
urbs merit their volume and find it, satisfyingly, here.

New Haven, USA Joe Cleary

Yale University

Note
1. 
Derek Mahon, ‘Glengormley’, Derek Mahon: New Collected Poems (The
Gallery Press: Oldcastle, Co. Meath, 2011), p. 14.
 Acknowledgements

This book was made possible by the support of Carlow College,

St. Patrick’s, who provided generous assistance towards the publication
of this book. We thank our colleagues at Carlow College, St. Patrick’s
for their help and collegiality. In particular, we are grateful to Dr Thomas
McGrath, Dr Margaret Murphy, Fr Conn Ó Maoldhomnaigh, and
Msg. Caoimhín Ó Néill for their encouragement. We also thank the
attendants and participants of the 2014 ‘Encircling Worlds: Imagining
Irish Suburbia’ conference, who provided us with the inspiration and
impetus for this book. We express deep gratitude to Ann Mulrooney for
her help, advice and support, and to our partners at VISUAL Centre
for Contemporary Art, Carlow, including Derek Blanche and Emma-
Lucy O’Brien. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of
Adam Bohanna, Eoin Byrne, Pat Collins, Evelyn Conlon, Derek Coyle,
Michael Cronin, Michael G. Cronin, Bridget English, Tracy Fahey,
Oona Frawley, Clare Gorman, Michael Hayes, James Heaney, Claudia
Luppino, Seán Lynch, Mary McIntyre, Peter Murphy, Margaret O’Neill,
Deirdre Quinn, Stephanie Rains, Donal Ryan, Clare Scully, Eamonn
Slater, Gemma Tipton, William Wall, Ciarán Wallace, Theresa Wray, and
Lisa Coen and Sarah Davis-Goff at Tramp Press. The team at Palgrave
Macmillan have provided valuable support in the production of this
book, and we would like to especially acknowledge the work of Felicity
Plester, Thomas René, Vicky Bates and Sooryadeepth Jayakrishnan in
bringing this project to fruition. We would like to express our gratitude
to Julitta Clancy. Many thanks also to Joe Cleary for his support. We are

xi
xii    Acknowledgements

grateful to Suella Holland and to Gallery Press for their permission to

reprint ‘Glengormley’ by Derek Mahon. We would also like to acknowl-
edge the contributors to this collection for their professionalism, advice,
generosity and scholarship. Finally, we would like to thank our friends
for their support, and our families for their inspiration and patience,
especially Charlie, Thomas, Ben and Nina—all children of the suburbs
and proof that Irish suburbia is not without its joys and wonders.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman

2 Brave New Worlds? 150 Years of Irish Suburban

Evolution 9
Ruth McManus

3 The Irish Suburban Imaginary 39

Mary P. Corcoran

4 Dublin and Its Suburbs: The Sum of Its Parts? 57

Michael Cronin

5 Suburbia in Irish Literary and Visual Culture 77

Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman

6 A Severed Space: The Suburbs of South Dublin

in Contemporary Irish Fiction 97
Liam Lanigan

7 Shame, Blame, and Change: Suburban Life in Irish

Women’s Fiction 119
Theresa Wray

xiii
xiv    Contents

8 Suburbia and Irish Poetry 139

Catherine Kilcoyne

9 Suburban Sensibilities in Contemporary Plays Set

in Dublin 163
Eamonn Jordan

10 Behind Closed Doors: Middle-Class Suburbia and

Contemporary Irish Cinema 191
Ruth Barton

11 ‘And This Is Where My Anxiety Manifested Itself…’:

Gothic Suburbia in Contemporary Irish Art 209
Tracy Fahey

12 The Sounds of the Suburbs? Experiences

and Imaginings of Popular Music in Dublin 227
John O’Flynn

13 The Narrow Margins: Photography and the Terrain

Vague 249
Justin Carville

14 SOUTHERN CROSS: Documentary Photography,

the Celtic Tiger and a Future yet to Come 275
Mark Curran

15 A Landscape of Crisis: Photographing Post-Celtic

Tiger Ghost Estates 301
Anthony Haughey

Index 323
 Notes on Contributors

Ruth Barton is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College

Dublin. She is the author of a number of publications on Irish cin-
ema including Irish National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004) and
Acting Irish in Hollywood (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006). She has
written critical biographies of the Hollywood star, Hedy Lamarr: Hedy
Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in Film (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2010) and the Irish silent era director, Rex Ingram: Rex
Ingram, Visionary Director of the Silent Screen (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2014). She is currently preparing a new mono-
graph on Irish cinema, Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, for
Manchester University Press.
Justin Carville is a lecturer in history and theory of photography at
the Department of Art and Design, IADT, Dún Laoghaire. His research
interests lie in the history and theory of the photographic image, Irish
photography history, visual studies, and theories of vision and visuality.
He held an IRCHSS Research Fellowship in 2008–2009 and was jointly
awarded an IRCHSS Major Projects Grant for 2008–2011. He is the
author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Irish
photographic history.
Mary P. Corcoran is Professor of Sociology at Maynooth University.
Her research and teaching interests lie primarily in the field of Irish
migratory processes, urban transformations and change, and pub-
lic culture. Her research has included analyses of urban and suburban

xv
xvi    Notes on Contributors

life, topics on which she has published widely. She is the recipient of
a Fulbright-EPA award for 2018–2019. Corcoran is currently the
Chairperson of the Local Community Development Committee, South
Dublin County Council, and is a board member of the Childhood
Development Initiative, Tallaght West and the Western Development
Commission. She is currently serving a second term on the Governing
Authority at Maynooth University.
Michael Cronin is the Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and
Cultural Translation, and the 1776 Professor of French. He is author of
Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages and Identity (Cork: Cork
University Press, 1996); Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation
(Cork: Cork University Press, 2000); Translation and Globalization
(London: Routledge, 2003); Time Tracks: Scenes from the Irish Everyday
(Dublin: New Island, 2003); Irish in the New Century/An Ghaeilge
san Aois Nua (Dublin: Cois Life, 2005); Translation and Identity
(Routledge, 2006); The Barrytown Trilogy (Cork University Press:
Ireland into Film series, 2007); Translation goes to the Movies (London:
Routledge 2009) and The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of
Microspection (London: Zero Books, 2012). He is co-editor of Tourism
in Ireland: A Critical Analysis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993);
Anthologie de nouvelles irlandaises (Quebec: L’Instant meme, 1997);
Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies (Manchester:
St. Jerome Press, 1998); Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the
Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Irish Tourism: Image,
Culture, and Identity (Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2003); The
Languages of Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003); Transforming
Ireland, co-edited with Peadar Kirby and Debbie Ging (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009). He was an Irish Language
Literature Advisor, Arts Council of Ireland (2009–2011). He is a
Member of the Royal Irish Academy and is an Officier de l’Ordre des
Palmes Academiques. He is the Series Editor for the New Perspectives in
Translation Studies (Routledge). He is co-editor of The Irish Review and
Editor-in-Chief of MTM.
Mark Curran is an artist, researcher, lecturer, and Programme Chair of
the B.A. (Hons) Photography programme at the Institute of Art, Design
and Technology (IADT), Dublin, where he also supervises postgraduate
practice-led research students. Since 2011, he has been Visiting Professor
on the M.A. in Visual and Media Anthropology, Freie Universität
 Notes on Contributors    xvii

Berlin. Incorporating multimedia installation informed by visual eth-

nography, since the late 1990s, Curran has undertaken a cycle of four
long-term research projects, critically addressing the predatory context
resulting from the migrations and flows of global capital. These have
been extensively published and exhibited internationally. More recently,
Curran has presented at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London
(2015), University of Ljubljana (2015), University of Boston (2016)
and the College Art Association, New York (2017). Supported by the
Arts Council of Ireland and curated by Helen Carey, THE MARKET
(2010–) continues the cycle and focuses on the functioning and con-
dition of the global markets and the role of financial capital. THE
MARKET has been installed at Gallery of Photography (2013), Belfast
Exposed (2013), Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2014), Limerick City
Gallery of Art (2015), Noorderlicht, Netherlands (2015), Blackwood
Gallery, University of Toronto, Canada (2016), Museum of Capitalism,
Oakland, USA (2017), Turchin Center for Visual Arts, North Carolina,
USA (2017), Le Bleu du ciel—Centre de photographie contemporaine,
Lyon, France (2017), and Krakow Photomonth, Poland (2018).
Tracy Fahey is Head of Department of Fine Art and Head of Centre of
Postgraduate Studies in Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT. She is
a member of the advisory boards of the Centre for Research in Popular
Culture, AUT, Auckland and the Centre for Studies in Otherness,
Denmark. Her main area of research is the Gothic, specifically domestic
Gothic space in the visual arts, with chapters in edited collections pub-
lished by Palgrave, Routledge, Manchester University Press, Rowman
and Littlefield, and McFarland. She also writes Gothic fiction and has
been published in fifteen Irish, UK, and US anthologies. Her first col-
lection, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre (2016) was nominated for a British
Fantasy Award in 2017.
Anthony Haughey is an artist and lecturer in the Dublin Institute of
Technology, where he supervises practice-based PhDs. He was Senior
Research Fellow (2005–2008) at the Interface Centre for Research in
Art, Technologies and Design in Belfast School of Art, where he com-
pleted a PhD in 2009. His artworks and research have been widely
exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Recent exhibi-
tions include: ‘UNresolved’, video installation, Athens Bienniale, ‘The
Politics of Images’, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2017) and ‘Proclamation’
(2016), which toured widely internationally. In 2016, he premiered his
xviii    Notes on Contributors

new video ‘Manifesto’, which was acquired for the permanent collection
of The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Other recent exhibitions
include: ‘Uncovering History’, Kunsthaus Graz, ‘Excavation’, Limerick
City Gallery, ‘Making History’ and Colombo Art Biennale (2014), as
well as a major British Council exhibition ‘Homelands’, touring South
Asia. His artworks and scholarly writing have been published in more
than eighty publications and his artworks are represented in many
important national and international public and private collections. He
is an editorial advisor for the Routledge journal ‘Photographies’ and
is a board member of Fire Station Artist Studios. He was recipient of
Create ‘Arts and Cultural Diversity Award’ (2014). He was lead cura-
tor for a major 1916 Commemorative exhibition, ‘Beyond the Pale: The
Art of Revolution’, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, and he was commis-
sioned by Lismore Castle Arts to produce an artwork for the exhibition,
‘The Museum of August Destiny’ (2016–2017). He recently exhib-
ited his video installation ‘UNresolved’ in Argentina, Berlin, and Paris
and curated ‘Forum: Transcultural Dialogues’, Rua Red gallery Dublin
(2018). He was recently awarded an ‘Infrastructure’ public art commis-
sion by Fingal County Council.
Eamonn Jordan is Associate Professor in Drama Studies at the School
of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin. His book The
Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (1997) is the first full-
length study on McGuinness’s work. In 2000, he edited Theatre Stuff:
Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre. He co-edited with Lilian
Chambers The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories
(2006) and The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right beside the Beyond’
(2012), both published by Carysfort Press. Dissident Dramaturgies:
Contemporary Irish Theatre was published in 2010 and From Leenane
to LA: The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh in 2014. He has
co-edited with Eric Weitz The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary
Irish Theatre and Performance (2018). His study The Theatre and Films
of Conor McPherson: Conspicuous Communities will be published by
Bloomsbury/Methuen in 2019.
Catherine Kilcoyne currently lectures at University College Dublin.
She specialises in poetry and theories of space and has previously pub-
lished on Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Patrick Kavanagh, and
David Wheatley.
 Notes on Contributors    xix

Liam Lanigan is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of

English, Speech, and Foreign Languages at Texas Woman’s University.
He has previously taught at University College Dublin and Maynooth
University. He earned his doctorate from University College Dublin
in 2011. He was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at
University College Cork (2013–2014), and a National Endowment for
the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute
for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (2015–2016). He is the
author of James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of
the Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Ruth McManus is Associate Professor in Geography in the School of
History and Geography at Dublin City University, and former Head of
the Geography Department at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. Her
research interests include urban geography, housing and town planning,
suburbanisation, twentieth-century urban history, demography, tour-
ism and heritage issues. Her books include Dublin 1910–1940: Shaping
the City and Suburbs (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002) and Leaders of
the City, Dublin’s First Citizens, 1500–1950 (co-edited with Lisa-Marie
Griffith) (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013).
John O’Flynn is Associate Professor of Music at Dublin City University.
His publications include The Irishness of Irish Music (Surrey: Ashgate,
2009), the co-edited volume Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond
(London: Routledge, 2014) and numerous journal articles, book chap-
ters, and encyclopaedia entries on a range of subjects including film
music, popular music, music and social media, and music in higher edu-
cation. In 2015–2016, he was the principal investigator for the project
Mapping Popular Music in Dublin, and he is currently completing a
monograph on the theme of music, the moving image, and Ireland.
Eoghan Smith is Programme Director of the Arts and Humanities pro-
gramme at Carlow College, St. Patrick’s. He is the author of the work
of fiction The Failing Heart (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2018) and John Banville:
Art and Authenticity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014). He has published a
wide range of articles, chapters, essays, and reviews on many aspects of
modern and contemporary Irish writing, including work on writers such
as John Banville, Samuel Beckett, and Claire Keegan. He previously
taught at Maynooth University.
xx    Notes on Contributors

Simon Workman is Programme Director of the English and History

programme at Carlow College, St. Patrick’s and has previously taught
at Trinity College, Dublin. His most recent publications include essays,
chapters, and reviews on various forms of modern Irish culture and writ-
ing, with a particular specialism in the poetry of Louis MacNeice and the
fiction of Maeve Kelly.
Theresa Wray holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cardiff. Her work
on Mary Lavin has been published in The Politics of Irish Writing (2010),
Mary Lavin (2013), New Voices, Inherited Lines: Literary and Cultural
Representations of the Irish Family (2013), The Irish Review (Winter
2013), New Hibernia Review (Summer 2015), and The Irish Short Story:
Traditions and Trends (2015). Most recently her work on Irish women’s
fiction has been published in Ageing Women in Literature and Visual
Culture (2017). Areas of research interest include Irish women’s writing
of the mid-twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the writings
of Mary Lavin, Maura Laverty, and Maeve Brennan, contemporary Irish
women’s fiction, the short story genre, and feminist approaches to wom-
en’s writing.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Variety of early suburban housing on Herbert Avenue,

Dublin. Photograph by Ruth McManus 14
Fig. 2.2 Local authority suburban housing. Crumlin Housing
Scheme under construction c. 1936. Courtesy
of G. & T. Crampton 19
Fig. 2.3 Aerial view of West Dublin with suburban housing under
construction. Photograph by Ruth McManus 26
Fig. 13.1 Liam Devlin, ‘untitled’ from the series Space to Love,
Space to Shop, 2007, © Liam Devlin 253
Fig. 13.2 Liam Devlin, ‘untitled’ from the series Space to Love,
Space to Shop, 2007, © Liam Devlin 258
Fig. 13.3 Dara McGrath, ‘M50 Ballinteer’ from the series
By the Way, 2003, © Dara McGrath 260
Fig. 13.4 Dara McGrath, ‘N11 Wyattville Junction’ from the series
By the Way, 2003, © Dara McGrath 265
Fig. 13.5 Dara McGrath, ‘N7 Castletroy’ from the series By the Way,
2003, © Dara McGrath 266
Fig. 13.6 David Farrell, ‘Drummin Village, Tipperary’, 2011,
from the series An Archaeology of the Present, © David Farrell 268
Fig. 14.1 Portrait (A Child) (c-print) from the series Stoneybatter
(Dublin), August 1998 276
Fig. 14.2 West of the City (Pine Valley, County Dublin, 2001)
(1 m × 1 m, c-Print) from the series Site 279
Fig. 14.3 HOME (Temple Bar, Dublin 1999)
(75 cm × 75 cm, c-print), from the series Site 283

xxi
xxii    List of Figures

Fig. 14.4 Ger from Dublin City (Skerries, County Dublin, 2001)
(50 cm × 50 cm, c-print) from the series Site 286
Fig. 14.5 Stephen from Dublin (IFSC, Phase I, Dublin, 2001)
(75 cm × 75 cm, c-print) from the series Prospect 288
Fig. 14.6 Inner City (Marrowbone Lane, Dublin, 1999)
(1 m × 1 m, c-print) from the series Site 290
Fig. 15.1 ‘Great Blasket Island, County Kerry, abandoned 1953’,
© A Haughey, 1996 303
Fig. 15.2 ‘American Tourists, County Kerry’, © A Haughey, 1996 304
Fig. 15.3 ‘Collecting Turf from the Bog, Connemara, Co. Galway’
© J. Hinde Studio and with kind permission from
J. Hinde Studio 305
Fig. 15.4 Settlement V, 100 × 120 cm © A. Haughey, 2011 309
Fig. 15.5 Settlement lll, 100 × 120 cm © A. Haughey, 2011 310
Fig. 15.6 Settlement XV, 100 × 120 cm © A. Haughey, 2011 311
Fig. 15.7 Pyrite infected house foundations, Co. Dublin, 2012 312
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman

This volume explores the literary and visual cultures of modern Irish
suburbia, and the historical, social, and aesthetic contexts in which these
cultures have emerged.
Though there is an expanding body of criticism on suburban ­cultures
in other Anglophone countries such as Britain and the United States,
­relatively little has been written on the suburbs in Irish literature and
visual arts.1 In spite of the physical existence of suburbia as a space
between city and country with its own set of unique cultural and social
identifiers, it is not always imagined as a culturally interesting place in
its own right, or as a vantage point from which to explore the inner
urban or the rural. However, although suburbia is sometimes negatively
depicted in literary and visual culture as a place to be escaped from, con-
temporary sociological research on Irish suburbia bears out the strength
of historical attachment to local forms of residential conglomerations.
The work of Mary Corcoran, Jane Gray, and Michel Peillon, which

E. Smith (*) · S. Workman

Carlow College, St. Patrick’s, Carlow, Ireland
e-mail: esmith@carlowcollege.ie
S. Workman
e-mail: sworkman@carlowcollege.ie

© The Author(s) 2018 1

E. Smith and S. Workman (eds.), Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature
and Culture, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96427-0_1
2 E. SMITH AND S. WORKMAN

informs several of the chapters in Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature

and Culture, has demonstrated that attachment to place is not only an
important aspect of local Irish cultures, but that many residents of mod-
ern Irish suburbs also feel strong attachments to where they have cho-
sen to live and to raise their families. These attachments are often more
substantial than are popularly recognised within Anglophone cultures,
particularly within Britain and America. Corcoran, Gray, and Peillon
propose that two dominant models have been employed in the study of
suburbia. The first model tends to stereotype the suburbs as dystopian
places of drab conformism and personal alienation, a stereotype often
repeated in artistic and media forms, while the second model employs a
sceptical, and crucial, reappraisal of such stereotyping.2 Imagining Irish
Suburbia in Literature and Culture not only reflects the form of this
debate but aims to advance it. The totality of this volume suggests that
while Irish suburban experience is often conceived pejoratively by writ-
ers and artists, there are also many who register and valorise the imag-
inative possibilities of Irish suburbia and the meanings of its social and
cultural life.
Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture contains four-
teen chapters. The first three establish key historical, sociological, and
theoretical contexts for Irish suburban cultures. Ruth McManus begins
the book with a concise overview of the evolution and development of
Irish suburbia from the nineteenth century to the present, thus estab-
lishing a vital geo-historical frame of understanding for the chapters that
follow. Although the development of Irish suburbia largely mirrors the
American and British experience, McManus demonstrates that Irish sub-
urbia has its own particular character and unique cultures. These cultures
can be felicitously understood within the local context; Mary Corcoran
in her chapter argues that, contrary to their representation as places of
social alienation, the suburbs are actually sites where engaged civic cul-
tures thrive, creating what she terms ‘social affiliations’. Although glo-
balisation and technological advances increasingly appear to weaken
attachments to the local, Corcoran argues that Irish suburbia remains
a place of ‘mico-civicism’ where social participation is strong, bind-
ing, and important. Michael Cronin’s chapter deepens McManus’s and
Corcoran’s sense that Irish suburbia is a vibrant and socially creative
space. He offers an incisive model of theorising suburban literary cultural
forms, specifically in relation to Dublin. Considering works by artists of
suburbia, such as James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Paul Howard, and John
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Banville (among others), Cronin explores the suburbs in four different

ways: as metonymic spaces (as opposed to metaphorical) that express the
geo-spatial complexity of Dublin in contemporary writing and which
‘provide anchor points of identification’ in a fragmented city; as cultur-
ally rich spaces that can be illuminated through ‘microspection’; as places
of multifarious intralingual subtleties that belie simplistic understand-
ings of language-use; and, echoing Corcoran, historically as fertile places
where ‘new forms of relationships were being tested’ and ‘where new
kinds of affinities were possible’ that have given rise to a more liberal and
tolerant Ireland.
Cronin demonstrates that there exist multiple Irish suburban cultures
to explore, and that, contrary to its popular image, Irish suburbia contains
within it an extraordinary number of productive cultures. This productiv-
ity is traced in aesthetic terms by Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman in
their overview of Irish suburban literary and visual culture. Although by no
means intended to be an exhaustive account, they argue that many Irish art-
ists have been more attuned to the possibilities, and indeed, necessity, of
writing out of and about Irish suburbia than has perhaps been recognised.
In recent times, in particular, a significant body of literary and visual cul-
ture has developed in response to the property boom that helped drive the
so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s,
and the fallout of the collapse of that economy. The rapid growth and sub-
sequent crash of this economy were underpinned in a large part by mass
suburban house-building projects; at the same time, many of the artists
who engaged with the Celtic Tiger and the catastrophic fallout of the crash
were themselves deeply invested in life in the suburbs. If Imagining Irish
Suburbia in Literature and Culture has a strong focus on the period from
the 1990s to the present day, it is because the rapid development of Irish
suburbia during this time was fundamentally revealing and transformative of
Irish culture, society and economic policy, the reverberations of which were
and still are being registered by Irish artists across a variety of art forms.
Chapters by Liam Lanigan, Theresa Wray, Eamonn Jordan, and
Catherine Kilcoyne are linked through their primary focus on literary
engagements with Irish suburbia and in their shared sense that the Irish
suburbs are crucial sites of cultural meaning as well as a distinctive index
of socio-economic transformation. Lanigan focuses on the interrelations
between geography, space, and identity in contemporary fictional rep-
resentations of the south Dublin suburbs in the work of Barry McCrea,
Kevin Power, and Justin Quinn. In his essay, he argues that the affluent
4 E. SMITH AND S. WORKMAN

and culturally powerful south Dublin suburbs have always had a particu-
lar importance in the Irish imagination, dating back to the nineteenth
century. During the Celtic Tiger period, the apparent economic and
cultural detachment of these suburbs not only from the rest of Ireland
but also from the rest of Dublin became exacerbated in the public mind,
albeit in complex and nuanced ways that Lanigan argues often ironically
draws attention to this same sense of detachment as ‘illusory’. Echoing
observations by McManus and Corcoran that Irish suburbia has its own
set of characteristics, Wray considers the wider context of American and
British representations and theories of suburbia, and asks important
questions about the richness and validity of Irish suburbia as a space for
female imagining and art, offering readings of writers such as Elizabeth
Bowen, Maeve Brennan, Maeve Binchy, Anne Enright, Patricia Scanlan,
Mary Morrissy, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. Eamonn Jordan comprehensively
surveys contemporary Irish plays set in urban and suburban Dublin dur-
ing the Celtic Tiger and Post-Celtic Tiger periods. His chapter considers
how Irish dramatists grappled with the profound changes that the new
economic paradigm was bringing about, and he explores in particular
representations of class and of inter-class relationships in contemporary
Irish theatre. Jordan additionally points out, echoing Wray, that the for-
mation of identity through personal and sexual relationships is a recur-
rent theme of Irish suburban writing. The final contribution on suburbia
in Irish literature, by Catherine Kilcoyne, examines how the work of Irish
poets W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, and
Medbh McGuckian track and constitute the plethoric meanings of Irish
suburbia in various locations and through different historical phases.
Engagement by Irish artists with suburbia, particularly in recent
times, is also prevalent in other forms of Irish culture. Chapters by Ruth
Barton, Tracy Fahey, John O’Flynn, and Justin Carville address the por-
trayal of contemporary suburbia within forms of visual and musical cul-
ture and offer analyses of its manifestation in Irish film, art, photography,
and music. Like Lanigan and, to an extent, Jordan, Barton examines how
recent renderings of Irish suburbia critique the assumptions and attitudes
of the middle classes of south Dublin. Focusing specifically on recent
films by John Boorman, Lenny Abrahamson, and Kirsten Sheridan,
Barton examines how membership of the middle classes in these films
is defined by house-ownership and cultural affiliation to the south
Dublin suburbs, to which is attached privilege. Yet this class privilege,
which habitually appears to be linked to specific suburban detachment
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

and affluence, Barton argues, is not one that is always depicted in pos-
itive terms in contemporary Irish cinema, suggesting that Irish film-
makers were alert to the more destructive aspects of the Celtic Tiger
economy. However, there is a sense that in the films considered here, the
approach to middle class Irish suburban culture is not always nuanced,
with film-makers preferring judgmental excoriation to more circumspect
reflection.
Barton and Jordan emphasise the importance of ‘home’ in the Irish sub-
urban imagination. The personal obsession with home-ownership became
something of a national nightmare after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger
economy, as the aftermath of the crash saw the landscape blighted by unfin-
ished and vacant housing estates that have since become known as ‘ghost
estates’. In her chapter, Tracy Fahey interprets the powerful nexus of Gothic
aesthetics and the image of the ghost estate/vacant home in recent Irish art
practice. Discussing several modes of visual art in the work of a number of
contemporary artists, she demonstrates the remarkable prevalence and mal-
leability of the ghost estate as signifier of Irish economic collapse along with
the enduring cultural attachment of Irish people to ‘home’.
Although suburbanisation is a modern phenomenon, Fahey’s uncov-
ering of older Irish attachments to ‘home’ in contemporary art practice
reflects the capacity of Irish cultural experience to survive by translat-
ing itself into new and modified forms. In his overview of musical hap-
penings in suburban Dublin, John O’Flynn explores the visibility and
the ‘hiddenness’ of the suburbs in contemporary Irish musical culture,
which he argues demonstrates continuity with older folk traditions. In
one sense, the suburbs are highly visible in popular music; not only are
many popular Dublin musicians suburbanites, but suburban experience
is reflected in the form and content of their music. Yet, as Corcoran,
Cronin, and Smith and Workman also allude to in their essays, O’Flynn
suggests the hiddenness of the suburbs is partly caused by the discursive
boundaries around suburbia, so that the fertility of suburban culture is
often obscured.
The essays by Fahey and O’Flynn reveal something of the ambigu-
ous relationship that Irish artists often have with suburbia; on the one
hand, suburbs are formative spaces for identity and creative endeavour;
on the other, they are not always openly and consciously celebrated.
This latter reluctance may in part be attributed to inherited discourses
about the imaginative limitations of the suburb. It may also be related
to the physicality of suburbia, which by nature involves topographical
6 E. SMITH AND S. WORKMAN

and ecological upheaval. Fahey’s consideration of ghost estates draws

attention to changes in the physical landscape wrought by suburbanisa-
tion, something which is echoed by Justin Carville’s exploration of pho-
tographic representations of Irish suburbia. Carville uses the concept of
terrain vague to offer new insights into the aesthetics of Irish suburban
photography. He suggests that recent Irish photographic practices have
undergone a ‘topographical turn’ in which landscape is not simply doc-
umented; instead, Irish photography has played a vital role in concen-
trating the eye on the cultural and economic forces that actively changed
Ireland, and to which there has been much political and public blindness.
Like many of the other authors in the collection, Carville is focused
on the striking transformations of landscape that occurred during the
mass suburbanisation of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. His chap-
ter provides a bridge towards the subsequent contributions by pho-
tographers Mark Curran and Anthony Haughey, who document how
photography has a unique power to catalogue such transformations.
Although both academics in their own right, these two essays by Curran
and Haughey offer comparable artists’ responses to the recent develop-
ment of Irish suburbia, disclosing the process and rationale of individ-
ual photographic artworks engaged with the evolving suburban spaces
of modern Ireland. Curran outlines his interest as a photographer in the
suburban developments of south County Dublin, and, like many oth-
ers, delineates the economic and political forces that drove the radical
transformation of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger through the expan-
sion of the built environment. Haughey, like Fahey, is interested in
the phenomenon of the ghost estate, and he documents his own artis-
tic process in photographing ghost estates, while also considering the
politics of exhibition of contemporary suburbia. In this sense, both
Curran and Haughey, along with others in Imagining Irish Suburbia in
Literature and Culture, see Irish artistic engagement with suburbanisa-
tion in dialectical terms, as acts which are both critical but aesthetically
productive, both sceptical and yet rich in artistic possibility.
Haughey’s and Curran’s work also pertains to the deficiency and
­malfunction within Ireland’s housing sector as it is currently constituted;
as this volume of essays goes to publication, Ireland is in the grip of a
housing crisis of striking scale and complexity, which has resulted in
steep increases in the numbers of homeless and families in emergency
provision. The state’s over-reliance on the private sector and flawed
social housing policies have resulted in house price inflation, sharp,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

sometimes exorbitant, increases in rents, and a dearth of new housing

stock. And though Curran’s and Haughey’s work is particularly focused
on these issues, the other chapters in this volume (despite variances in
theoretical approach, historical focus, and thematic preoccupation) also
elucidate some aspect of the forms of political economy and cultural
formation that have led to the current calamity in housing. In toto,
this variegated field of analysis provides a penetrating diagnosis of the
systemic failures in housing provision, which were engendered by the
myopic and misguided perspectives (both recent and historic) of the Irish
polity and its cultures. Yet these essays not only anatomise the causes
of these socio-political failures, they also hone and enrich the language
through which solutions to the current crisis in housing can be articu-
lated and implemented. It is clear that suburbia will prove a crucial site
in this process and become a locus for how Irish society re-imagines itself
into the future.

Notes
1. See for example Martin Dines, Gay Suburban Narratives in American
and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Sarah
Edwards and Jonathan Charley, eds, Writing the Modern City: Literature,
Architecture, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2011); Jo Gill, The
Poetics of the American Suburbs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);
Lynne Hapgood, Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture,
1880–1925 (Manchester University Press, 2005); Catherine Jurca,
White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Bernice M. Murphy,
The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009); Nathanael O’Reilly, Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs
in the Contemporary Australian Novel (Amherst, NY: Teneo Press, 2012);
Ged Pope, Reading London’s Suburbs: From Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Roger Webster, ed., Expanding
Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives (New York: Berghahn Books,
2000).
2. Mary P. Corcoran, Jane Gray, and Michael Peillon, Suburban Affiliations:
Social Relations in the Greater Dublin Area (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2010; Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010),
pp. 3–5.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pittsburgh
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
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eBook.

Title: Pittsburgh
a sketch of its early social life

Author: Charles W. Dahlinger

Release date: September 15, 2023 [eBook #71653]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1916

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

PITTSBURGH ***
 PITTSBURGH IN 1790
As sketched by Lewis Brantz
From Schoolcraft’s Indian Antiquities
 PITTSBURGH

A SKETCH OF ITS EARLY

SOCIAL LIFE

BY

CHARLES W. DAHLINGER

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1916
 Copyright, 1916
BY
CHARLES W. DAHLINGER
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
 To
B. McC. D.
 PREFACE
The purpose of these pages is to describe the early social life of
Pittsburgh. The civilization of Pittsburgh was crude and vigorous,
withal prescient of future culture and refinement.
The place sprang into prominence after the conclusion of the
French and Indian War, and upon the improvement of the military
roads laid out over the Alleghany Mountains during that struggle.
Pittsburgh was located on the main highway leading to the
Mississippi Valley, and was the principal stopping place in the
journey from the East to the Louisiana country. The story of its early
social existence, interwoven as it is with contemporaneous national
events, is of more than local interest.
C. W. D.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
November, 1915.
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.—The Formative Period 1
II.—A New County and a New Borough 22
III.—The Melting Pot 38
IV.—Life at the Beginning of the Nineteenth
Century 62
V.—The Seat of Power 90
VI.—Public and Private Affairs 114
VII.—A Duel and Other Matters 138
VIII.—Zadok Cramer 161
IX.—The Broadening of Culture 184
Index 209
Pittsburgh
 CHAPTER I
THE FORMATIVE PERIOD

Until all fear of Indian troubles had ceased, there was practically
no social life in American pioneer communities. As long as
marauding bands of Indians appeared on the outskirts of the
settlements, the laws were but a loose net with large meshes, thrown
out from the longer-settled country whence they emanated. In the
numerous interstices the laws were ineffective. In this Pittsburgh was
no exception. The nominal reign of the law had been inaugurated
among the settlers in Western Pennsylvania as far back as 1750,
when the Western country was no man’s land, and the rival claims
set up by France and England were being subjected to the
arbitrament of the sword. In that year Cumberland County was
formed. It was the sixth county in the province, and comprised all the
territory west of the Susquehanna River, and north and west of York
County—limitless in its westerly extent—between the province of
New York on one side, and the colony of Virginia and the province of
Maryland on the other. The first county seat was at Shippinsburg, but
the next year, when Carlisle was laid out, that place became the seat
of justice.
After the conclusion of the French and Indian War, and the
establishment of English supremacy, a further attempt was made to
govern Western Pennsylvania by lawful methods, and in 1771
Bedford County was formed out of Cumberland County. It included
nearly all of the western half of the province. With Bedford, the new
county seat, almost a hundred miles away, the law had little force in
and about Pittsburgh. To bring the law nearer home, Westmoreland
County was formed in 1773, from Bedford County, and embraced all
of the province west of “Laurel Hill.” The county seat was at
Hannastown, three miles northeast of the present borough of
Greensburg. But with Virginia and Pennsylvania each claiming
jurisdiction over the territory an uncertainty prevailed which caused
more disregard for the law. The Revolutionary War came on, with its
attendant Indian troubles; and in 1794 the western counties revolted
against the national government on account of the imposition of an
excise on whisky. It was only after the last uprising had been
suppressed that the laws became effective and society entered upon
the formative stage.
Culture is the leading element in the formation and progress of
society, and is the result of mental activity. The most potent agency
in the production of culture is education. While Pittsburgh was a
frontier village, suffering from the turbulence of the French and
Indian War, the uncertainty of the Revolution, and the chaos of the
Whisky Insurrection, education remained at a standstill. The men
who had blazed trails through the trackless forests, and buried
themselves in the woods or along the uncharted rivers, could usually
read and write, but there were no means of transmitting these boons
to their children. The laws of the province made no provision for
schools on its frontiers. In December, 1761, the inhabitants of
Pittsburgh subscribed sixty pounds and engaged a schoolmaster for
the term of a year to instruct their children. Similar attempts followed,
but, like the first effort, ended in failure. There was not a newspaper
in all the Western country; the only books were the Bible and the
almanac. The almanac was the one form of secular literature with
which frontier families were ordinarily familiar.
In 1764, while Pittsburgh was a trading post, the military
authorities caused a plan of the village to be made by Colonel John
Campbell. It consisted of four blocks, and was bounded by Water
Street, Second Street, now Second Avenue, Market and Ferry
Streets, and was intersected by Chancery Lane. The lots faced in
the direction of Water Street. In this plan most of the houses were
built.
At the outbreak of the Revolution, the proprietors of the province
were the cousins, John Penn, Jr., and John Penn, both grandsons of
William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. Being royalists, they had
been divested of the title to all their lands in Pennsylvania, except to
a few tracts which had been surveyed, called manors, one of them
being “Pittsburgh,” in which was included the village of that name. In
1784 the Penns conceived the design of selling land in the village of
Pittsburgh. The first sale was made in January, when an agreement
to sell was entered into with Major Isaac Craig and Colonel Stephen
Bayard, for about three acres, located “between Fort Pitt and the
Allegheny River.” The Penns determined to lay out a town according
to a plan of their own, and on April 22, 1784, Tench Francis, their
agent, employed George Woods, an engineer living at Bedford, to do
the work. The plan was completed in a few months, and included
within its boundaries all the land in the triangle between the
Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, extending to Grant Street and
Washington, now Eleventh, Street. Campbell’s plan was adopted
unchanged; Tench Francis approved the new plan and began to sell
lots. Major Craig and Colonel Bayard accepted, in lieu of the acreage
purchased by them, a deed for thirty-two lots in this plan.
Until this time, the title of the occupants of lands included in the
plan had been by sufferance only. The earlier Penns were reputed to
have treated the Indians, the original proprietors of Pennsylvania,
with consideration. In the same manner John Penn, Jr., and John
Penn dealt with the persons who made improvements on the lands
to which they had no title. They permitted the settlement on the
assumption that the settlers would afterwards buy the land; and they
gave them a preference. Also when litigation arose, caused by the
schemes of land speculators intent on securing the fruits of the
enterprise and industry of squatters on the Penn lots, the courts
1
generally intervened in favor of the occupants. The sale was
advertised near and far, and immigrants and speculators flocked into
the village. They came from Eastern Pennsylvania, from Virginia,
from Maryland, from New York, and from distant New England. The
pack trains carrying merchandise and household effects into
Pittsburgh became ever longer and more numerous.
Once that the tide of emigration had set in toward the West, it
grew constantly in volume. The roads over the Alleghany Mountains
were improved, and wheeled conveyances no longer attracted the
curious attention that greeted Dr. Johann David Schoepf when he
arrived in Pittsburgh in 1783, in the cariole in which he had crossed
the mountains, an achievement which until then had not been
 2
considered possible. The monotonous hoof-beats of the pack
horses became less frequent, and great covered wagons, drawn by
four horses, harnessed two abreast, came rumbling into the village.
But not all the people or all the goods remained in Pittsburgh. There
were still other and newer Eldorados, farther away to the west and
the south, and these lands of milk and honey were the Meccas of
many of the adventurers. Pittsburgh was the depository of the
merchandise sent out from Philadelphia and Baltimore, intended for
the western and southern country and for the numerous settlements
that were springing up along the Monongahela and Allegheny
3
Rivers. From Pittsburgh trading boats laden with merchandise were
floated down the Ohio River, stopping at the towns on its banks to
4
vend the articles which they carried. Coal was cheap and emigrant
5
and trading boats carried it as ballast. In Pittsburgh the immigrants
lingered, purchasing supplies, and gathering information about the
country beyond. Some proceeded overland. Others sold the vehicles
in which they had come, and continued the journey down the Ohio
River, in Kentucky flat or family boats, in keel boats, arks, and
barges. The construction and equipping of boats became an industry
of moment in Pittsburgh.
The last menace from the Indians who owned and occupied the
country north of the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers was removed on
October 21, 1784, when the treaty with the Six Nations was
concluded at Fort Stanwix, by which all the Indian lands in
Pennsylvania except a tract bordering on Lake Erie were ceded to
the State. This vast territory was now opened for settlement, and
resulted in more immigrants passing through Pittsburgh. The
northerly boundary of the village ceased to be the border line of
civilization. The isolation of the place became less pronounced. The
immigrants who remained in Pittsburgh were generally of a sturdy
class, and were young and energetic. Among them were former
Revolutionary officers and soldiers. They engaged in trade, and as
an adjunct of this business speculated in lands in the county, or
bought and sold town lots. A few took up tavern keeping. From the
brief notes left by Lewis Brantz who stopped over in Pittsburgh in
1785, while on a journey from Baltimore to the Western country, it
appears that at this time Fort Pitt was still garrisoned by a small force
of soldiers; that the inhabitants lived chiefly by traffic, and by
entertaining travellers; and that there were but few mechanics in the
6
village. The extent of the population can be conjectured, when it is
known that in 1786 there were in Pittsburgh only thirty-six log
buildings, one of stone, and one of frame; and that there were six
7
stores.
Religion was long dormant on the frontier. In 1761 and 1762,
when the first school was in operation in Pittsburgh, the
schoolmaster conducted religious services on Sundays to a small
congregation. Although under the direction of a Presbyterian, the
services consisted in reading the Prayers and the Litany from the
8
Book of Common Prayer. During the military occupation, a chaplain
was occasionally stationed at Fort Pitt around which the houses
clustered. From time to time missionaries came and tarried a few
days or weeks, and went their way again. The long intervals between
the religious services were periods of indifference. An awakening
came at last, and the religious teachings of early life reasserted
themselves, and the settlers sought means to re-establish a spiritual
life in their midst. The Germans and Swiss-Germans of the
Protestant Evangelical and Protestant Reformed faiths jointly
organized a German church in 1782; and the Presbyterians formed a
church organization two years later.
The first pastor of the German church was the Rev. Johann
Wilhelm Weber, who was sent out by the German Reformed Synod
9
at Reading. He had left his charge in Eastern Pennsylvania
because the congregation which he served had not been as
10
enthusiastic in its support of the Revolution as he deemed proper.
The services were held in a log building situated at what is now the
11
corner of Wood Street and Diamond Alley. Besides ministering to
the wants of the Pittsburgh church, there were three other
congregations on Weber’s circuit, which extended fifty miles east of
Pittsburgh. When he came West in September, 1782, the
Revolutionary War was still in progress; Hannastown had been
burned by the British and Indians in the preceding July; hostile
Indians and white outlaws continually beset his path. He was a
soldier of the Cross, but he was also ready to fight worldly battles.
He went about the country armed not only with the Bible, but with a
12
loaded rifle, and was prepared to battle with physical enemies, as
well as with the devil.
Hardly had the churches come into existence when another
organization was formed whose origin is claimed to be shrouded in
the mists of antiquity. In the American history of the order, the
membership included many of the greatest and best known men in
the country. On December 27, 1785, the Grand Lodge of
Pennsylvania, Free and Accepted Masons, granted a charter to
certain freemasons resident in Pittsburgh, which was designated as
“Lodge No. 45 of Ancient York Masons.” It was not only the first
13
masonic lodge in Pittsburgh, but the first in the Western country.
Almost from the beginning, Lodge No. 45 was the most influential
social organization in the village. Nearly all the leading citizens were
members. Toward the close of the eighteenth century the place of
meeting was in the tavern of William Morrow, at the “Sign of the
14
Green Tree,” on Water Street, two doors above Market Street.
Although not a strictly religious organization, the order carefully
observed certain Church holidays. St. John the Baptist’s day and St.
John the Evangelist’s day were never allowed to pass without a
celebration. Every year in June, on St. John the Baptist’s day, Lodge
No. 45 met at 10 o’clock in the morning and, after the services in the
lodge were over, paraded the streets. The members walked two
abreast. Dressed in their best clothes, with cocked hats, long coats,
knee-breeches, and buckled shoes, wearing the aprons of the craft,
they marched “in ancient order.” The sword bearer was in advance;
the officers wore embroidered collars, from which depended their
emblems of office; the wardens carried their truncheons; the
deacons, their staves. The Bible, surmounted by a compass and a
square, on a velvet cushion, was borne along. When the Rev. Robert
Steele came to preach in the Presbyterian Meeting House, the
march was from the lodge room to the church. Here Mr. Steele
preached a sermon to the brethren, after which they dined together
15
at Thomas Ferree’s tavern at the “Sign of the Black Bear,” or at the
16
“Sign of the Green Tree.” St. John the Evangelist’s day was
observed with no less circumstance. In the morning the officers of
the lodge were installed. Addresses of a semi-religious or
philosophic character, eulogistic of masonry, were delivered by
competent members or visitors. This ceremony was followed in the
afternoon by a dinner either at some tavern or at the home of a
member. Dinners seemed to be a concomitant part of all masonic
ceremonies.
By the time that the last quarter of the eighteenth century was
well under way, the hunters and trappers had left for more prolific
17
hunting grounds. The Indian traders with their lax morals had
disappeared forever in the direction of the setting sun, along with the
Indians with whom they bartered. If any traders remained, they
conformed to the precepts of a higher civilization. Only a scattered
few of the red men continued to dwell in the hills surrounding the
village, or along the rivers, eking out a scant livelihood by selling
18
game in the town.
A different moral atmosphere appeared: schools of a permanent
character were established; the German church conducted a school
which was taught by the pastor. Secular books were now in the
households of the more intelligent; a few of the wealthier families
had small libraries, and books were sold in the town. On August 26,
1786, Wilson and Wallace advertised “testaments, Bibles, spelling
19
books, and primers” for sale. Copies of the Philadelphia and
Baltimore newspapers were brought by travellers, and received by
private arrangement.
In July, 1786, John Scull and Joseph Hall, two young men of
more than ordinary daring, came from Philadelphia and established
a weekly newspaper called the Pittsburgh Gazette, which was the
first newspaper published in the country west of the Alleghany
Mountains. The partnership lasted only a few months, Hall dying on
 20
November 10, 1786, at the early age of twenty-two years; and in
the following month, John Boyd, also of Philadelphia, purchased
21
Hall’s interest and became the partner of Scull. For many years
money was scarcely seen in Pittsburgh in commercial transactions,
everything being consummated in trade. A few months after its
establishment, the Pittsburgh Gazette gave notice to all persons
residing in the country that it would receive country produce in
22
payment of subscriptions to the paper.
The next year there were printed, and kept for sale at the office
of the Pittsburgh Gazette, spelling books, and The A.B.C. with the
Shorter Catechism, to which are Added Some Short and Easy
Questions for Children; secular instruction was combined with
23
religious. The Pittsburgh Gazette also conducted an emporium
where other reading matter might be purchased. In the issue for
June 16, 1787, an illuminating notice appeared: “At the printing
office, Pittsburgh, may be had the laws of this State, passed
between the thirtieth of September, 1775, and the Revolution; New
Testaments; Dilworth’s Spelling Books; New England Primers, with
Catechism; Westminster Shorter Catechism; Journey from
Philadelphia to New York by Way of Burlington and South Amboy, by
Robert Slenner, Stocking Weaver; ... also a few books for the learner
of the French language.”
In November, 1787, there was announced as being in press at
the office of the Pittsburgh Gazette the Pittsburgh Almanac or
24
Western Ephemeris for 1788. The same year that the almanac
appeared, John Boyd attempted the establishment of a circulating
25
library. In his announcement on July 26th, he declared that the
library would be opened as soon as a hundred subscribers were
secured; and that it would consist of five hundred well chosen books.
Subscriptions were to be received at the office of the Pittsburgh
Gazette. Boyd committed suicide in the early part of August by
hanging himself to a tree on the hill in the town, which has ever since
borne his name, and Scull became the sole owner of the Pittsburgh
Gazette. This act of self-destruction, and the fact that Boyd’s name
as owner appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette for the last time on
August 2d, would indicate that the library was never established.
Perhaps it was the anticipated failure of the enterprise that prompted
Boyd to commit suicide.
The door to higher education was opened on February 28, 1787,
when the Pittsburgh Academy was incorporated by an Act of the
General Assembly. This was the germ which has since developed
into the University of Pittsburgh. Another step which tended to the
material and mental advancement of the place, was the inauguration
of a movement for communicating regularly with the outside world.
On September 30, 1786, a post route was established with
26
Philadelphia, and the next year the general government entered
into a contract for carrying the mails between Pittsburgh and that
27
city. Almost immediately afterward a post office was established in
Pittsburgh with Scull as postmaster, and a regular post between the
village and Philadelphia and the East was opened on July 19,
28
1788. These events constituted another milestone in the progress
of Pittsburgh.
Another instrument in the advancement of the infant community
was the Mechanical Society which came into existence in 1788. On
the twenty-second of March, the following unique advertisement
appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette: “Society was the primeval desire
of our first and great ancestor Adam; the same order for that blessing
seems to inhabit more or less the whole race. To encourage this it
seems to be the earnest wish of a few of the mechanics in
Pittsburgh, to have a general meeting on Monday the 24th inst., at
six p.m., at the house of Andrew Watson, tavern keeper, to settle on
a plan for a well regulated society for the purpose. This public
method is taken to invite the reputable tradesmen of this place to be
punctual to their assignation.”
Andrew Watson’s tavern was in the log building, at the northeast
corner of Market and Front Streets. Front Street was afterward called
First Street, and is now First Avenue. At that time all the highways
running parallel with the Monongahela River were designated as
streets, as they are now called avenues. The object of the