General Post Office
General
Post Office
In Brief
The "general post office" at the center of Lower Sackville
(O'Connell) street is a grand neoclassical building
constructed from 1814 to 1818 as the last great architectural
element of Georgian Dublin. British naval artillery reduced it
to a hollow stone shell in the Easter Rising of 1916, but it
was rebuilt in the 1920s. In Aeolus Joyce emphasizes
its importance as a hub of mail traffic between Ireland and
England and as a landmark "in the heart of the Hibernian
metropolis," located next to Nelson's Pillar and to
Sackville Street's busy intersections with Prince's Street and
Henry Street.
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Architect Francis Johnston designed a building over 200 feet
long and over 50 feet high, with a portico of fluted Ionic
columns. Joyce calls the portico a "porch," as he does
with the corresponding features of Deasy's school, St.
Andrew's church, the Bank of Ireland, the Four
Courts, and the National Library. The portico
and its triangular pediment were made from Portland limestone,
but the rest of the building's exterior was constructed with
strong granite blocks. Those on the ground floor are
rusticated (i.e., roughly finished and irregularly
projecting), while the top two floors feature smoothly
finished ashlar stones.
The website of Ireland's National Inventory of Architectural
Heritage describes changes that were made to the building over
the course of its first century, including an extensive and
elegant redesign of the interior put into place from 1904 to
1916. The renovated post office produced by this construction
was reopened to the public in March 1916, just in time to be
annihilated. Sarah Buckley writes on the webpage, "One can
only surmise that the builders and craftsmen packed up their
tools satisfied that their work would endure for the ages
little realising, however, that the interior would be lost
within a matter of weeks."
At the beginning of the Rising, on April 24, Padraig Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic to a crowd gathered outside the GPO, and armed republican forces claimed it as their headquarters. For them the building held symbolic importance as a prominent expression of British rule, and also practical significance: it had thick walls, it afforded links by mail, telegraph, and telephone to other parts of the city, country, and world, and its rooftop offered commanding views. The republicans perhaps figured that British authorities would not destroy one of their own contributions to Dublin's imperial grandeur, but the British exercised no such restraint. The building's proximity to the Liffey made it an easy target for the gunboat which floated up the river as far as the Carlisle (O'Connell) bridge. Explosive shells launched from the Helga damaged the exterior of the post office and reduced many nearby buildings to rubble. Incendiary shells gutted the beautiful interior and spread fire to still more buildings.
In addition to the "vermilion mailcars" seen outside the post
office in Aeolus, Joyce notes a line of "shoeblacks"
calling out for business "Under the porch." One of these men
figures in Bloom's fantastical list of adulterous rivals in Ithaca.
The penultimate suspect, just before Blazes Boylan, is "a
bootblack at the General Post Office."
