William Street is a broad Georgian street of stucco and brick frontages, with tall sash-windowed upper floors and a long run of shopfronts stretching in a steady line.
This street tells a quieter kind of city story: not grand monuments, but people opening a door each morning and trying again. It carries the name of William Pery, first Baron Glentworth, brother of Edmund Sexton Pery, the man who pushed this whole Newtown Pery district into being. And you can still feel that Georgian order in the rhythm of the buildings around you, even after so many interruptions.
By the eighteen fifties, William Street had already become a place where ambition tested itself in public. James W. Peattie, once a principal cutter at Todd’s, stepped out on his own and opened a tailoring and clothing shop at number fifty-six in January of eighteen fifty-six. Not long after, Mrs Dickson announced her own business at number forty-two. Those small acts matter. A street becomes itself when people risk their savings and reputation on an address.
If you glance at the image in the app, you can see that long commercial face of the street still holding together, even after everything it has endured. And endure it did. Fire returned here again and again. One major blaze came in May of eighteen sixty. Then, in eighteen seventy-seven, Boyd’s premises caught fire and the flames spread into the adjoining Hibernian City Hall. Reports said the heat blistered paint on buildings across the street. Workers scrambled to save the rear stores and dragged away several hundred gallons of paraffin before it could ignite. Henry Street had its own collisions of trade and disaster; here, too, commerce lived with that constant risk.
Yet the remarkable thing is not simply that William Street burned. It is that it carried on. Boyd’s suffered another fire in eighteen ninety, and a representative even wrote to the Limerick Chronicle to deny rumours about dangerous oils on the premises, describing the panic when the hose water suddenly failed. Still the business rebuilt. Carew’s, at number fifty-five, says it has traded here since eighteen eighty-five. That sort of continuity is easy to miss, but it is the backbone of a city.
Even particular buildings wear that pattern. At numbers seven to nine, the red-brick and terracotta shop replaced warehouses that burned in November of eighteen eighty-six, very likely to a design by Robert Fogerty in eighteen eighty-seven. And then Todd’s, on the corner with O’Connell Street, went up in the great fire of the twenty-fifth of August, nineteen fifty-nine, after an electrical fault. Smoke first showed on the William Street side.
So William Street leaves you with a practical lesson: a city survives not only through planning, but through stubborn return. When you are ready, continue to Thomas Street, Limerick, about a two-minute walk away, where old buildings have found yet another use in the city’s changing cultural life.
