Features
Harold's Cross has a number of shops and businesses and an active credit union. Harold's Cross Park, a small well maintained city park, occupies the site of the original village green.
Historically a number of large houses were constructed, mostly with the appendage of ‘Mount’, reflecting the parish’s elevation, and their names are remembered today but no longer as houses: Mount Argus, (church and monastery) Mount Jerome (cemetery), Greenmount House (the Hospice), Mount Harold (the Catholic Church) and Mount Drummond and Mount Tallant (Housing).
At one side of Harold's Cross is Mount Jerome Cemetery, as mentioned in Joyce's Ulysses, originally the residence of a family named Shaw. It is considered Dublin's most gothic cemetery and there lie such lumunaries as Thomas Davis, George Russell (AE), and Oscar Wilde's father, William Wilde, and mother, in addition to members of the Guinness family and deceased members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The remains of French Huguenots once buried in St. Peter's Churchyard, Peter's Row (now the location of the Dublin YMCA), which was demolished in the 1980s, are interred here. Other famous graves include those of mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and playwright John Millington Synge. The cemetery was operated from 1837 to 1984 by a private company and now belongs to the Massey family.
The suburb is also home to Dublin's first hospice, Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross. This palliative care facility was founded in 1879 in a house called Our Lady's Mount (formerly Greenmount), which was previously the Mother House of the Religious Sisters of Charity. Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Sisters of Charity order, lived in Our Lady's Mount from 1845 onwards. She bought a large Georgian house at Greenmount from a famous abolitionist family called Webb who were members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), after she offered more than a rival bid from Mount Jerome cemetery. A new Hospice building was commenced in 1886, and many more buildings followed.
In 1804 the sisters of the order of St. Clare (San Damiano) moved to the village to run a female orphanage, founded the previous year, now the Saint Clare's Convent and Primary School. St. Clare's was founded in 1803 and as such is the oldest Catholic school in the Archdiocese of Dublin. Beside the convent is the national headquarters for the Secular Franciscan Order.
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Famous quotes containing the word features:
“Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child, in whom we trace
The features of the mother’s face,
Her aspect and her attitude.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)