Irish Town
Irish Town is one of Main Street's sub-districts running parallel to it, from Cooperage Lane in the north to John Mackintosh Square in the south. It was named in the early 19th century when Gibraltar was split into differing quarters although its originalname was Calle de Santa Ana after a hermitage on the street. The name irish Town had been attributed to the merchants who lived there but research shows this to be untrue. A credible reason was that an Irish regiment was barracked here. A more colourful explanation is that it named after the ladies who supported that regiment as the street had a reputation in the 18th century.
Read more about this topic: Streets In Gibraltar
Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or town:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)