Bachelor's Quay

Bachelor's Quay

Photograph showing men at work repairing paving stones on Bachelor's Quay, Cork

Cork Camera Club collection, Cork City Libraries

Bachelor's Quay
Cork Camera Club collection, Cork City Libraries

Bachelor's Quay

Photograph showing men at work repairing paving stones on Bachelor's Quay, Cork

Cork Camera Club collection, Cork City Libraries

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Bachelor's Quay is built on a reclaimed marsh which was called Pike's Marsh. The Bachelor's Quay Pikes were well-known merchants in Cork in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were prominent members of the Quaker community. Bachelor's Quay was once a fashionable promenade and the site of the houses of wealthy businessmen. When the wealthier citizens of Cork left the city centre for the more fashionable suburbs, their former houses on Bachelor's Quay became tenements. A part of the quay has been redeveloped in recent years with apartment blocks replacing some of the demolished tenements. Bachelor's Quay was the scene of a horrific accident on 19 November 1959 when a gale blew a wall down, killing three young women on their way home from work.