The Ormond Quay Hotel, the place of the Sirens episode in Ulysses, is special to me. When I took the Ulysses course from Dr. Ware at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in the autumn of 2000 I went to Dublin to visit the sites of the episodes. One of these sites was the Ormond Quay Hotel. I saw the concert room, which was empty at the time. It was semi-dark with a reddish cast that evoked a mysterious mien. One could imagine that the ghosts of the characters in the episode met daily to reenact the experience described in Ulysses complete with its musicality. I wanted to see the hotel when I was in Dublin recently in October 2011 so I took the Dublin city bus to the Phoenix Park Gate on Infirmary Road. I walked through the park and out the lower gate. This is the same gate through which, "The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern quays," in the Wandering Rocks episode. This gate is shown in the picture in my blog entry of August 7, 2011. I walked from the park along the north side of the River Liffey passing the various quays where the viceregal cavalcade had continued its journey on June 16, 1904. As the reader will recall the sirens of the Ormond hotel, Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, looked out over the crossblind and viewed the cavalcade. When I reached the Ormond Quay I imagined that I might see "Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar," but instead I saw graffiti on the walls and a padlocked door with a for sale sign overhead. What a horrible sight. Evidently, before Ireland had experienced hard economic times with the rest of the world there had been plans to build apartments on this site. Certainly, there are many of the Ulysses sites still intact for instance the Martello tower and the Glasnevin cemetery. These will remain. Each site has a semblance that grows from what goes into the corresponding episode. For music and romance the concert room of the Ormond Quay Hotel is without equal.

The greatest eruption known at the Ormond Quay Hotel until now has been Bloom's burgundy induced flatulence. Let us hope the hotel never suffers the massive eruption of the wrecking ball.