The "general post office" at the center of Lower Sackville (O'Connell) street is a grand neoclassical building constructed from 1814 to 1818 as the last great architectural element of Georgian Dublin. British naval artillery reduced it to a hollow stone shell in the Easter Rising of 1916, but it was rebuilt in the 1920s. In Aeolus Joyce emphasizes its importance as a hub of mail traffic between Ireland and England and as a landmark "in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis," located next to Nelson's Pillar and to Sackville Street's busy intersections with Prince's Street and Henry Street.

Architect Francis Johnston designed a building over 200 feet long and over 50 feet high, with a portico of fluted Ionic columns. Joyce calls the portico a "porch," as he does with the corresponding features of Deasy's school, St. Andrew's church, the Bank of Ireland, the Four Courts, and the National Library. The portico and its triangular pediment were made from Portland limestone, but the rest of the building's exterior was constructed with strong granite blocks. Those on the ground floor are rusticated (i.e., roughly finished and irregularly projecting), while the top two floors feature smoothly finished ashlar stones.

The website of Ireland's National Inventory of Architectural Heritage describes changes that were made to the building over the course of its first century, including an extensive and elegant redesign of the interior put into place from 1904 to 1916. The renovated post office produced by this construction was reopened to the public in March 1916, just in time to be annihilated. Sarah Buckley writes on the webpage, "One can only surmise that the builders and craftsmen packed up their tools satisfied that their work would endure for the ages little realising, however, that the interior would be lost within a matter of weeks."

At the beginning of the Rising, on April 24, Padraig Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic to a crowd gathered outside the GPO, and armed republican forces claimed it as their headquarters. For them the building held symbolic importance as a prominent expression of British rule, and also practical significance: it had thick walls, it afforded links by mail, telegraph, and telephone to other parts of the city, country, and world, and its rooftop offered commanding views. The republicans perhaps figured that British authorities would not destroy one of their own contributions to Dublin's imperial grandeur, but the British exercised no such restraint. The building's proximity to the Liffey made it an easy target for the gunboat which floated up the river as far as the Carlisle (O'Connell) bridge. Explosive shells launched from the Helga damaged the exterior of the post office  and reduced many nearby buildings to rubble. Incendiary shells gutted the beautiful interior and spread fire to still more buildings.

In addition to the "vermilion mailcars" seen outside the post office in Aeolus, Joyce notes a line of "shoeblacks" calling out for business "Under the porch." One of these men figures in Bloom's fantastical list of adulterous rivals in Ithaca. The penultimate suspect, just before Blazes Boylan, is "a bootblack at the General Post Office."

Read More