Richard Wall documented this sense of "greenhouse" in An
Anglo-Irish Dialect Glossary for Joyce's Works (1987), A
Dictionary and Glossary for the Irish Literary Revival
(1995), and An Irish Literary Dictionary and Glossary
(2001). In his Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2004),
Terence Dolan quotes from the last of these, which says that
the name referred to "the hexagonal, green, cast-iron public
urinals, which were once part of Dublin's street furniture."
Wall is almost certainly wrong about the hexagonal
shape—photographs show that the structures were octagonal—but
he is almost certainly correct about the color. Present-day
confirmation of that can be found on Horfield Common in
Bristol, England. There, just off Gloucester Road at the end
of a concrete path, stands an ornately decorated,
Victorian-era iron urinal, this one round, that is painted a
bright shade of green. While new paint was no doubt applied
recently, it presumably may have been chosen to match what
came before. A photograph of one of the Dublin urinals on
Ormond Quay, taken in the days of color film, shows that it
too was painted green.
In Penelope, Molly's thoughts about penises lead her
to male exhibitionism and thence to greenhouses: "that
disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market or that
other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the
statue of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he
was pissing standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes
up to one side the Queens own they were a nice lot its well
the Surreys relieved them theyre always trying to show it
to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens
greenhouse near the Harcourt street station just to try
some fellow or other trying to catch my eye as if it was 1 of
the 7 wonders of the world O and the stink of those rotten
places the night coming home with Poldy after the Comerfords
party oranges and lemonade to make you feel nice and watery
I went into 1 of them it was so biting cold I couldnt keep
it when was that 93 the canal was frozen yes it was a
few months after a pity a couple of the Camerons werent there
to see me squatting in the mens place meadero."
("Meadero" is a Spanish word for urinal. The "Camerons," or
"The Queens own," were the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, an
infantry regiment.)
Molly seems to have experienced some curiosity about what the
greenhouse experience was like. (Does "just to try," at the end
of the first boldfaced passage above, refer to her desire to
peek inside, or is it somehow syntactically connected to men
"trying to catch my eye"?) But her strongest response is to "the
stink of those rotten places," which she associates with men's
"disgusting" desire to display their sexual organs to total
strangers. It would appear that, in the strongly homosocial
environment of 1904 Dublin, men often did not bother to
completely button up before leaving the confines of the
convenience.
Perhaps some connection is implied to the strange moment in
Wandering
Rocks when Stephen's father confronts the viceregal
cavalcade passing by him on Ormond Quay: "
On Ormond quay Mr
Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse for the
subsheriff's office, stood still in midstreet and brought his
hat low. His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus'
greeting." The phrase "brought his hat low" could describe
Simon extravagantly doffing his hat, or perhaps making a deep
bow. But would this passionate nationalist ever make such a
gesture of obeisance?
It could perhaps be claimed that Simon salutes the viceroy in a
spirit of sarcastic mockery (your LORDship) or of resigned
cynicism (when in Rome...), but in
James Joyce's Ireland,
David Pierce suggests a different way of understanding the
gesture. He notes that "The plebeian Joyce took delight in
associating the British Establishment with the urinal," notably
in the bizarre detail of
Edward
VII's bucket in
Circe. Simon is coming "from the
greenhouse," a structure which did in fact stand on the river's
edge of Ormond Quay as one of the photographs here shows.
Pierce's comical take is that Simon "has forgotten to button his
trousers" and bends over to remedy the problem, but the Lord
Lieutenant "assumes that one of his subjects is showing respect
and returns the greeting. Across the colonial divide, even basic
signs get misread" (105).
The practice of giving urban men places to relieve their
bladders, at a time when people moved about by foot and indoor
toilets were rare, apparently started in Paris. According to a
page on the Old Dublin Town website (www.olddublintown.com),
they were informally called
pissoirs but the "official
name was
vespasiennes, named after the first century
Roman emperor Vespasianus, who put a tax on urine collected from
public toilets and used for tanning leather." Introduced in 1841
by Claude-Philibert Barthelot, comte de Rambuteau,
the Prefet of the former Départment of the Seine, the
first pissoirs had a simple cylindrical shape and were often
called
colonnes Rambuteau. "In 1877 they were
replaced by multi-compartmented structures, referred to as
vespasiennes.
At the peak of their spread in the 1930s there were 1,230
pissoirs in Paris," but then came a steady decline until in 2006
only one remained.
From Paris the practice spread to Berlin, which held
architectural competitions in 1847, 1865 and 1877 to choose
designs different from the Parisian pissoirs. The Old Dublin
Town site notes that "One of the most successful types was an
octagonal structure with seven stalls, first built in 1879.
Their number increased to 142 by 1920." Something like this
design must have been adopted in Oslo as well, judging by a
Norwegian witticism that Ole Martin Halck has mentioned to me in
a personal communication. One of the circus companies that
regularly visited Oslo after the city constructed a permanent
building in 1890 was called Cirkus Schumann, after its
German/Danish founding family. There was a urinal in Oslo's
central square, Stortorget, that was vaguely round and had a
capacity of seven men ("sju mann"), so this structure too came
to be called the Cirkus Sjumann.
Precise dates are harder to come by for cities in the UK, and
in Dublin the available historical record seems to be almost
entirely photographic. The Old Dublin Town page says that
French-style urinals arrived "prior to the 1932 Eucharistic
Congress, as part of a 'clean up Dublin' campaign," and in The
Encyclopaedia of Dublin Bennett notes that "In 1932,
several ornamental cast-iron pissoirs were imported from
France and erected on the Quays" for that occasion (95). But
Joyce's novel makes clear that they were present much earlier.
Vincent Altman O'Connor suggests that pissoirs may also have
been erected for the same purpose (cleaning up a dirty old
town) before one of the visits of King Edward VII, who came to
Dublin in 1868, 1885, and 1903.
Numerous photos document the presence of greenhouses in
Dublin. At least five images of the pissoir on Ormond Quay
survive, including the color photograph displayed here. As the
poster for The Eagles on its river side suggests, this fixture
lasted into the 1970s, when the Dublin Corporation sold it
to a student for £10. It ended up converted into a gazebo in
someone's back yard in Sandymount.
