pilgrimage: No. 10 Cedarwood Road & Mount Temple

pilgrimage is a series of essays about journeys to places where magic happened. It's about why we go there, why we want to remember, and why it's important that we do. I hope these journeys inspire you to find and make your own places. You can read the rest of the essays in the series here.

In 1984 I had bought a cheap ticket to London on a charter airline, stayed with friends who were doing their junior year abroad, and backpacked around the country. Part of this was a quick jaunt over to Ireland via the ferry from Liverpool, where I had journeyed to for obvious reasons (at least I hope if you’re a reader of this newsletter that they are obvious). In Dublin, I stayed at a woman’s residence full of girls who had come in from the countryside for school or work. I did all of the required tourist things – I saw the Book of Kells, I wandered the grounds of Trinity College, I went to historical sites like the General Post Office and Kilmainham Jail and even did a tour of the Guinness factory (even though I did not and still do not enjoy Guinness). 

But I also took my paper map into the tourist office and asked them to help me find a place called Windmill Lane. I was told there was nothing there and it wasn’t a good part of town but I thanked them and walked over there anyway, during which I was stopped at least half a dozen times by well-meaning locals who were sure I was lost. I had gotten the address – 3 Windmill Lane – off of the back of a U2 record. It’s completely gone now but at the time it was just a building.

I didn’t knock on the door because I wasn’t interested in doing that – I knew it was a place of business and not like the house the Beatles all lived in in Help! and I was just interested and curious. 

30 years later, it’s a Thursday morning in Dublin, overcast and windy. Later that night I'll see the first of two Patti Smith shows. But right now, I catch the number 9 bus at a stop just after O’Connell Street, one of the city’s main north-south arterial roads. I was heading just north of the center city to a random northern neighborhood that happens to be the location of Bono’s childhood home, located at No. 10 Cedarwood Road. 

Cedarwood Road is north of center city, not far from the airport. When you’re taking the bus from the airport into town you’ll absolutely recognize the housing stock if you saw any of the 2018 U2 shows for Innocence and Experience, when an arena-sized animated drawing of 10 Cedarwood Road was projected onto the video screen. That particular style of semi-detached house was popular and I saw it in a few places on my recent travels in Ireland. I rode the double-decker bus northward, watching my progress on Google Maps so I knew when to get off the bus. It was around 11 o’clock so outside of rush hour and so the bus was an average assortment of humans needing to get from point A to point B. There was even That Guy who needed to watch a video on his phone without headphones (although there were a lot less of those in Ireland). 

There’s a couple of other buses that go nearby or that you can get with a connection but from doing the trip planning, Number 9 was the most direct one. Even if the bus routes have changed in the intervening years, there was still definitely a main bus route that the young Paul Hewson used to have to take to get into center city to go record shopping and meet his friends and do just about anything that wasn’t going to the off-license or getting a takeaway meal. The cool stuff is not on the outer edges of the city. Your parents have moved there to get away from the heat and the noise while all you want to do at some point in your teens is run towards it. 

The buses announce the next stop via the PA system and also by electronic display, and Google Maps will also gently vibrate the phone to let you know it’s time to get off soon. I got off the bus at a corner and turned right, walking through a residential area, similar semi-detached houses to the one I already recognized, but mostly the same, quiet and tidy. It was a Wednesday around lunchtime and so most people were going to be at work. This was deliberate, I honestly wanted to be as low-key as I possibly could, both out of consideration for the locals and also because on some level it’s kind of cringe, as the kids would say. I am absolutely not above cringe but I was doing this in tribute and not to call attention to myself. I wanted to show up, check it out, and quietly get the hell out of there. Someone lives there now, there’s no plaque (although it is labeled on Google Maps) and I understand that no one really wants to live near anything that’s going to generate a parade of strangers onto their street on a regular basis. On the other hand, I also firmly believe that recognizing the places in our environments where important things have happened is vital. It is aspirational, it is a reminder that there is more to life than going to work or school and coming home and mowing the lawn. If we see how close we are to places where something happened we might begin to believe we could be one of those people. 

Sleepwalking down the road / and not waking from these dreams / 'Cause it's never dead it's still my head / It was a warzone in my teens

That’s the line I was thinking of as I walked down Sycamore Road and turned left onto Cedarwood. It was gray and damp and would soon start raining for real. No one was out in their yards or walking down the street – again, the only thing you’re going to walk to is the pub or the corner store. A car from a driving school with the giant red L indicating the driver was learning drove up the street and turned left at #10 onto Cedarwood Avenue. They’d pass me more than a few times while I was standing on the corner across the street, staring at the house and trying to put it into perspective. It’s not in the suburbs – the address is Dublin – but it’s not in the city either. It’s a half an hour bus ride away but that might as well be on the other side of the planet when you’re a young kid who can’t drive and who has no money – even if all you’re doing in the city is walking around and looking at things, you still need carfare to get there and back. 

Cedarwood Road is unremarkable and uniform, low garden walls and gates and arched entrances, a garage with a short driveway. It’s a step up from the crowded terraced housing in the city, even the grand Georgian buildings are chopped up into apartments. Living here would have been considered a step up for a family, it would be considered respectable, a good, safe place to raise a family. There’s even a park, an open green square dotted with large trees, half a block away. It is also absolutely the worst kind of place for a smart and precocious teenager to live. It would have felt absolutely stifling, I am sure, to a young Paul Hewson, sitting in his room and listening to music and reading books that are showing him that there is something greater out there than the very beige and confined environs of Cedarwood Road. Anyone who has been a teenager can easily imagine all of that. 

Which is, I guess, the thing I had come here to try to see. This is where it started. This is what he needed to escape from. This is what, most likely, his parents had hoped for him, a good house on a nice block in a solid, respectable neighborhood. It is fine if that is what you want, but that is not what Paul Hewson had in mind. Teenage rebellion isn’t unique, of course, it’s one of the most universal experiences. If things had been comfortable or even simply okay in that house, history would have been different. But looking at the context of that house in that neighborhood in that area is absolutely illuminating in a way that you can only glimpse by being there. If you’re stuck there you’re going to try to engineer a way to survive until you can get out. It makes absolute sense that you might react to that by teaming up with the other weird kids on the block, and you’re going to create a secret society where everyone has a secret name that isn’t the one given to them by their parents, like Bonovox of O’Connell Street. You will try to become someone else, or at least become someone who feels comfortable to you. You react to the flat blandness of Cedarwood Road by either conforming to it by osmosis or by going completely in the other direction.

What’s missing in the current landscape is the public housing towers that were built around the area in the late 60’s/early 70’s to try to mitigate the tenement housing that people in central Dublin were still living in. Just before getting on the #9 bus, I had visited an old Georgian house (14 Henrietta Street) that had been converted into 17 one-room apartments and entire families lived in each one. The last person didn’t leave that building until 1979; people didn’t want to leave their communities and the people they knew and the neighborhoods that were familiar to them, and putting them all into highrise government projects on the outskirts of town fixed one problem but caused countloads of others. The story of “Running to Stand Still” comes from those places, Ballymun Flats. “I see seven towers, but I only see one way out.” Those were the buildings. It was bad for everyone. They were demolished in the early ‘00s. This is recent history, still. 

It is raining harder now and I am under a tree trying to mitigate most of it but it’s pretty miserable. I think I get it, I think I’ve gotten as much as I’m going to get standing on a random residential street corner on the northside of Dublin. I reverse directions in Google Maps and walk back to the #9 bus stop, a proper stop with a shelter so I’m out of the worst of it. On the way back into town, I’m sitting up top again, the way a bunch of teenagers absolutely would have done and absolutely still do, listening to Songs of Innocence + Experience – yes, the album you all got on your phone – I’m in that headspace and want to make sure I’m gleaning anything I can from the general vibe.(The later U2 records don’t sound like the city the way the early ones do;  I listened to the 1980 live show from the Marquee earlier and I strongly recommend that experience.)

Metal crash, I can't tell what it is / But I take a look / And now I'm sorry I did / 5:30 on a Friday night / Thirty three good people cut down 

That’s how I was listening to “Raised by Wolves” on the way back, and remembered an interview Bono gave where he explained that on Fridays he would visit a certain record store in Dublin and if he had been following that routine on that particular day in 1974 he would have been in the middle of one of the explosions because it was in the same area, but he rode his bike to school that day instead of taking the bus. It’s a song about the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the deadliest attack of the Troubles, 33 people died. We know that from the song, we know more from the presentation of the song during the tour. 

But now I want to know where that happened, now that I am in the middle of everything. The bombs went off at 5:30pm in three different locations in the middle of Dublin, one of which I learn was literally down the street from my hotel and a second which I walked multiple times while I was there because it is the main pedestrian route from a major inter-city train station. One of those two locations -- literally in the middle of the city -- is where an 11-year-old Andy Rowen witnessed the aftermath while out with his father making deliveries. The Rowens lived across the street from the Hewsons at 5 Cedarwood Road; Peter Rowen is the child on the covers of Boy and War, and the Rowen house was a refuge from the above-mentioned warzone for young Paul Hewson.  

“Raised by Wolves” was a centerpiece of the 2018 tour, bringing this particular aspect of Irish history, and Bono’s childhood, in front of tens of thousands of people every night. They played it in Belfast, despite being requested not to; they played it in Paris in December 2015, the rescheduled shows after the terrorist attacks in November of that year. It’s not a random song about some abstract event; Andy Rowen’s life was devastated, the impacts of witnessing the aftermath of the bombing accompanied him for the rest of his life. He’s the main character in “Bad” and “Running to Stand Still,” songs about heroin addiction.  If you are a U2 fan you know all of this already, but if you’re someone who’s still mad that U2 put a record album on your phone without permission, these are things that may be worth knowing. 

I hadn’t planned on going to look for any of this; I probably would have felt voyeuristic if the thought had crossed my mind when I was making plans. It is the universe pointing me in a direction because I was already in search of insight. I get off the bus on O’Connell Street and walk half a block down Parnell; the marker is right there, thousands of people walk over it every single day. 

I went to Mount Temple Comprehensive School on a rainy Saturday morning. It felt less creepy to skulk around school grounds when there were no students around and between Taylor Swift (in Dublin for three shows at Aviva) and Dublin Pride, center city was crowded enough so I decided to poke around the edges. I did not expect to get onto the grounds but the gate was open and I walked right in. It’s an old funky building, originally built in the late 1800’s as a residential house, but eventually became a school and it is where the members of U2 met, thanks to Larry Mullen Jr. putting a card on a bulletin board that either read “Drummer seeks musicians to form band” and/or “Wasted money on drum kit, who did the same with a guitar?” The band that would eventually become U2 (but got their start as Feedback) both rehearsed and played their first gigs at Mount Temple Comprehensive. 

Mount Temple was specifically established as an educational institution that was open to members of all religions as well as those who did not adhere to a religious teaching. That, in Dublin in the 1970s, was not a small thing, and is a fertile environment for the unconventional and the weird to show up and be able to find themselves. U2 and their associated cohort are proof that this approach worked; they’re the most famous of the school’s alumni but you don’t have to become an international rock star to have been positively impacted by an educational institution.

It all started here, a bunch of teenage kids banging away on instruments and playing loud sets of cover songs by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the Bay City Rollers (it was the late 70’s, come on) in the school gym, alongside the tennis courts and bicycle racks and portable overflow buildings that are familiar to anyone who’s been a public school student anywhere in the world. And yet in this unremarkable place, some kind of combination of luck and magic met. There isn't a plaque, but there should be. Teenage kids absolutely need to know there's a way forward, that someone else who dragged themselves to this building every day dreamed big and watched it happen, and they started right here.

[Two notes: the first one I didn't even know where it was / where to look for it / that there was something to look for. I was just walking and I saw it and I wasn't even sure I was right, but I took the picture quickly because it was the middle of the day and there were hundreds of people walking around, and with film, you know, you don't know if it came out until later. This time I literally walked by it at least 6 times before I saw it on my last day, on my way to the theater.]

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