In Dublin 12, the John F. Kennedy Industrial Estate street signs remind southsiders of the June 1963 visit of JFK to this island. Across the River Liffey, and a different series of Americans are remembered in Coolock, where street names like Aldrin Walk, Armstrong Walk, Apollo Way and even Tranquility Grove honour (most of) the heroes of the 1969 Moon landing. This was total news to me until today, when I found it mentioned in both the print edition of the Dublin Inquirer and a lovely piece on thejournal.ie, complete with photos of street signs.

Digging into the archives, it’s easy to see how the street names came to be. Dublin, like the rest of the world, was fascinated by the journey of man into space. On the day after the great event, the Irish Press went out onto the streets to get the views of the ‘Plain People of Ireland’. All Patricia of Donnybrook could say was “We didn’t watch it on television because we don’t have a television”, and Susannah “couldn’t see any point in the whole exercise.” Thank God for Ballymun taxi man Gerard, who believed “a person would have to be very dense not to be interested in this fantastic achievement.”

When a tiny fragment of moon rock was put on display in the city in February 1970, more than 4,000 people showed up in just a few hours at the United States embassy building in Ballsbridge for a gawk. The tiny fragment was described by one journalist as being “about an-inch-and-a-half in diameter, or roughly the size of a walnut”. Still, it all had the feel of a great occasion about it, always enough for Dubliners.

When Captain Eugene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17, arrived in Ireland in 1973, he brought with him a fragment of moon rock for President Childers, which he presented in Aras an Uachtarain. As pieces made appearances north and south in universities and at conferences, they continued to draw impressive crowds throughout the 1970s.

The street names in the Woodville Estate of Coolock were controversial from the beginning, leading the Evening Herald in the summer of 1977 to report that some residents at Woodville Estate were “slightly moon-sick”, calling for more “down-to-earth” names like Woodville Way and Woodville Avenue. Armstrong Walk, Aldrin Walk, and Collins Rendezvous honoured the men of the moon landing, while there was even a Tranquility Grove, in honour of the Statio Tranquillitatis where Apollo 11 landed.

Voting in a plebiscite on changing the names, residents rejected Collins Rendezvous for Woodville Court, but held onto the others. Thus, one member of the team was destined to be forgotten, in Coolock at least.

We eagerly await a Yuri Gagarin Avenue.