December 10 1924
In Dail Eireann yesterday Mr [Kevin] O’Higgins, Free State Minister for Justice, introduced a bill to amalgamate the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the Civic Guards. He said that the rights of the members of the two forces would not be affected by the Bill, and members of the DMP would not be liable for service outside the Dublin area without their consent. The Bill was not introduced as an economic measure. The object was an improvement of police efficiency by unified control. The Bill provided for a gradual reduction of the police rate in the Dublin area from its present rate of 8d in the £ until it was finally extinguished. The reductions would go on each year until 1932, when it would be 1d in the £, and thereafter would cease altogether.
The DMP, established in 1836, was merged with an Garda Síochána in 1925.
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Fifth Avenue – then and Now
The other week Fifth Avenue, the famous New York thoroughfare, celebrated its centenary. It was a week full of civic activity, show, and decoration.
One hundred years ago Fifth Avenue was a rural lane, a place of humble beginnings and no great promise. A street only a few blocks long, in the midst of the bucolic surroundings and at its northern boundary a trout stream, with hills and woods beyond.
A street so unlike the modern Fifth Avenue of motors, signal towers, massive buildings, resplendent shop windows, and gay crowds that one can only wonder why the most daring flights of human imagination are so often feeble in comparison with realities.
The whole story is recorded in a beautiful volume now issued by the Fifth Avenue Association, an organisation of businessmen who has assumed the guardianship, and will prevent the encroachment of undesirable features in the famous thoroughfare.
Some idea of the change is to be got from present and past values. The Columbia leaseholds in the avenue, some twenty acres, were bought by Dr [David] Hosack of Columbia College, just over a hundred years ago for an average price of 180 dollars a lot. This was for years a botanical garden. Columbia University still owns this property, which is assessed today at 20,000,000 dollars.
New Yorkers celebrated 100 years of Fifth Avenue as a shopping district, one of the world’s most famous thoroughfares, in 1924.
