Search Results for 'Forster Park Hotel'

Larry was the eldest child of Jack and Ethel Cheevers who lived on Dalysfort Road in Salthill. They were the owners of the Forster Park Hotel and the iconic Park Café which was attached to it. Larry was educated in the Jes and in Castleknock College and went on to study dentistry in UCG — you could only do first year there at the time — and later in UCD where he finished the course and qualified.

This aerial photograph was taken c1945. On the left you can see the Eglinton Hotel which was originally built in the 1860s. Up to that time, Salthill was a small village that included Lenaboy Avenue and the area between what we know as Seapoint and the Bal. The construction of the Eglinton was on a scale not seen before in Salthill, and it extended the village to the west. It came at a time when locals were beginning to promote the village as a resort, a destination for tourists.

Ninety years ago, on August 2, 1931, the world famous long-distance swimmer, Miss Mercedes Gleitz, attempted to swim from the Aran Islands to Salthill. She did in fact manage to swim from Inis Meán to Spiddal in 18 hours 43 minutes, a distance of 18 miles as the crow flies, but it was estimated that with currents, etc, she covered a distance of nearly 30 miles. Two days later she gave a swimming demonstration in Salthill and presented a cup to the Chamber of Commerce to be presented to the school in the county which presented the greatest number of swimmers in relation to its student numbers. She stimulated a lot of interest in the sport, which had received a terrific boost just a few months before with the formation of two clubs, Blackrock Swimming Club and Galway Swimming Club. This guaranteed competition between the clubs and quickly helped raise standards.

There was a long discussion at an Urban District Council meeting in July 1935 about whether to allow purchasers of plots in front of the house at Forster Park, recently occupied by Dr Michael O’Malley, to proceed with the building immediately, or to force them to defer construction until the road along the Promenade had been widened. The plots had been advertised as building sites. One of the objectors said, “We are a long time looking for a town planning scheme in Galway, and now that we have it, I strongly object to this building. We have one of the finest hotels in the country (The Eglinton) and now you want to destroy it.”