Grafton Street

This guide to Grafton Street in Dublin follows a teenager named Glen Hansard, who quit school at thirteen and taught himself to busk on this exact pavement, chasing down a man who once grabbed his coins. It traces how, decades later, a director cast Hansard to play a Dublin busker in a small film shot mostly right here, opposite a nineteen-year-old Czech musician named Marketa Irglova playing a flower seller who stops to listen. Musicians on the street today still pay a small yearly fee, keep their sets to about an hour, and space themselves roughly one hundred meters apart.