The essence of post-Troubles Northern Ireland is mostly hidden - grief and pain, scars that will take years to heal, if ever, and unquantifiable commitment to a different future. Some choose flash new office buildings and restaurants as markers of the turnaround. The makeover of one bit of 19th-century Belfast may be a surer sign of the times, writes Fionnuala O Connor
A few hundred yards from the City Hall, another civic building has always had more contact with far more citizens. The Ulster Hall is squat as its name, built in a style apparently common to Victorian town halls, but no others have held unionist meetings over three centuries, performers as varied as Caruso, Parnell, Winston Churchill, Rory Gallagher and Led Zeppelin, plus 21st-century republicans.
This is a working building dressed outside as for glumly sober Belfast Sundays of the past: shoebox shape, smack on the footpath where the City Hall by contrast looks out portentously past lawns and statues. Beneath the notice of trendy new Belfast, tea-dancers are the latest subset to make the Ulster Hall their own. Dour outlook and dowdy interiors have been humanised by delightfully promiscuous use, and there is above all what symphony lovers call "that rich woody sound".
The original 1859 proposal by its young Newry architect showed high arched ceiling, crinolines and frock coats mingling on a spacious floor. It might have rivalled the Mansion House, but budgets ruled. The original owners sold to the city council, chief selling-points removable seating, wide corridors and a wooden ceiling that helped produce acoustics good enough for music-lovers of all kinds.
The hall's management is proud that they stayed open through the 1970s and 1980s. Their website quotes band musician Gerry McAvoy on a night in 1971 when "10 bombs went off around the city as we were playing", and gives pride of place to a blurry still of the much-missed Rory Gallagher, singing and playing with trademark intensity, eyes tight closed, the caption "Rory at midnight, 1.6.1984". Even part-way through a revamp today, fresh colours and the first stage of proper disabled access have given the old place more appeal. A proper bar for the first time will make converts: some have always improvised.
It is quite a stretch from the solemn unionist ceremonies of the 1912 Covenant to today's tea-dances, where women of a certain age cheerfully outnumber men. "Little old ladies with heavy bags, clanking away, and they're not a bit interested in tea," says a nostalgic former ticket-seller.
Boxing matches, wrestling, Prof Crocker and his Performing Equine School, the Dalai Lama, the Clancy Brothers: all human life has poured through the hall's (hitherto) dark doorway. The dying Parnell, crushed by the O'Shea scandal, addressed a rally in Ulster Hall when the Catholic bishops refused him St Mary's Hall - stooped and frail, said the editor of the Northern Whig, speaking hoarsely to a diminished band of supporters.
Yet the most vivid and lasting association until recent years was undoubtedly with unionism in various forms.
At the eve-of-Covenant rally in 1912, Edward Carson was presented with the yellow silk banner said to have been carried at the Boyne. "May this flag ever float over a people that can boast of civil and religious liberty!" Carson declaimed to great applause. "Suspiciously fresh looking flag," sniffed the Irish News. James Craig, first prime minister of Northern Ireland, told a rally in the Ulster Hall nine days after the state came into existence that he "would never bow the knee to treachery or allow a whisper of 'Republic' to enter my thoughts".
In the 1960s a young orator called Ian Paisley held packed Ulster Hall rallies that evoked the solemnity of the Covenant and the passions that surrounded partition. Students both Catholic and Protestant went along for amusement, but found, as one still remembers, that laughing out loud meant "you were frog-marched out in seconds - you wouldn't have dreamed of heckling".
The Paisley voice was weaker a few years ago when he appeared in one of the hall's more bizarre platform parties, flanked by the then MP Bob McCartney, with the venerable Conor Cruise O'Brien, then a McCartney follower, sitting smiling behind them as a crowd sang cheerfully: We are, we are, we are the Billy Boys.
There was another happy crowd when shortly before the Good Friday agreement referendum, Jim "Doris Day" Gray escorted the convicted UDA killer Michael Stone to the platform.
And it was a moment akin to the first triumphal sashay of Sinn Féin through the corridors of Stormont when Martin McGuinness, then minister for education, grinned into the microphone and asked: "Do you remember this hall? Packed with unionists? We know who we are - we're Irish and proud of it." Tonight it's the Ulster Orchestra, and Beethoven.