Ballsbridge () (from historic Ball's Bridge) is an affluent neighbourhood of the city of Dublin, the capital of Ireland. The area is largely north and west of a three-arch stone bridge across the River Dodder, on the south side of the city. The sign on the bridge still proclaims it as "Ball's Bridge", in recognition of the fact that the original bridge on that location was built and owned by the Ball family, a well-known Dublin merchant family in the 1500s and the 1600s. The current bridge was built in 1791. Ballsbridge was once part of the Pembroke Township. History 18th-century maps show that the area of Dublin that is now Ballsbridge was originally mud flats and marsh, with many roads converging on a small village located around the bridge, and known already as Ballsbridge. Situated on the Dodder, this village had a ready source of power for small industries, including by the 1720s, a linen and cotton printers, and, by the 1750s, a paper mill and a gunpowder factory. By the early 1800s, Ballsbridge was a small settlement on a major road linking Dublin city with the port at Dalkey, where most of the shipping freight was landed, due to the shallow waters of the Liffey estuary. The land around Ballsbridge was rural and mostly belonged to the Earl of Pembroke. After the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) moved into its present site near Ballsbridge in 1879, the Earl of Pembroke began to develop these lands into suburban residential housing. The RDS held their first show on their new premises in the early 1880s. In 1903, the land formerly known as the ‘Forty Acres’ was given to the city by the Earl of Pembroke to establish Herbert Park. (The Earl of Pembroke's surname was Herbert.) In 1907, the Dublin International Exhibition was held in Herbert Park. Until 1965, there was a well-known botanical garden on Landsdowne Road near Ballsbridge. The garden belonged to Trinity College, which had leased land from the Earl of Pembroke. In 1960, the original lease from the Pembroke Estate expired and was not renewed. After reducing their size considerably, Trinity decided, in 1965, to close the botanical gardens at that location and to open a new garden at Dartry. Two hotels now stand on the site. In 1916, the Mount Street bridge, which spans the Grand Canal at the foot of Northumberland Road, was the site