Future City - Hamilton Next

[SteelTown]

A critical walk downtown

Here are Harry Stinson s impressions:
Slow down: Massive one-way streets are not good. The way King Street is zooming one way and Main is zooming the other, theres not a lot of incentive to stop and do something, but that s not incurable. King Street is a potentially terrific street. It s got the architecture.It's got the scale, but it s just sort of turned into this Blade Runner ambience.

Park the buses somewhere else:
You stand on King Street just past the Connaught Hotel there, and the buses
just drive you nuts. It s like being in a garage somewhere. How do you expect
patios to do any business? How do you expect people to stroll along the boulevard when they have to yell at each other when they re beside each other?

Clean up your act:
There are some magnificent buildings there and they recovered in grime and they're derelict, yet they're operative. You walk along King Street and you see one nice shop and it stands out because it s the only one. The rest of them are cheesy or boarded up, or have seedy-looking customers hanging around outside, doing some sort of commercial transaction.

Shake it up:
This is not a situation that lends itself to just a lot of pleasant little practical elements here and there. It needs somebody to come in and shake it by the ears and make a statement that causes other people to say, You know, if they're doing something that serious, maybe this is going to work and I should buy into it.

Behind by a century:
That boardedup theatre (the Century on Mary Street, which showed its last film in 1989), that drove me nuts. That is completely outrageous. When I ask, Why is that? all I get is a shrug. What does that mean?

No pain, no gain:
It's time for someone to stand up and say, OK,we ve got to do this. We have to fix this. We have to do something. We can do something. It's not impossible. We have to break a few eggs to do it, but we have to do it.

The political leadership needs to say, We re going to put things in a global context. We re not going to nibble away and say this can t be done. And that's a little bit unfair; it s going to be a little bit unfair to everybody about something. But the way it is right now is a whole lot unfair to just about everybody.