Best face forward
What do investors see in our downtown? Does the core attract or repel?
Through the objective eyes of outside business people, Hamilton is two places at the same time.
One is a blighted place of neglect and decay. The other is place of unrealized opportunity and potential.
Perceptions count. Hard facts such as square-foot costs for buildings are critical in deciding where to invest, but businesses must also consider what customers, employees — and bankers — will think when they announce they’re planning to set up in a new place.
When it comes to perception, it seems Hamilton could use a good scrubbing — quite literally.
Last month, Toronto developer Harry Stinson, sometimes called that city’s “Condo King,” came to Hamilton for a stroll around downtown. He ended up walking for nearly six hours — from the bay to the foot of the escarpment, from Wellington Street to Hess Village — fascinated, as he tried to figure out
what was wrong and what was right.
Stinson had come at the invitation of Hamilton architect John Mokrycke, who was wanting to talk to him about speaking at an industry function.
Stinson’s most recent project, the redevelopment of a bank building and adjoining condo-hotel tower at King and Yonge streets in downtown Toronto,
is wrapped up in receivership and legal snarls. Stinson has been in the news for months over his public battles with David Mirvish, backer of the 1 King West project.
But his trip to Hamilton left him eager to return and test the waters for working here, especially downtown, where a checkerboard of neglected and underused buildings and empty lots, dotted with pockets of success and creativity — he noted King William Street as one — left him intrigued, and somewhat puzzled.
“It’s a far more interesting city than people think,” he said. “It’s got a lot of potential. It’s got a lot of nice features, but I don’t know — it seemed sort of,
despondent, if I can put it that way. It’s like people are resigned to it. I thought the downtown core was a bit scary, in the sense that there really was no visible effort by anybody to do anything.”
Stinson thinks the basic structure of downtown, especially King Street from Catharine to Bay streets, is a template for village-style urban living, with a human scale, pleasing vistas, a good helping of history and a potentially productive balance of commercial, office and living spaces.
But the reality of today’s downtown is dirty, dark and forbidding, he said, and it will take courage to mine the potential there. “If you look at the city, it’s like a giant doughnut. The perimeter, which isn’t that far away, is pretty conventional and stable. Then you hit the core, and it’s like you go through a time warp. There’s this malaise. You know how when you’re swimming in the lake and you hit these little cold patches? It’s like you walk into Hamilton and all of a sudden you hit this giant cold patch, and it’s the downtown core.”
Before he goes to City Hall to ask what planning support he might expect, he plans to meet informally with community leaders to test their will to create change. He will need all the support he can get, he said, before he even thinks of bringing lenders downtown and asking for their backing.
But if he and others like him can get broad support, he said, downtown could become a pleasant place to live, work, eat and shop, especially with what he describes as the inevitable westward migration from overcrowded and overpriced Toronto. Like so many, Stinson says the timing and the effect of that migration will depend on establishing all-day, full GO train service to downtown Hamilton.
Ron Adams sees much the same double edge. He has spent half a century in the business of scouting, selecting and leasing commercial sites in Canada.
Now based in Burlington, Adams describes his job as “real estate counsel.”
His experience includes finding the site and helping to develop the White Oaks Mall in London, Ont., selecting sites for seven Holiday Inns across the province, finding sites for 50 Goodyear tire stores across Canada and participating in redevelopment of the Historic Properties in downtown Halifax.
Like Stinson, he sees potential, though he believes the richest area for development is along its highway corridors, especially the industrial lands between The Spectator building near Main and Frid streets and the nascent McMaster Innovation Park at Longwood Road and Aberdeen Avenue.
Like Stinson, he says the potential is obscured as Hamilton has failed to correct old perceptions, which it could easily rectify by creating welcoming entrances, especially where Highway 403 joins Aberdeen Avenue and Main Street — which he refers to as Hamilton’s front door. It would only take a little, he said, to change perceptions a lot.
“Hamilton, it seems to me, is a hell of a lot more than the image of the steel plants that you see from the QEW, but I think that image still lives. The image people have of an area is what they get from a car window or a bus when they’re driving by.”
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They also have 100 Main on the wrong side of Main hahaha
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