A tale of two downtown corners
October 08, 2008
By Paul Wilson
Travellers entering Hamilton off the 403 do a sweep along Main Street, reach high ground at Hess, then coast into the core.
Main and Hess is important, or should be. Today we check out two corners of that old intersection to find out how one of them came to be so beautiful — and why the other has been a disgrace for a generation.
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Celeste Blackmore got a lot of grief a few years ago when she painted the house on the hill, the north- west corner of Main and Hess.
In the book Heritage Treasures, that place is said to be the oldest occupied house within the original boundaries of Hamilton. It’s a house that gets noticed. James and Celeste Blackmore have owned it eight years. He’s a dentist who attracts patients from far and wide because he puts them to sleep.
And she’s the force behind the renovations of this old house. She’s the one who picked out a very bright shade of yellow for the exterior. “Do you know how much flak I got for that?” But she had taken three things into account. First, the yellow paint going on that stucco was going to cure. Second, the sun would fade it. And third, this is Hamilton.
No one’s slamming Celeste today. The colour is now perfect. The house is stunning. Part of it is said to have been there since 1803. The main house was built some 40 years later. It belonged to Hamilton businessman Alexander Murray from 1867 to his death 100 years ago. He called it Arlo House. The next owner was Fenner Frederick Dalley, of Two-in-One Shoe Polish fame. Some will still remember the house as the residence and medical offices for John Fawcett, an obstetrics and gynecology specialist who stayed there from 1938 until the early 1970s. Ever since, the Italianate mansion has been the place where drillers and their anxious subjects gather.
“This is a dental building,” Celeste says. “Some people are afraid and we wanted it to be a happy place. It was a dark, dark place. We didn’t want it looking like something out of Harry Potter.”
So the tangle of vines — which were covering the windows and eating away at the stucco — got pulled down, and up went that sunshine-y paint. And out front, inside the restored wrought-iron fence, is one of the finest pieces of grass in downtown Hamilton, bordered by a rose garden.
Inside, the Blackmores have kept what original features remained — dark panelling in the lobby, fireplace in the waiting room, Marlo House shields over the doors. So far they’ve spent $200,000 bringing this house back.
“How could we not do that?” Celeste says. “We couldn’t just sit on this jewel and let it deteriorate.”
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We go one door over, to the northeast corner of Main and Hess. On this ground, some 20 years ago, developers decided to float a project called The Riviera. “Hamilton’s Première Address,” it said then.
A sales pavilion was erected and painted purple, pink and green. To make way for this posh dream, the developers knocked down the Burleigh Apartments, and the city lost several dozen units of affordable housing.
Then, like now, the economy collapsed. And all these years later, that plywood sales pavilion still stands. It’s grey and crumbling, weeds rising.
This property has been owned for a long, long time by a Toronto-based developer. “It goes back to my father’s time,” says Brian Otis, vice-president of the Otis Group. He says they had sold the land to the Riviera developers. “But when they didn’t make a go of it, the property came back to us.”
Ever since, Otis has leased out that nearly two-acre parcel — Hess to Caroline, Main to George — for parking.
“But we are interested in doing something,” Otis says. And he believes they are now close. “There’s an old saying in this business that a good site is a site you have a tenant for,” he says.
And he was talking again last week with Shoppers Drug Mart about opening a 20,000-square-foot store there. An LCBO could join the project, along with some smaller stores. And the city would like to see a two-level parking area behind that for 300 cars. The city would lease it from the developers, with hopes it would control the Hess Village overflow.
Otis thinks they could move ahead with a project next year, but is mystified as to why it didn’t happen a long time ago. “I think this site’s gold,” he says. “It’s just that no one else seems to know that.”
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