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.

[raisethehammer]

so Harry Stinson's 6 hour walk pretty much nails it.
The idiots running this city can't figure it out and they live here 24-7.
Fire them all and hire Harry to run the show!

[fastcarsfreedom]

Hey RTH...thanks man, seriously, you made good arguments (I agree most overhead transit is ugly and expensive)...what I take exception to is people making flip comments (and not getting their facts straight). Though I'm not as quick to blame city government for the city's ills...I absolutely loved reading Harry Stinson's comments/reviews of the city...he nailed point-after-point. His opinions were balanced, positive where they needed to be and realistic where they needed to be. His comments about the Century Theater (they extend to the Tivoli also, of course) were dead on.

[the dude]

Originally Posted by raisethehammer

so Harry Stinson's 6 hour walk pretty much nails it.
The idiots running this city can't figure it out and they live here 24-7.
Fire them all and hire Harry to run the show!

ya, but a lot of these dudes don't live or visit downtown, aside from going to work. they don't see the dereliction and don't care. it doesn't affect them.

[HAMRetrofit]

Harry's comments are great. It is clear that the city is not run by the urban minded otherwise it would not be the way that it is.

Decisions are being made by those incapable of understanding cities. I bet not a single one of these people have actually walked around the city for 6 hours to notice these blatantly obvious things.

[MolsonExport]

Stinkson? that guy's credit rating stinks.

[raisethehammer]

I could care less about his credit rating.
It took him 6 hours to see what the idiots at Hamilton City Hall still refuse to see.
No kidding they don't walk around for 6 hours downtown...they'd all have to run home to put on bulletproof vests first if they did that.

[SteelTown]

Btw if there's any article that you would like posted here that's in Hamilton Next just let me know and I'll post it, I know the articles aren't online so I can help.

[SteelTown]

Here's the first question for Future City!

This Week

The Welland Canal is too small for supership navigation between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Should a new canal and lock system be constructed near Hamilton instead of Niagara?

[flar]

It's not that people don't care about downtown, I believe that many actively hate it and wish it to fail. Case in point: several city councillors, past mayors, pretty much the entire school board, which leaves beautiful old schools in the lower city to rot and builds state of the art schools on the mountain (that will be undercapacity in less than 20 years as current cohort grows up). I'd also put money on it that the school board will locate on the mountain, where it's safe, clean, bountiful with highways, and they can go to Boston Pizza for lunch, and charge it to the taxpayer.

[raisethehammer]

Originally Posted by flar

It's not that people don't care about downtown, I believe that many actively hate it and wish it to fail. Case in point: several city councillors, past mayors, pretty much the entire school board, which leaves beautiful old schools in the lower city to rot and builds state of the art schools on the mountain (that will be undercapacity in less than 20 years as current cohort grows up). I'd also put money on it that the school board will locate on the mountain, where it's safe, clean, bountiful with highways, and they can go to Boston Pizza for lunch, and charge it to the taxpayer.

You're right on. I've said that for years.
Too many people in Hamilton want our city to fail.
We'll never really reach our full potential without help from city hall, but at least it's heartening to know that ordinary citizens can drive the redevelopment like we're seeing on King East and James North.
If the city doesn't care, at least a lot of people do.

[DC83]

Originally Posted by fastcarsfreedom

DC83, you have no idea what you're talking about (in regard to Detroit)--it's plainly obvious you haven't been in Downtown Detroit in a few years--so quit throwing around the "ghetto" word--and if you want to get critical about the Detroit People Mover system in some serious way--get your facts straight--it's not a freaking monorail! It is the identical to the automated system used in Vancouver (Skytrain) and the same as the one proposed in Hamilton in the early 1980s. It makes me absolutely livid to see people on here making flippant remarks about other cities--the very sort of "joking" that has hurt Hamilton's reputation for so many years--do unto others man...seriously.

Hey, sorry. I use "monorail" b/c it's elevated. I guess I should refer to it as "elevated transit"?

If it's anything like the Skytrain, then it's just like the Scarborough RT. The RT is horrible: slow, loud, small.

I was simply stating an elevated track for transit looks ghetto and does NOT make for a good streetlife experience. OBVIOUSLY everyone in this forum wants on-street Light Rail and that (former) Mayor Morrow's idea for a elevated transit line is a dead one (here's hoping)?

as for the Game today, I voted against a new canal.

[SteelTown]

I voted aganist the canal idea too, the Welland area needs the economic benefit more than Hamilton. Plus it'll do environmental damage.

[DC83]

Originally Posted by SteelTown

I voted aganist the canal idea too, the Welland area needs the economic benefit more than Hamilton. Plus it'll do environmental damage.

Environmental Damage + little economic benefits to Hamilton.
Hamilton already benefits from the Canal as much as it can in it's current location.

Has Niagara benefited from the Canal? Not-so-much in recent history.
As far as I can remember, I think the last economic boom Niagara saw was when they started to suppy Hamilton with energy... when was that? 1800-something??

[raisethehammer]

I voted against too...expanding the Welland Canal makes more sense instead of building a new canal from scratch.
Plus, the ships are all coming to Hamilton anyhow so just expand the one that already exists...kind of a stupid question actually.

[raisethehammer]

is this really necessary?
today's question is whether we should allow a gold smeltering plant on the waterfront since gold was discovered south of the city.
I thought this game might actually be useful with real ideas...apparently not.

[matt602]

Wow thats just ridiculously far fetched. Who's coming up with these things, a class of 5th graders?

Gold smelting... ridiculous.

[block43]

Next weeks predicted question: Aliens have crash landed in Dundas. Do we help them fix their space ship and pretend they were never here? Or do we capture them and steal their technology and place them in cages to collect revenue as having the worlds only alien zoo?

[flar]

Who told you about the aliens in Dundas?

[block43]

I took the time machine the City may choose to invent in question 4 to the time period of question 3 and found out.