Tarnished tower offers hope
Partially mothballed Steeltown landmark has 360-degree view of a brighter future;
PART FIVE OF SEVEN
Paul Wilson
The Hamilton Spectator
(Oct 4, 2007)
The view up here is fabulous, 360 degrees. Mountain, harbour, east, west. It's the best in the city. But no one's seeing it. They haven't for years.
We've arrived at 100 King St. West, better known as the Stelco Tower, perched atop Jackson Square.
We're getting a special ride today. We proceed to the west bank of elevators, the ones that go to the top half of Hamilton's tallest office tower. They've been locked down a long time.
Push the button, floor 24. This cab may be dusty, but it's ear-popping fast. In an instant, we're soaking up that view.
This panorama used to belong to the captains of Stelco. The tower was built for them and a thousand of their charges, the staff who moved over from the factory zone to this tower of new times. This was the first step in the rebuilding of downtown Hamilton 35 years ago.
"The needs of the community will be greatly served by all the things that will spread out from this beginning," Stelco chairman H.M. Griffiths said on opening day.
But the past two decades have been tortuous for Stelco. Thousands downsized. Huge losses. Flirtation with bankruptcy. And finally, hopefully, new stability with the purchase of Canada's last independent steelmaker by U.S. Steel. But the sale does little to help downtown, specifically that rust-coloured monolith in its midst.
The tower emptied out in dribs and drabs. It started off full, Stelco occupying 15 floors. In 1979, the company had 1,700 employees in the building. Ten years ago, that was down to 300.
Three years ago, the last of them were transferred back to the Stelco plant. And the Jackson Square developers shut down the west bank of elevators, thus sealing off floors 15 to 24.
A mix of banking and insurance firms occupy the floors below, including Royal, TD, RBC Dominion, Laurentian, London Life, Great-West, Reliable Life.
The downtown Hamilton office vacancy rate stands at 27 per cent. Take the Stelco Tower/ Jackson Square properties out of the equation and that rate drops to about 15 per cent.
How to fill up that tower again? Surely the man to talk to is Emile Mashaal, president of Yale Properties. It's the Montreal-based development company that began building the Jackson Square complex in the early '70s, leasing the land beneath it from the city for 99 years.
The complex has struggled, but it would be hard to blame Yale for that. It has kept the properties in good repair and modernized along the way.
I finally get through to Mashaal. "I didn't want to talk to you," he says. What he means, as it turns out, is that he doesn't want to talk to anybody from Hamilton. No one at The Spectator, no one at city hall, no one.
"Everyone knows what the problem is," he says. And what would that be? The mob? The smog? One-way streets?
"I'm not going there," he says.
What does he want to see happen in Hamilton? "I want to go to a city where if I provide the best product at the lowest price, I get a chance to sell it ... That's it, OK? Thank you. Goodbye." And he hangs up.
It's a remarkable state of affairs when downtown's biggest player in office/ retail space loathes the city he's invested in.
There's background here. Yale Properties went after the deal for a new federal office complex eight years ago and lost.
Six years ago, the city proposed pulling the Farmer's Market out of Jackson Square and putting it across the street in an office/hotel complex at the Lister Block. Yale sued on that one and the market didn't go anywhere.
And last May, when the politicians were talking about building a new City Hall, Yale Properties took out an ad in this newspaper, a reminder that it had 400,000 square feet of empty offices. The mayor had no response.
We turn to developer David Blanchard. He's been part of the local scene for decades. He and partners now own virtually all the so-called B office buildings in Hamilton, retrofitted towers that include 25 Main West, the HSBC at Hughson and King, the former Union Gas building at Hughson and Main. (There are only two A buildings downtown, the mirrored twin towers at King and James.)
Blanchard doesn't want to tell Yale Properties how to do business. But what would he do with the top half of the Stelco Tower?
"It should be made into condos. They'd sell in a minute. Look at that view.
"They say there are technical problems and they can't do it. I don't believe it." He says a 1,000-foot unit could go on the market at $250,000 to $300,000.
But what about filling the Stelco tower with office workers again? "All that space was designed to house the kind of big companies that aren't here anymore. Stelco, Westinghouse, Firestone, you name it."
It would be a mistake to hope that the big companies will be coming back to town. "I've been waiting for that for 25 to 30 years," Blanchard says. "It's not going to happen."
His outfit has saved vintage buildings. In the '90s, three of the four corners at Main and James were occupied by spectacular but empty buildings. But Blanchard and associates have brought all those corners back to life -- the 1928 Pigott/Sunlife complex is condos, the 1908 Landed Banking building is office space and the 1929 Bank of Montreal is now palatial quarters for the Gowlings law firm.
Blanchard is now starting work on a 1950s Modernist low-rise on Hunter, across from the Hamilton GO Centre.
It's an expansion and retrofit of the city's health department headquarters.
Blanchard says that's the formula. "Take these good buildings, fix them up, keep the city ticking."
Is that it? Just look after what we already have and find new uses for old structures? Restore the core a corner at a time? Many think so.
"Stop looking for the megadeal," says Jack Beume, longtime developer with a dozen properties around Hamilton. At his latest, he spent $500,000 to clean up a building at James and Hunter once used for courts. He now has a full board of commercial tenants.
More from Beume: "Give the politicians some backbone and kick out the bums downtown. You have to make people feel safe."
Bob Bratina, councillor for the downtown ward, knows the problem. "A certain football team didn't want to stay downtown and that upset the owner very much."
That's David Braley and his B.C. Lions that's he's talking about. If a 300-pound tackle is anxious about staying downtown, it's situation serious.
So you have to make the core less lonely, get more people with jobs moving in. More GO Transit is good for that, Bratina says. "It encourages the development of higher class residential." More condos like the Core Lofts, carved out of the old Bell building at Main and Bay.
GO has just indicated it would be prepared to bring service to James North as well as the TH&B. But more GO will hasten Hamilton's transformation to bedroom status.
"So what?" says Bratina. "If people with a household income of $100,000 want to start treating Hamilton as a bedroom, that's better than a 20 per cent poverty rate."
Bratina says downtown needs hotel rooms, too, especially with the Royal Connaught dark these many years.
And Azim Kassam has ridden into town to do his part. His family had hotels in Toronto. He bought the old Ford dealership on Main East near Wellington for $1.3 million and is well into the $3.7 million job of converting it to a 60-room Days Inn. It's to open in March.
A couple of other hotels are supposed to be coming to the core. "The more the merrier," Kassam says. "That way people will be more comfortable downtown."
Dave Kuruc sometimes serves out-of-towners. He's run the Mixed Media arts shop on James North for two years. He's a pioneer in the arts renaissance on the street, a phenomenon that now lures adventurers from suburban places.
Kuruc talks about six people from Mississauga who signed up for a course at the Print Studio across the street.
They had lunch at Acclamation, each spent about $60 at his store and marvelled at the street's architecture. "They arrive with no preconceptions," Kuruc says. "They see what we don't."
He thinks we could do a better job of linking the waterfront to downtown. The trolleys are full down by the bay and he'd like to see some kind of special conveyance moving up James Street, too. "Something that when people see it they want to be on it," Kuruc says.
He's 29, but knows his history. He knows about the waves of immigrants who moved here. They lived above the stores and on the surrounding streets. They worked, shopped, took evening strolls. They built the community. After they moved to the suburbs, there was a vacuum.
"We close at six because there's no one left here," Kuruc says. "It's a pretty quiet place at night." Empty sidewalks don't feel safe.
"But now we're starting to see places being rented to good people," Kuruc says. "They're the ones who will make this a real neighbourhood again."
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