Posted Apr 26, 2019, 3:06 AM
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Hamilton Historian
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Join Date: Sep 2013
Location: Hamilton
Posts: 3,145
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ScreamingViking
We've been in a paradigm where the smallest voices may have the biggest impact. That's not a bad thing, often those voices have something very meaningful to say. But sometimes their needs are given more emphasis than what makes sense for everyone in the longer term.
We haven't achieved a great equilibrium in satisfying those interests with a balance against the greater "good."
I don't know that we ever will, for sure not while this conservative wave is apparently sweeping parts of the country (and perhaps THE country this fall). How that filters down to municipalities will be interesting to see. It may very well end up being a blunt "this is how things need to go" as upper levels of government dictate the same. Especially as the spending downloadings begin in earnest.
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Regardless of the complaints all of you might have - the hamilton of today is still 500% better than the hamilton of 10-15 years ago - let me take you on a magical tour of what hamilton was like back then..
It was like flint michigan back in the day. You felt uneasy walking around downtown. There were homeless people everywhere, scooter people, crackwhores, and mental patient people walking around muttering to themselves as they had shuttered the psych wards as they declared it inhumane to keep them boarded up so these people were free to roam the downtown, making everyone feel uneasy. They were generally harmless but it only takes one.. - half the downtown was boarded up or falling apart. There were beggers constantly on king st in the gore park area. Drugged out women would walk up to your car window and knock on it asking for change. You couldn't walk along james st without encountering sketchy people and you didn't dare linger in front of jackson square for long. Sketchy people would sit on the stairs to the top of jackson intimidating people - religious people would shout their doom and gloom wearing signs in front of jackson, and people would down right punch each other in broad daylight. If someone came up to you to try to talk to you you got the hell out of there. There were hookers on emerald st, which led to the joke "What do you call a full set of teeth in hamilton? 32 Hookers on emerald st" and the joke of people telling you to go stand on the corner of king and james.
Abandoned buildings were everwhere and squatters crawled into them and did drugs- the outdoor bathrooms were dens for drug dealings and assaults - needles littered the floors and alleys everywhere (needles still litter the alleys).
And you never. Entered an alley. Especially at night. Period.
Buildings were spraypainted like crazy, windows were broken or painted over - entrances were boarded up - almost all of king william st was either sketchy or boarded up - lister, william thomas, and the other building beside lister were boarded up - kresgeys was filled with the "people of walmart" type of bingo players, walking farther east down king st led to sketchier areas.. oh and gore park was filled with people waiting for buses as thats where the buses used to stop. The downtown type of people were very "hamiltonian" as we dubbed them - grizzled looking, teeth missing, smelly, old clothes, shambling about - barton st was a nightmare, and in some ways still is, and riding the bus was a russian roulette game (not of getting hurt or killed, but of meeting some very very uncomfortable people). People didn't dress up to go downtown, and you didn't see regular families with their kids walking around - people hurriedly got to where they had to go and then got out.
You still see some semblances of the "old days" with cash mart places everywhere, thrift stores, and other low end stores in jackson and along king st - slowly these places are being replaced with higher scale businesses but we allowed them to come in to service the type of people we had allowed to filter in.The downtown also used to stink from the factories.
Now we got an area where you see families and kids walking around - king william st and james st are revitalized and you see patios and people dressing up to go downtown. We have art crawl and super crawl. Arguably the downtown hasn't looked this good since the days of the eatons center. Things are getting better, just not at the pace a lot of people would like to see them get better, but they ARE getting better - slow progress is better than NO progress. I grew up never seeing a single crane downtown. Now they are popping up everywhere.
Back in the old glory days of hamilton it used to be an entertainment hub - sporting more than 50 small theatres across the entire city. It had a horse racing track where centre mall is now, it had an amusement park by the water, it had all sorts of crazy cool stuff. Downtown was the major commerce center and had cigar stores, fur shops, jewellery stores and fine china shops. There were parades down james st and king st, people all had flags outside their dwellings. Everyone did their shopping at kreskeys, arliss shoes ribonsons and woolworths and the right store.People had jobs in the factories making stoves and appliances or making steel - and the key is that life was centralized downtown - then everyone decided to suburbanize and create big box stores and malls and it killed the downtown core and left a vacuum that was filled with vagrants. Now we are slowly getting back there. The key is to centralize business in the core - not ship everyone out to toronto and have hamilton be a bedroom community - hamilton is a real city, not a suburb, and it can very much return to that - but there has to be jobs downtown - not just restaurants and breweries...
Although I have to admit, one of the reason you probably see so few sketchy people is because they scooped them all up and shipped them out of town for the pan-am games. They are probably in st catharines now.. Can't have outsiders seeing our derelict state of being..
Last edited by Chronamut; Apr 26, 2019 at 3:35 AM.
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