Build me up and bring me down

And down we go

The steel retaining walls along the side of the Escarpment on the Claremont Access are failing. Or, at least, as a memo regarding a late February inspection noted, new bulging along segments of the wall are “indicative of a potential failure”. The walls are between 55 and 53 years old (they were constructed in stages) and are nearing the end of their natural lifespan.

Let’s take a look at the Claremont, its history, and whether we need so many mountain accesses at all.

Winding trails and family tales

From the earliest days of colonial settlement in the Hamilton area, folks have been trying to scale the Niagara Escarpment. The natural formation is uneven, with some sections of sheer rock giving way to sloping hills. By the 20th century, Hamiltonians had carved a number of roads, trails, and railways into and up the side of the Escarpment, providing us with this fascinating network, taken from a map in the McMaster archives.

Railways scaled the mountain, with an electric trolley slowly climbing the western portion of the Escarpment and offering stops at the Tuberculosis Sanatorium. An incline railway brought people from the base of James Street South to the elegant Mountain View Hotel overlooking the city. Paths allowed for sleighs and horse-drawn carts to carry goods from the lower city to the homesteads and farm plots on the mountain.

Claremont was a tiny road at the time, branching from an intersection at Arkledun, heading up the Escarpment, meeting with John Mountain Road and Strongman’s Road, both now just memories of the past. It slipped past the Mountain View and curved along to West 5th.

As time marched on and the city changed, driven by a desire to simplify the urban environment to make things easier for folks using private automobiles, Hamilton’s mountain accesses needed to change too.

By the late 1960s, Claremont hadn’t changed much, but big plans were in the works. This photo from the folks over at Vintage Hamilton on the Facebooks shows what it looked like on a summer day in 1968. The white “notice” sign is informing motorists that the access would soon be closed to make way for the gleaming new fast-paced Claremont of the future.

Other mountain accesses had been simplified and straightened. The Jolley Cut had, by 1961, taken much the same form we know today. The the Claremont…it remained a small access.

The plan was hatched to build a multi-lane access that would provide connections to both Upper James and West 5th and line up with the city’s one-way street conversion project, routing the lower city’s northbound traffic onto Victoria and southbound onto Wellington. The southbound routing meant some expropriation and the Upper James to West 5th segment of the new access would block off the views folks on Claremont Drive itself had of the lower city.

Oh. And one additional problem. See that little star on the map up there? The one on the approximate location of 123 West Avenue South? Yeah, that’s where my grandparents lived.

That’s right, folks: the Erl Family and the Claremont Access have a complicated history.

Well, we have a complicated history with urban renewal in general, as the first place my grandparents lived in Hamilton after immigrating was at the corner of Bay and Main, which was, not long after they bought 123 West Avenue South, expropriated and demolished to make way for City Hall.

Upon hearing of the new Claremont Access project, my grandparents were faced with the prospect of once again moving after only a short time in the city. From their home on West Avenue, my grandmother could walk to the Central Library to read Macleans and listen to the radio to improve her English. They could walk the three blocks to St. Patrick’s where my father and uncle went to school. They were within walking distance of the market and shops and every German immigrant’s piece of home in the city: Denningers (and I cannot stress this enough: it is pronounced den- ing - ers. Not den-in-jjjjjers. It is a German name. My grandparents knew them. That’s the pronunciation.)

And so up the mountain they went. By the time the Claremont construction was underway, they had relocated to the east mountain. Into an entirely car-dependent suburb. And 123 West Avenue South? All the houses on the east side of West Avenue (I know, I didn’t name it) were demolished to make way for Carter Park. When the leaves are gone from the trees, you can see the hulking mass of the Access from the place my family once lived.

Bring the mountain down

To ensure the safety of motorists using the Claremont, city engineers placed eight-metre tall steel retaining walls along the side of the Escarpment, sheered clean to create space for the access. To secure these walls, they drilled 3 metre long screws into the side of the rock face, acknowledging that the whole flimsy structure would need to be replaced in about 40 or 50 years.

In February 2012, a mudslide burst through the retaining wall and spilled out onto the access. Right on schedule. And in 2016, the access was closed again when more parts of the Escarpment began to slide.

The budget for fixing the Claremont walls is consistently in flux. $8,000,000 was thrown around in the past decade. But with inflation and supply chain issues, you can bet that number will be higher now.

So here’s the question: do we need the Claremont at all?

The Spec reports that 17,000 motorists use the access daily. The Keddy Access Trail that runs along the side of the Claremont is a very popular pedestrian and cyclist route up and down the mountain (including with yours truly). And the other pedestrian links to Escarpment trails, including the Bruce Trail, are a great way of providing foot-traffic access to important places like St. Joe’s mountain campus and Mohawk College.

The fact of the matter is, we can’t simply rip down the retaining walls and hope for the best. Even in those maps from the 1920s, it is clear that folks have been building homes close to the edge of the Escarpment for as long as we’ve been carving roads into it. Letting the retaining walls fail could send homes and their residents sliding down the Niagara Escarpment and onto the city below.

And the Claremont, as ugly and destructive as it is, also serves a purpose. Slowly but surely, we’ve been reclaiming the access for human use, rather than the exclusive use of the private automobile. Even heritage advocates, lamenting the loss of the simpler, more human-scaled roads of the past, recognize that the Claremont was a creature of its time. Writing in 2017, local heritage advocate Joachim Brouwer noted that the crumbling rock face and failing retaining walls aren’t exclusively the fault of today’s leaders.

Indeed, as climate change is accelerating extreme weather, which is, in turn, eroding the Escarpment, we have to look to the policies of the past which have locked us into car dependency. Not just urban renewal projects that forced a family from the core and into the suburbs, but the overall policies that encouraged the private automobile over everything else.

The Claremont Access, in its current form, is a physical representation of those policies. But it doesn’t need to remain that way. The Keddy was a start. But moving to change the entire access in addition to bolstering the retaining walls will help us move toward a future where these aren’t pressing threats. The soft slope of the Claremont lends itself to higher-order public transit, like streetcars and LRT. More pedestrian connections, shaving lanes off and restoring some sections of the Escarpment, or other alterations to the Claremont could reshape not only the access’s immediate surroundings, but the way we look at transportation in the city.

So, do we need the Claremont? Maybe. But maybe not in the way it looks now. Maybe this latest landslide is the push we need to really think outside the box. Maybe this will show is a whole new way to climb a mountain.

A towering wind

As reported by Joey Coleman, the City of Hamilton’s Design Review Panel will be debating two residential towers in Corktown that have been proposed by the DiCenzo Construction Company. The towers are proposed for the big ‘ol vacant lot to the south of Hamilton’s tallest building, the 172 metre tall Landmark Place at Main East and Catherine South.

Okay, fun fact time. This is an aside, but I don’t usually get a chance to talk about this. The lot in question is on the east side of Catherine Street. Across the street, on the west side, is 33 Bowen Street. That building dates back to 1844 and was built after George Hamilton, city founder and an all-around shady developer in his own time, sold a parcel of “his” land. Since then, it has been a blacksmith shop, a ginger ale warehouse, a garage, one of the first “The Keg” chains in Ontario, and Slainte Irish Pub, a place where the vibes were always, as the Irish would say, beagán as. It may be one of the oldest buildings in the lower city.2 Cool, eh?

Anyway, back to the towers.

Joey’s reporting on this raises some important information. DiCenzo is proposing a three-storey podium with commercial space, 751 units, parking for 366 cars and 388 bikes, with shadows that’ll darken even the park in front of the old Wentworth County Courthouse on Main and a wind tunnel that will create what the developer admits will be “uncomfortable” conditions in the winter.

So let’s look at the good and the bad with this proposal.

The Good

Infill - As the above photo shows, the core has many, many, many vacant lots, indicating an extremely inefficient use of space downtown. All of that ugly, uninspired, unproductive space to store cars could be converted into a couple of high-efficiency parking garages and the remaining space can be used for housing, service provision, or greenspace. So this project aims to better utilize the space we have.

Commercial space - far too often, residential towers are proposed with cavernous lobbies that serve as aesthetic show pieces, rendering a building’s ground floor a kind of liminal space. Like that room in some people’s houses where you can’t sit on the furniture or use the amenities because they’re for “show” (or being set aside for a papal/monarchical visit). Ground-floor commercial space can provide important services to the residents of the tower and offer more opportunities for local makers and creators to start something wonderful.

0.49 parking spaces per unit - the constant complaint from existing residents about new developments is “won’t somebody think of the traffic!?” With this development, the expectation is that residents will be using active and public transportation for their daily errands and commuting needs. Considering the heavy toll of the private automobile on the climate crisis, with some estimates indicating that 11% of Canada’s CO2 emissions come from personal cars and trucks, developments that do not prioritize the storage of cars are on the right side of history.

The Bad

“Residential units” - This is a purposefully ambiguous term. 751 units which, according to Joey’s reporting, will be divided into 497 one-bedroom or bachelor units and 254 two-bedroom units. Will these be dedicated rentals or condo units? And will it even matter? A recent report from Statistics Canada found that 42% of condos in Ontario are owned by investors, not occupants. If these units become condos and are rented out, there is no guarantee they’ll be affordable. There are currently 28 1-bedroom condo units for rent in Hamilton listed on rentals.ca. The average monthly rent on these units is $2783.61, which includes brand new builds like the Platinum Condos at King+Queen and older remodeled units in the east end. The upper-end of “affordable” rent in Hamilton (as defined by the CMHC) is $2,150 a month. Guarantee that, with rising interest rates, investors will be charging a lot more to earn their monthly mortgage payments in this new building. Speaking of which, looking at realtor.ca for the sale price of new condo units in the core, they start at just under $400,000 (again for the Platinum) for a studio and go up to $1,175,000 for one of the penthouse suites of the Connaught (lobby use not guaranteed). Condo fees also range from around $150 to $600 a month.

Heckin’ wimdy - The wind issue is one that a lot of folks might not consider to be all that important in the proposal phase. But consider the pedestrian experience on the street or in the alleys adjacent to the property on a blustery January day. Environmental factors can have a huge impact on the human experience around these massive towers and render any amenity or commercial space unusable. As William Whyte notes in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, people flock to urban amenity spaces that have access to regular sun and little wind. “What people seek are suntraps,” he writes. “And the absence of winds and drafts are as critical for these as sun.”3

Boxed in - The buildings will consist of bachelor, 1-bedroom, and 2-bedroom spaces. These won’t be sufficient for families, multi-generational households, or any nonconventional family/cohabiting groups. The idea behind only offering these kinds of units is to maximize profit for the developer, rather than provide what is needed in the community. Places like Mississauga are struggling with a lack of multi-bedroom apartment options, leading to their city council actually examining whether they can mandate some multi-bedroom options in new developments. Going back to rentals.ca, the website currently shows 330 available 1 and 2 bedroom units in Hamilton but only 53 apartments/condos with 3 or more bedrooms in the city.

What are you? Some kind of NIMBY?

Okay, first off, more housing supply won’t solve the crisis. That’s just developer propaganda. Building housing outside the market is important to give us alternatives to either home ownership or tenancy.

But, more importantly, every development should undergo a healthy amount of community scrutiny. That’s the essence of living in a democracy. We must ask questions of experts and raise informed concerns about how any new development will impact the existing neighbourhood.

As for this project: I genuinely don’t know how I feel about it. Yes, it would be nice to get rid of some ugly parking lots in the core. Yes, the ground-floor retail is appealing. Yes, fewer parking spaces is always a good thing. But I have concerns about this development simply being another vehicle for wealthy out-of-town (and in-town…can’t forget that there are shady people here too) investors to try and make a buck off our community. If these are condos, if these are rentals, or if these are condos that people buy and rent out, someone is going to be exploited.

Let’s see how this progresses. Only time will tell what kind of development this will be.

If you’re interested in attending the Webinar, it’ll be today (Thursday, March 9) at 1:30 PM on the city’s Webex platform.

Unless you’re on the r/Hamilton subreddit, in which case, you might already think this is the best possible thing that could ever happen to this city ever.

Mostly joking, Redditors. You folks are alright. And sorry for making so many of you mad by not clearly articulating that density is good so long as it is even and gentle. Tall towers aren’t everything, no matter what the developers tell you.

Bird site continues to molt

On Saturday, Spec reporter Fallon Hewitt reported on the really interesting BLK Owned initiative, aimed at highlighting all the Black-owned businesses and organizations in the area. It is a cool effort that has, as Hewitt reported, “worked to bridge the gaps faced by Black business owners.”

On Sunday, Hewitt sent this tweet:

In the past few months, replies to tweets have been growing increasingly aggressive and reactionary. The content of these reply tweets ranges from boilerplate talk-show conservative dad stuff (“socialism deosnt work look at communist cuba its humen nature!” he said, the clacking of his Android’s keyboard reverberating off the inner walls of the cab of his F150. He closes the phone, with its cracked screen and full-volume Minions ringtone, and drops it carelessly into the free cup holder, the rear-most one, avoiding the morning’s Tims cup still occupying the first spot. Three creams, extra large, the liquid within matching the air temperature of the truck almost perfectly. He looks up and scans the empty Beer Store parking lot, bathed in reds and greens from the tint of his Oakleys. He softly strokes his goatee. “F**k Trudeau,” he whispers to himself with a smile. ~fade to black~) to repetition of some of the more polished and violent rhetoric we’ve been seeing from the far-right. Indeed, the site is quickly being overrun with the most violent fringe figures online to the point where the “trending” bar and “for you” page are unusable.

(Side note, the Garbage Day newsletter hypothesizes that the For You page is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a creation, cobbled together from other bits of the site, and that it “seems to prioritize tweets that are talking about already-viral content.” This means folks might be trying to boost their own engagement by trying to connect themselves to things about to go viral early on. Read about it down below.)

And, while much of that is based on personal experience, people inside the company have told the BBC that hate is on the rise and that the company is no longer able to stop targeted harassment campaigns against, in particular, women and survivors of assault. As a whistleblower told the BBC:

We still haven’t found a new place to do the kind of things we could on Twitter. The ol’ Bird Site was a place where you could find out about current events in real time, hear from reporters about stories you might have missed, find out about protests and rallies and pop up shops and community events and political drama. You could see a politician respond to an issue, a celebrity dox themselves during a pointless fight with a teenager, and post updates on how your newsletter is doing.

But the Bird Site continues to molt. It is dropping feathers at a furious speed, leaving nothing but trolling comments and general nastiness in its wake. And yet, we remain fixated on Twitter. It was a part of our lives for so long. Letting go feels like it’ll be difficult. We keep posting, our replies keep filling up with nonsense, and we carry on as if we all we’re clinging on to is a fist full of feathers.

Bye, bye, by-election pie

Advance voting in the Hamilton Centre by-election is now open in advance of regular polls on March 16th. This is a pretty dynamic race and there’s a fair level of enthusiasm on the ground, which speaks to the organizational efforts of each campaign.

The Cable 14 debate on March 7th was the source of a few fireworks. The Tory candidate, police officer Pete Wiesner, skipped the debate. This is a now standard play for PC candidates, who don’t exactly have the best answers for the Premier’s “do what feels right/do what feels like it’ll make developers richer” policy strategy.

Despite Pete’s absence, it was still a raucous affair, with Liberal candidate Deirdre Pike asking NDP candidate Sarah Jama to “apologize” to Jewish people for what Pike and B’nai Brith have called past “anti-Israel” associations. Jama responded by reminding the community of Pike’s complicated history with racialized communities.

As the Queen’s Park Observer noted, the rumour circulating is that the Liberals and Tories had been in talks to protest the debate because of the antisemitism allegations. If the Greens were on board, they would have all sat out. To her credit, Green candidate Lucia Iannantuono apparently rejected this idea. During the debate, Iannantuono remarked that “the right loves this [the back-and-forth between Jama and Pike], that we’re nit-picking at each other.”

Not to get all political on everyone, but it should be no surprise that I think Sarah Jama should represent Hamilton Centre at Queen’s Park. Sarah is a dedicated and passionate member of our community and has worked tirelessly for so many people often ignored by the political establishment. Antisemitism is reprehensible and, in an age when antisemitic attitudes are being mainstreamed by the furthest fringes of the far-right, we all need to oppose this kind of hatred. Expressing sympathy with the everyday people of Palestine is not antisemitism. Critiquing the policies of the hard-right and anti-democratic Netanyahu government is not antisemitism. Promoting cross-cultural dialogue and initiatives that break down barriers between people is not antisemitism.

Dredging up these old allegations is a distraction tactic. The Tories can’t defend their policies designed to make the rich richer. The Ontario Liberals have spent more time trying to court another party leader than advancing a unique and compelling platform. So this is a way to distract and discourage. Politics can and must be about bringing people together and advancing an ideology that will make life better for everyone. Sarah is doing just that.

Oh, and the far-right New Blue Party is running Lee Weiss Vassor, a former LRT manager for the city who now works as an engineering consultant. Their party profile says they are an active member of the equally far-right anti-vax, anti-trans, anti-everything group “Action4Canada” (which is a group founded to, in their own words: “protect Canada’s rich heritage which is founded on Judeo-Christian biblical principles”) and is running to oppose Critical Race Theory in schools. Fun.

Cool facts for cool people

• There is still time to sign up to sit on one of the City of Hamilton’s Agencies, Boards, and Committees (ABCs in the political geography parlance). While the city’s open house was yesterday (March 8th), you have until April 9th to sign up. As a previous member of the city’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Committee, I can say that these committees have the potential to be a very rewarding experience and a great way to improve our community.

• I had an opportunity to see the world première of The Gig at Theatre Aquarius this week. A brilliant political and social commentary about three drag queens who are asked to perform at a Tory fundraiser, this show was hilarious, heartbreaking, and so very relevant in our current moment. Go check it out if you can. The Gig is on until March 25th.

Thanks for sticking around until the end, all you cool folks. If you like what you read, give it a share. See you next week!