…but first, a big thank you from The Incline!

This past Thursday was the first Incline live event at King West Books/Mixed Media in Westdale. It was a great night full of local history, conversations about Hamilton’s civic politics, and socializing with engaged community members. I want to thank the nearly 30 folks who showed up in person and watched over the impromptu livestream as I shared a version of the piece you’ll see below.

And a big, big thanks to Dave and Stephen at King West Books/Mixed Media for hosting the event. It was on Dave’s suggestion that this event even happened and I’m so grateful for his support through all of this.

If you missed the live event, that’s okay because we’ll be hosting more over the next while. Our goal for the next event is to hold it in a larger venue, possibly one that’s licenced, and bring some cool people from the city in for a longer conversation.

At the event, I got a lot of questions about how people can support this project. The first is by telling your friends and sharing it in your circles. I’ve heard tell of a couple of cool group chats where Incline pieces spark some lively discussions 😎. But you can also support me by contributing to my ko-fi.com account. Quite a few people have said they don’t like contributing online, which I totally understand, so I’ll work on setting up a way for people to contribute financially in other, in-person ways shortly.

Thank you again to everyone who showed up, provided tech support, sent me messages before and after the event, contributed, shared articles, and read on their own time and in their own way. I know I’m not great with emails (I read everything people send, even if I don’t respond promptly or at all), but feel so happy to have the support of so many people in this community.

During the question and answer period after my talk, I got a great question about what we can do to get involved and get ready for our municipal elections coming up in 2026. Everyone has their own skills, passions, and dreams. Everyone can contribute in their own way, from simply voting to standing as a candidate. This project is my way of being an engaged citizen: using my skills and passions to inform, critique, and offer solutions. And I’m so honoured to not only be able to do this, but to see such meaningful support from the community.

And so, with that, please enjoy the written version of what I spoke about on Thursday night.

The Relocation

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about relocation. At the beginning of April, my partner and I were informed by our landlords that, after many years in the business, they were ready to retire and sell the home we had occupied for the past five years. That kicked off two months of searching for a new place, a frantic few days of packing, quick negotiations, lease signings, exhausting truck rentals, and a move that is, only now, coming to something that resembles a close (I have another send-off to my now-former neighbourhood in the works, so stay tuned for that).

Almost serendipitously, while the whole process was beginning, I stumbled upon a report from the Planning and Development Department (PDD) from the Region of Hamilton-Wentworth in the Hamilton Public Library’s archives. From April 1985, it details an event from Hamilton’s history with which I was unfamiliar.

The Region’s PDD report from 40 years ago chronicled a mass movement of Hamiltonians, relocated to suit both the city’s industrial goals and for their own health and well-being, but in a way that captured their sentiments and tried to understand their lives post-move. It was of a state-sponsored relocation of dozens of people from a community I did not even know existed.

That report lead me down one of my usual local history rabbit holes - one that involved me eventually passing by the site many times over these past two months, searching for remnants of the community. I spent days combing through my usual sources to learn more about this place that, for the most part, has been quite literally wiped off the map of Hamilton.

So let’s take a look at that forgotten part of the city, concentrated around the intersection of Sherman Avenue North and Burlington Street East, and the story of the relocation of 75 homes in the early 1980’s.

Let’s take a trip to the Alpha Neighbourhood.

Alpha to Keele, A to Z

There’s scant historical information available on the Alpha Neighbourhood, which, by 1985, had been defined to include around 4050 square metres east of Birch Avenue to just past Sherman Avenue North. Some of the streets of the community - Brant, Imperial, and Gerrard - still exist, but the street from which the community derived its name and its two neighbours - Alpha, Beta, and Keele - are gone. The area is now a patchwork collection of industrial buildings, vacant lots, waste storage facilities, transportation uses, and a very small number of residential buildings that have persisted all these years.

Alpha Street was just one of the streets in the neighbourhood. It was no more than 80 metres long, running north-to-south, and was surrounded by 11 homes - two semi-detached buildings and seven single detached. The naming of the community is still a mystery, from the reason why they went with “Keele” instead of “Gamma”, to the selection of Greek letters to begin with. But the naming stuck and, before long, the community became known as the “Alpha Neighbourhood”.

The first readily-available information on the area comes from a call for public tenders to build a sewer system under Alpha and Beta in 1912. This effort was clearly in anticipation of the streets supporting residential development in the years that followed.¹ Much of the land in the area was then owned by Morris Levy, a local builder and contractor who would eventually build many of the homes in the area.

Most of the homes in the area were built between 1913 and 1916 as the city’s industry began to expand rapidly to meet the needs of a country at war. As with many of the surrounding communities like Brightside, Stipley, and Gibson, the Alpha Neighbourhood was populated heavily by new Canadians, drawn to the city with the promise of steady work in nearby factories. The 1917 Vernon’s City Directory shows the diversity of the area, listing Alpha residents with last names like Augustina, Malassolo, Santarelli, Vasileff, and Zivkovich.

Planning a neighbourhood in the area made sense. There were thriving communities, complete with ample amenities a short walk down Sherman or Burlington. The area was well-served by transit, with the HSR’s Crosstown streetcar on Birch Avenue able to bring residents as far south as King and Sanford or a few short stops east to Brightside. That’s in addition to the Burlington-James South line that could get Alpha residents all the way to the James Street Mountain Incline if they were patient. By the mid-1920’s, mixed use buildings popped up along Sherman, bringing services right into the community itself.

Of particular interest for residents was the proximity of the neighbourhood to some of Hamilton’s largest employers. As Alpha grew around the intersection of Sherman and Burlington, so too did neighbouring concerns like International Harvester, the Grasselli Chemical Company (later DuPont), Hamilton Bridge Works, and Stelco. As a result, the Alpha neighbourhood became a vibrant working-class community. A survey of records from 1940 shows that, of the 11 working-age “heads of household” on Alpha Street, four were employed as general labourers, two at International Harvester, two at Stelco, one with the Canadian National Railway, and two without fixed employment (one of those being a widow).

***

The Alpha Neighbourhood wasn’t simply a home for upstanding workers. No, like many of Hamilton’s working-class neighbourhoods, it also attracted its fair share of interesting characters.

Not long after the first homes popped up on Alpha Street, the Spec reported that the Hamilton Police busted a resident for keeping too many kegs of beer in his basement. A few years later, an argument between neighbours resulted in a near-fatal stabbing. In 1917, after being found wandering down nearby train tracks, a recent Russian immigrant living at 9 Alpha Street was jailed for a month, with the judge proclaiming in court: “We intend that the foreigners of this city shall respect the law…they must not think they can do as they please.” This was, apparently, in response to the Russian’s response to being placed under arrest, which included biting an officer, scratching another, and then trying, and failing, to flee on foot.²

The neighbourhood’s location and composition meant that it was a constant source of fascination for the local press and a regular site of increased activity for the Hamilton Police. From the end of World War I to the 1960’s, the Spec’s references to the street were almost exclusively about the various petty crimes of the residents. Public drunkenness, small thefts, arguments that boiled over into assaults. In one explosive trial, the city learned about the “torrid” house kept at 9 Alpha Street. The judge in the trial of two women found in “salacious” circumstances, bemoaned that “the trouble is, nowadays…some women don’t leave much to the imagination,” before he sentenced them to three-to-six months in prison. None of the men found in the house-of-ill-repute were found guilty.³

At the same time, the homes on the street began to be subdivided into smaller units, becoming multiplexes and rooming houses, catering specifically to immigrants and people who were down-on-their-luck.

By the 1960’s, the city’s industry had expanded into the previously unoccupied land around the Alpha Neighbourhood. Where once the residents had marshland within reach of their homes, now they had growing roads, busy rail lines, and ever-expanding industry. In 1968, a local father complained to the Spec about the lack of near-by amenities for the families on Alpha Street. The father - a steelworker who had nine children of his own - said that, among the few houses on the street, there were 42 children who primarily played in the grassy median along Burlington Street. His complaint was that, for the $246 in property taxes he paid, “we should have more in the way of play areas for the kids.”⁴

But it was unlikely the Alpha Neighbourhood would be getting any amenities at that point. Indeed, by 1968, Alpha’s days were numbered. Decisions made over twenty years prior had all-but sealed Alpha’s fate.

Zone of Industry

From 1946 to 1951, Hamilton’s urban planners were tasked with one of the most ambitious undertakings in the city’s history: the creation of a comprehensive zoning by-law. Block-by-block, planners assessed the city’s existing uses and developed a plan for permissible future uses, all with the goal of guiding development and ensuring an orderly future for Hamilton. Their plans were inherently limiting, steeped in the post-war obsession with cars and “middle class” single detached housing. These plans rejected perceived “disorder”, which included multiunit homes, mixed-use buildings, and the often-misidentified “slum”.

In one of the first maps published showing the proposed zoning changes in 1946, the Alpha Neighbourhood - a decidedly disordered community in the eyes of planners at the time - was to be exclusively zoned “IH” for “Industry, Heavy” (the name for the use would stay the same, but heavy industry’s zoning designation would later be changed to “K”).⁵ By early December, 1951, the Ontario Municipal Board approved Hamilton’s proposed zoning by-law, including provisions for existing uses to become “legal non-conforming” upon the by-law’s implementation. That meant that, even though the Alpha Neighbourhood was zoned for heavy industry, the existing homes could stay. But no new houses would ever be built in the area, nor was it likely they would be getting any amenities beyond the grassy median on Burlington Street.

Not long after the zoning by-law came into effect, Dofasco began buying up land in the McAnulty neighbourhood. Their $25 million expansion plan (around $270 million today) would eventually cut the neighbourhood in half, diagonally, as if it were a sandwich. By the early 1960’s, most of the homes north of Beach Road in the neighbourhood had been bought or demolished to make way for facilities that could increase the company’s output by 25 percent.⁶

Dofasco’s expansion showed that relocation was not only possible, but preferable to maintain the city’s industrial growth. In 1969, the city approved a new official plan that sought to renegotiate the terms of the zoning by-law, putting more pressure on residential properties in industrial areas to move out of the way for future development. And, because of that, through the 1970’s, city council began to focus on what were termed “residential enclaves” in the Industrial Sectors.

A report from 1977 (confirmed in another from 1985) identified nine enclaves north of Barton Street: Alpha, Beatty, Biggar, the Keith, Land, Leeds (what remained of the Brightside neighbourhood), McAnulty, Rowanwood, and Stapleton. These ranged from the relatively large Keith at 527 homes to the 13 small homes along the north side of Biggar Avenue between Sherman and Lottridge.

This focus wasn’t merely out of interest for the city’s historic development patterns. Planners and public health officials began raising the alarm over dangerous truck traffic, high rates of respiratory illnesses, and the slum-like conditions of some of the homes. This was appended to the city’s desire to maintain a healthy relationship with industry and attract new industrial development where it could.

In April of 1977, council first addressed the issue of enclaves, debating whether residents stayed there because they wanted to or because they could not afford to leave due to financial burdens. Councillors almost immediately began throwing out suggestions, including landswaps on the mountain, expropriating the homes, or just leaving the issue alone.⁷

Two years later, the plan had been developed. And it drew on Dofasco’s willingness to expand a few blocks over.

***

After Dofasco cut McAnulty in half and the city passed the 1969 official plan, a directive was issued to begin buying up more homes in McAnulty. The city’s initial focus was on the homes between Ottawa Street and Woodleigh Avenue (next to the former Lloyd George School). As the city acquired the homes, they would demolish them, eventually leaving a vast, empty space in the neighbourhood. Soon after, the city would close off Wallace and Hampton Avenues, and began preparing the land for sale to any manufacturing concern interested in expansion.

The focus on enclave relocation meant that the city now had a goal to strive for. By selling the newly assembled land off Ottawa Street, the city would be able to fund the purchase of homes in the Alpha Neighbourhood. Reliance on the private market wouldn’t cut it by the dawning of the 1980’s; Alpha had seen property values tumble as it became evident the enclave was adrift and there was little municipal interest in supporting it.

This would mark the first step in a larger plan to buy every property in McAnulty, demolishing them to make way for industry. That grand scheme would eventually hit a snag when the price tag for the remaining sections of the neighbourhood ballooned to over $10,000,000 (around $42 million today). But the initial swap was, with any luck, going to set a precedent the city desperately wanted.

While the residents of McAnulty fought back with passion (74 percent of residents there wanted to remain and the fight to save the community generated considerable sympathy, even if the Spec report on the community said: “walk through the McAnulty neighbourhood and your eyes smart from the pollution”) the residents of Alpha were more open to the city’s proposal.⁷ In the years since the passing of the zoning by-law and official plan, the neighbourhood had begun clearing out. By 1981, many of the homes on Alpha Street were vacant and nearly every home on neighbouring Beta Street had been abandoned. Many former homes were purchased by speculative investors who thought they could low-ball residents, hold onto the land until the city became desperate, and then turn a healthy profit from a last-minute sale.

The remaining residents - many elderly people who moved to the community decades earlier for work - stayed because of the pride they had in their homes. For many, these modest homes were all they owned, spending decades caring for them amidst a sea of industrial development.

It was because of this that those same residents complained of persistent illnesses, high levels of pollution, and fear of fires from vacant properties. Some residents said the rumbling of trains kept them up all night. Others said they refused to leave their homes after multiple break-ins. For the right price, nearly all residents said they would move. The owner of 1 Alpha Street, which bordered the rail line, summarized the state of the neighbourhood to the Spec, saying: “The area is becoming a slum…it’s certainly not a classy neighbourhood. Houses are boarded up and the area is deteriorating.”⁹

In 1981, the city had found a buyer for their land in McAnulty, and it was exactly who they expected. Neighbouring Dofasco decided to bid on the property. One tiny snag, though, was that they were only willing to pay around $2 million for the parcel, which was $1 million less than it cost the city to buy the homes, demolish them, and do the work necessary to prepare the land for sale. Knowing they likely wouldn’t get a better offer, the city and the region approved the sale in July of 1981, but were candid about what the price tag meant. The residents of the Alpha Neighbourhood would be slowly relocated, but future enclave clearance plans would almost certainly be shelved.¹⁰

With the McAnulty sale done, the city proceeded with the Alpha relocation. In October of 1981, the city’s planning and development committee approved a $1.29 million dollar plan - dubbed the “Alpha Project” - to begin clearing the neighbourhood, starting with the northeast corner of the enclave.

While the residents were pleased with the progress, many remained skeptical about their prospects. One resident - the widow of one of the labourers identified in my survey of the workers on the street from 1940 - told the Spec she wasn’t sure where she’d go and that she’d miss her garden, even if she knew it was right to leave because she had “to go outside and wash my porch off every day because of the pollution”. One of the last residents of Beta Street said she wanted to move to the mountain, but likely wouldn’t be able to afford a home there, even with the $29,000 the city would pay for her property.¹¹

A year later, most residents had moved. A few bought homes elsewhere in Hamilton, some of the seniors had been moved to Macassa Lodge on the east mountain, and the Hamilton East Kiwanis Club found non-profit housing for those who could not afford accommodation on their own. By December of 1982, all but six homes (two vacant and four occupied) had been purchased by the city, and the municipality’s patience was running out. The city opted to shift to “stick” mode after a long period of offering the “carrot”, expropriating the last homes and completing the Alpha Project.¹²

Three years after the first phase of the Alpha Project was completed, the city was still offering the land it cleared for sale, in some cases at a huge discount. The province and federal government refused to help and regional council had stepped back from the enclave relocation program after suburban representatives balked at paying for such a Hamilton-centric policy.

In the intervening years, the city had scaled back its plan, opting to focus on case-by-case relocations in just the Alpha, Biggar, Leeds (the last remnants of Brightside), and Stapleton enclaves. The money had run dangerously dry, leaving just $300,000 in the enclave relocation pot - just enough to buy 12 more homes in the dwindling Alpha neighbourhood along Gerrard Street. There was hesitation among members of council to pay for the last dozen to go, but a chemical fire at a dump on nearby Brant Street which forced the temporary evacuation of some of Alpha’s last residents in August of 1986 helped seal the deal.¹³

Today, there are around 11 residential properties in the former Alpha Neighbourhood, which is now divided between the official city neighbourhoods of Industrial Sectors B and C. Of those, six are located on Imperial Street, bounded on the west by an auto wrecker and on the east by Green For Life, a for-profit waste management company owned by billionaire and former minor-league hockey player Patrick Dovigi, an early and consistent supporter of the Ford Family’s political ambitions.

The study

After the Alpha Project relocated most residents, the Region of Hamilton-Wentworth’s PDD commissioned a report - the very report that actually initially got me interested in the Alpha Neighbourhood.

Rather that produce a typical planning report, the PDD opted for a qualitative analysis of the well-being of former Alpha residents. One researcher was tasked with calling or visiting the relocated residents to check in on their progress and, in the words of the report, “get a better understanding of their new lifestyles.”

By the time they were purchased by the city, only 38 of the 60 homes in the northeast corner of the Alpha Neighbourhood were occupied. The tenacious researcher was able to collect data from half the former residents, with the other half either having limited English-language skills or being impossible to locate after a few years. But the data they collected was enlightening.

The mean length of tenure in Alpha was 22.1 years, with two-thirds indicating they lived in the neighbourhood for over a decade before relocation. After relocation, most residents found it easy to find new accommodations, with a small but notable minority saying the move was “difficult”. While 68 percent said their new homes were of higher quality and 42 percent said their new homes were closer to better schools, 59 percent said the Alpha Neighbourhood was closer to their work and 47 percent said Alpha was far more affordable. All that said, nearly 80 percent of the relocated residents said they were better off in their new communities.

In these questions, the researcher included an enlightening comment. Only two relocated residents said they were worse off in their new homes. The researcher goes out of their way to note that one of those respondents “faced extreme hardships prior to the relocation and never fully recovered…[blaming] expropriation for his situation” while the other simply mailed in a survey without any comment.

Despite the overall positives, 68 percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the amount of money they received from the city, though 79 percent said the city was justified in buying the homes in Alpha and that they should do it for other similar areas.

Like with any good qualitative survey, the researcher included respondent comments in an appendix that give incredible insights into the residents’ thoughts around living in Alpha, their relocation, and their lives after.

One resident told the researcher he wanted to “leave the house for his son when he died” but, when he asked his son what he’d do with the property, he said “he would sell the house for $50 just to get rid of it.” Others talked about the state of the community as it became evident Alpha wouldn’t receive any municipal support. “Pizza places wouldn’t deliver to the neighbourhood for fear of being robbed,” one relocated resident said. “If you were to bring tourists to the Alpha area they would never come back to Hamilton or Canada again,” another said. One former resident said simply: “It was hell.”¹⁴

As happy as they were to be living elsewhere, the relocated Alpha residents still complained about the lack of a concrete plan for the area, the belaboured negotiations, and the seeming inability for the city to sell the land on which their homes once stood.

All these years later, it’s hard to say if the residents would be happy or not with the state of the Alpha Neighbourhood. The streets where their homes once stood have been closed, with only curb cuts indicating where there were once public roads. Now, the neighbourhood is home to a Tim Horton’s, a sign shop, an autobody repair garage, and a joint landscaping/concrete storefront.

Some of the last remaining vacant Alpha properties - the mixed use buildings along Sherman between Imperial and Gerrard - were slowly torn down between 2007 and 2011, leaving just four original buildings. This includes 388 Sherman Avenue North, once the Italian Evangelical Church, that was, a few years ago, seized by the city for tax arrears. It received no bids at the city’s November 12, 2024 tax seizure sale.

Movement of the people

The story of the Alpha relocation is an interesting one for a number of reasons. The residents expressed an admiration for parts of their neighbourhood, but knew they would need to leave because of how unsafe the area had become. The Region took great care to study the effects of relocation, as if to justify the massive upheaval, and received the feedback they wanted. In contrast to other planned relocations, most of the residents of Alpha left willingly, even if they acknowledged there were some hardships in adjusting to life elsewhere.

The city facilitated their relocation to accommodate industrial growth that, a few short decades later has not only stopped, but is in steep decline. Now we are faced with a mounting bill for the clean-up of lands contaminated by careless industrial producers who used the city and its people before walking away or allowing themselves to be consumed by multinationals.

The story of the Alpha relocation stands in contrast to other movements of people. Proposals for mass relocations of people in Strathcona, the North End, the Keith, and McAnulty faced pushback from organized neighbours who refused to step out of the way. The constant piecemeal relocation of those Hamiltonians experiencing homelessness from their makeshift encampments has become a flashpoint in the community, fueling the rise of some of this city’s loudest and angriest right-wing aspiring politicians. The regular relocation of tenants in this city when buildings that they have made their homes for years are sold, traded, or converted has simply become a fact of life for those of us without the wealth necessary to purchase property.

That’s part of the reason why the story of Alpha is so fascinating. A community of people, moved by the state to better accommodate the growth of industry, went willingly because of their declining quality of life caused by their being abandoned by the municipality and beset by the very industries by which many of them made their livelihoods. Now, years later, that grand investment and relocation of people has left a landscape pitted with empty lots, dumps, and abandoned industrial concerns. All that remains are a few unwanted buildings and deep curb cuts on Burlington Street, reminding us of where roads once sat.

And, if for nothing else, the story of Alpha has helped me with my own relocation. It helps put into context that, as unique as my own situation may seem, it isn’t as dire or as extreme or as threatening as the situation in Alpha was for so many years. Indeed, it makes me feel just a little more connected to this city. One relocation in a long line of relocations. Alpha to Omega, A to Zed.

1  _{“Sealed Tenders” Hamilton Spectator, August 19, 1912 (Spec archive link)}

2  _{Hamilton Spectator stories: “Legacy Stabbed, Started Fight”, April 16, 1913 (link); “Girls convicted on vagrancy charges”, March 29, 1915 (link); “John Gotoff didn’t get off”, October 5, 1917 (link)}

3  _{“Atmosphere at 9 Alpha Street Rather Torrid” Hamilton Spectator, July 4, 1921 (Spec archive link).}

4  _{“Where Can Kids Play? Asks Father” Hamilton Spectator, July 24, 1968 (Spec archive link).}

5  _{“Ward Seven Zoning” Hamilton Spectator, March 7, 1946 (Spec archive link)}

6  _{“Dofasco Expansion Transforming Area” Hamilton Spectator, April 30, 1959 (Spec archive link)}

7  _{Ken Campbell. “‘Worst’ area but residents love it: Ford” Hamilton Spectator, April 18, 1977 (Spec archive link)}

8  _{Kathy Lawrence. “A neighbourhood in limbo” Hamilton Spectator, April 21, 1979 (Spec archive link)}

9  _{“Residents prepared to vacate homes” Hamilton Spectator, July 21, 1981 (Spec archive link)}

10  _{“Powell urges new land buy policy” Hamilton Spectator, July 14, 1981 (Spec archive link); Mark Hallman, “$1m loss will stall renewal, Sage says” Hamilton Spectator, July 20, 1981 (Spec archive link).}

11  _{Mark Hallman. “$1.29m to raze north end homes” Hamilton Spectator, October 15, 1981 (Spec archive link)}

12  _{“Expropriate six who won’t sell says committee” Hamilton Spectator, December 21, 1982 (Spec archive link)}

13  _{Hamilton Spectator stories: Mark Hallman. “Funds in city’s north-end buy-up program running low”, March 20, 1985 (link); “Chemical fire fumes force evacuation of 25 residents”, August 2, 1986 (link); Kevin Von Appen. “The slow death of Gerrard”, August 23, 1986 (link).}

14  _{Region of Hamilton-Wentworth Planning and Development Department. “Alpha Relocation Survey” April, 1985 (HPL link)}