…but first, a word from The Incline

WOW!

I am so incredibly humbled by the outpouring of support I’ve received from readers, friends, and family over the past week for my participation in this coming Saturday’s Pride and Remembrance Run in Toronto.

Thanks to everyone’s contributions, I’ve exceeded my fundraising goal of $500 dollars - which goes to the Sherbourne Health Centre, Sunshine Centres for Seniors, the Women’s College Hospital Foundation, and the Pride and Remembrance Foundation.

There’s still time to donate to my run this weekend and any donation over $20 will get you a tax receipt (the Pride and Remembrance Run is a registered charity in Canada). The run itself if almost at its fundraising goal, so let’s help get them past their own finish line!

And, since I’ve met my own goal, I’ll be sure to post pictures from the run in the next edition. If we get to $600, I’ll even post the unflattering ones (which will, knowing expressive old me, be most of them).

You can donate to my run by clicking the button below.

Okay, on with the newsletter!

The Strathcona Quinquennium

Neighbours

On the evening of September 3, 1947, George Bull was getting ready for another shift at work. Like so many Hamiltonians at the time, Bull was employed by the company that was the driver of Hamilton’s success and was, in many ways, the industrial engine of the region: Stelco.

Bull had an important job as the operator of one of the massive cranes that lifted and moved the staggeringly hefty “ladles” of molten steel from place-to-place in the plant. The ladles, on average, weighed around 50 metric tonnes (around 50,000 kilograms or 110,000 pounds - roughly the same weight as 83 African elephants combined). At their absolute maximum, the cranes could lift close to three times that weight. The patience, skill, and resolve of the crane operators was crucial, especially when working in sweltering conditions all through the night.

Bull’s workplace was the Number 1 Open Hearth - one of Stelco’s oldest shops. No. 1 actually pre-dated the company, having originally been a part of Hamilton Iron and Steel prior to its 1910 merger with a host of smaller metallurgical concerns to create The Steel Company of Canada or “Stelco”. The shop was opened in 1900 close to what locals called “Huckleberry Point”, due to the abundance of wildlife - particularly berries and ducks - that thrived in the marshy land close to the waters’ edge. The berries and the waterfowl would, over the next few decades, be edged out, and the name Huckleberry Point would give way to the more utilitarian designations “Piers 16 & 17” located in “Industrial Sector N”.

When it was opened, the shop was outfitted with some basic “tilting” furnaces, but was renamed the “Number 1 Open Hearth” in 1906 as the company embarked on considerable upgrades and improvements in the lead-up to, and immediate aftermath of, Stelco’s birth. In 1930, No. 1 was closed thanks to reduced revenue on account of the Great Depression, but was re-opened and expanded in 1940 when war-time demand saw a massive surge in orders for steel.

***

The steel making process - and, indeed, all industrial work - at the time brought with it the ever-present threat of workplace injury. Bull’s shop was no exception; in 1928, No. 1 was the site of a traumatic event when, shortly after midnight on November 18, cooling ingots of steel exploded after dangerous levels of different gasses built up in the molds. The explosion happened just as two workers were attempting to load the cooling ingots onto cranes for transport to another part of the shop. The workers - a crane operator and a molder - were seriously injured, even after their colleagues quickly sprung into action to get them to safety.

It’s hard to say if Bull was particularly concerned about the safety conditions at work. He began his employment with Stelco five years after the 1928 incident and, for most of the 14 years he worked at the plant, conditions were tolerable, though one of the demands of the strike in 1946 that had resulted in the recognition of the Steelworkers union was an increased focus on workplace safety.

On top of that, Bull was a healthy and energetic man. As he was preparing to head into the shop that September night, he was just a year shy of his 40th birthday. Every one of his 39 years had been spent in Hamilton. In his youth, he was a football star who occasionally dabbled in the world of rugby. But he wasn’t just sturdy and athletic; Bull was a model family man for the time.

Years earlier, Bull had married Evelyn Martin, who had moved with her family to Hamilton from Montreal in 1912. Evelyn - or Eva, as she preferred to be called - was one of nine Martin children. After settling here, the Martins didn’t stray far from Hamilton, with almost all of the nine children remaining in the immediate area. The furthest a Martin ventured from the city was to the sunny environs of Norwich, in Oxford County, around 80 kilometres southwest of Hamilton. But geography wasn’t the only way in which the family had ingratiated into Hamilton. One of Eva’s sisters, Grace, would marry a strapping young defensive tackle for the Hamilton Flying Wildcats. He would leave the club before they merged with the Hamilton Tigers to form the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, instead embarking on a political career that spanned decades. By the time he died in 2012, Grace’s husband - long-time member of Hamilton City Council for Ward 5, Reg Wheeler - would be known as one of the city’s biggest advocates, bestowed with the moniker “the Mayor of the Beach Strip”, after the community in which he and Grace made their home.

Maybe because of Eva’s large family, the Bulls opted to only have one son, George Jr. In 1941, the small family moved into the upper unit of a small multiplex in the quiet and leafy environs of the Strathcona neighbourhood.

Indeed, it was a long trek from George’s home on Napier Street to the No. 1 Open Hearth over on Wilcox Street (just a short hop from the Alpha Neighbourhood). There’s no information as to how Bull got to work, but his Napier Street home wasn’t too far from a stop on the Burlington-Westdale HSR streetcar line that would have brought him to the end of the street on which the No. 1 shop was located. It’s unlikely he could have hitched a ride from any of his neighbours; in contrast to some neighbourhoods in Hamilton at the time, Strathcona was a community where people of varying income brackets lived side-by-side. Among Bull’s Napier neighbours were welders, truckers, farmers, cigar rollers, tailors, small business owners, managers, watchmakers, and bankers.

Regardless of how he got to Stelco that day, Bull clocked in for his shift, made his way to his crane, and began work in the fleeting hours of September 3. The early portion of his shift was standard and unremarkable. Then, not long before the sun rose on September 4, a new ladle of molten steel was hooked up to Bull’s crane, and he began to winch it up.

***

The cranes were inspected daily, so no one noticed anything wrong with Bull’s machinery. The ladle he lifted was not overloaded or positioned improperly. All proper procedures, as outlined by Stelco company policy, were followed. By all accounts, everything was entirely normal. The following seconds would prove that was not the case.

While the ladle was high in the air, a single tooth on a gear in the arm section of the crane snapped off. The errant tooth became lodged in another set of gears, causing a fatal jam. This jam caused the machinery to seize, all while the ladle remained suspended in air. The tension quickly became too much and one of the cables attached to the ladle of molten steel snapped. The ladle tipped, spilling over 45,000 kilograms of molten steel on the shop floor.

On impact, there was splash back and an ignition of all flammable materials in the surrounding area. Witnesses say the flames shot 61 metres (200 feet) in the air, engulfing the entire crane and its cabin. Those same witnesses reported that Bull was able to exit the cabin and get onto the adjoining catwalk before collapsing.

Three of his coworkers ran to his aid, pulling his burning clothing from him, suffering injuries themselves. The combination of fire and molten steel had left Bull with burns to over 1/3 of his body and, unconscious, he was rushed to the General Hospital.

Doctors did what they could but the extent of the damage was too much. One day later, Bull succumbed to his injuries.

***

In a hastily convened inquest that met just a week after Bull’s death, the assembled jurors determined that what happened was a freak accident and that no fault could be assigned to Stelco, the employees on shift, or Bull himself. The whole incident, they determined, was caused by one faulty gear that gave way at the wrong time. But the inquest did recommend Stelco inspect cranes before and after each “lift”, rather than once a day, to get a better feel for the state of the equipment. Another Stelco crane operator, called upon to testify at the inquiry, reported that the company had made the decision to start doing just that immediately after the shop was reopened in the days after Bull’s death.

On the one year anniversary of his passing, Eva placed a memorial poem in the Spec that read:

Eva and her young son remained in their house on Napier until her sudden death in 1955. Orphaned just before his 16th birthday, George Jr. joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and, at age 19, found work with the company that was still the industrial engine of the region. In his adult years, he was more than just a Stelco employee; he married, raised three children, led fundraisers for local homes for adults with developmental disabilities, served as president of the local Air Force Club, and coached baseball at Alexander Park in Ainslie Wood. George Jr. lived a full life but, like his mother and father before him, he passed away well before his time, aged 58.

***

The home in which the Bulls lived was rented, having been converted into a multiplex after its sale in 1928 for $2,150.00 (the equivalent in today’s currency of $39,250). In the second year of the Great Depression, it changed hands once again, this time selling for a loss - $1,500 (today’s $29,700). The owner who snagged the property became the Bulls’ landlord, but he disposed of the house the year following George’s death, fetching $3,200 (today’s $45,300) for it.

The property changed hands infrequently over the next few decades. After being in the same hands for around 16 years, the property’s dutiful owner passed away in the early 1980’s and the house was sold for $107,000 (today’s $258,000).

***

A few years before the deed for the property changed hands hands, a young musician set off from Regina on a Kawasaki Ninja, the sport motorcycle so iconic that, for a time, “ninja” became shorthand for all bikes in the same style. His flaming red hair blowing in the wind as he sped down the TransCanada Highway, Dan “Danno” Achen knew he wanted to be in a place - a real place - where music and creativity thrived. It was no wonder, then, that he found what he was looking for in Hamilton.

On one fateful night, Achen was at the Hess Village anchor, The Gown and Gavel, when he had a chance encounter with another guitarist, Colin Cripps, who introduced him to a host of other budding musicians in the city. By 1989, Achen, Tom Wilson, Russ Wilson (it being Hamilton, there are a host of Wilsons, but none are related), and Ray Farrugia had founded Junkhouse, the iconic rock band that would achieve chart-topping success with 1993’s Out of My Head.

The band went their own ways in 1998, but, by that time, Achen had immersed himself in Hamilton’s music scene. Soon after, he found himself running Catherine North Studios, the quirky music studio in the former Church of the Redeemer at the corner of Park North and Murray West. Easing into his new role as a behind-the-scenes man in music, Achen co-produced Dallas Green’s second solo album as “City and Colour”, Bring Me Your Love, working with the former Alexisonfire frontman as he sang with Canadian legend Gord Downie. And he made time to mentor his niece as she began to make a name for herself in the music industry. The daughter of Achen’s sister, she worked closely with her “Uncle Dan” as she navigated her way through the Canadian indie music scene, establishing herself by using her last name as a mononym - Feist.

In the summer of 2000, Achen purchased that house on Napier Street, opting to live in the main floor unit and rent the top floor - likely the unit in which the Bulls lived - to help offset the cost of his mortgage. From that home, Achen was a short trip away from the studio, close to Hess Village, seemingly in the centre of the action as Hamilton established itself as a city for artists and dreamers.

Achen was, evidently, a keen, albeit casual, hockey player. In mid-March, 2010, Achen and some friends made their way into Oakville for a friendly game. In the middle of the game, Achen fell to the ice. His friends scrambled to his aid and called paramedics, but he was already gone. He had suffered a massive heart attack at age 51.

After Achen’s passing, his estate held onto the house on Napier Street for two years before finally selling it to a group of investors for $265,000.

***

140 years after it was built, 79 years after the Bull family moved in, just a hair shy of 20 years after Dan Achen bought the property, and eight years after the group of investors took it over, came May 1, 2020. The house on Napier Street had seen it all, the city growing and changing around it. It had stood through the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920 and, at that moment, was still standing in the early days of a frightening new global health crisis. And on that day, my partner and I rolled up in front of that same little house, as-of-yet unaware of the history contained within, simply happy to have a place we could share as we waited out the pandemic.

And, before we knew it, five years had passed. The name for a five-year period is, interestingly, a “quinquennium”, from the Latin “quinque” for five and “annum” for year.¹

West end naming conventions

The house on Napier Street was built in 1880 - around 100 years after the neighbourhood that would become known as Strathcona was settled by Europeans.

The area was used for millennia by Indigenous peoples in the region, though not for any kind of permanent settlement. Around 13,000 years ago, as the glaciers retreated across the land that would eventually become Ontario, they left massive lakes at their base. One of those was Lake Iroquois - in essence, an enlarged version of today’s Lake Ontario. As the waters of Lake Iroquois fell to their current levels, they carried massive amounts of sand and gravel along with them, much of which became lodged in the area we know today as the Burlington Heights. This created the unique geological formation in the city known as the Iroquois Bar (or Iroquois Sand and Gravel Bar, if you’re feeling adventurous). Atop that bar was a natural prairie, which provided neighbouring Indigenous communities with bountiful medicinal herbs, stocks of deer, and essential materials for everyday life. The elevated prairie was a welcome contrast from the rest of Hamilton’s shoreline - muddy, marshy, and teaming with insects through much of the warm season.

In 1784, the British Crown and the loyalist contingent of the Six Nations began negotiating the Between the Lakes Treaty to determine the lines of delineation between Indigenous and settler land. The treaty would eventually include six miles on either side of the Grand River (roughly) for Indigenous settlement, but leaving out their ancestral lands in Barton Township, including the Iroquois Bar. In 1791, land around the bar was granted to Captain Robert Lottridge, a prominent United Empire Loylalist who fought the American rebels valiantly before retreating to the safe haven of Upper Canada. Lottridge was unable to enjoy the lands he was granted, though, as shortly after he took possession of the land, he died.

Lottridge’s death turned out to be Richard Beasley’s opportunity. A jack-of-all-trades, Beasley was involved in an assortment of businesses in Barton Township, including a fur trading outfit, a saw mill, and a grist-milling concern. The latter two of his entanglements were located atop the Niagara Escarpment in a growing community that would later be called Ancaster. But, as spread out as he was, Beasley needed a central location from which he could dart to any investment if the need arose, especially since he had begun speculating in land around the Grand River. Seeing that nothing was happening with Lottridge’s land, Beasley set up a modest cabin, fur trading post, and wharf in the area where Dundurn Castle is today.

Years passed and Beasley repeatedly made and lost considerable sums of money. During one of his “boom” periods, he built a brick house on his land, which was officially granted to him on account of his having “squatter’s rights” in 1798. During the War of 1812, his land was seized for military purposes and it was there, on a summer day in 1814, Beasley got a front row seat to one of the darkest moments in the city’s history. Eight men, suspected of aiding the invading American army, were quickly tried, found guilty, and executed. Their heads were lobbed off, affixed to poles, and were displayed in neighbouring settlements as a reminder of how seriously the crown took the crime of high treason. Their bodies were buried in hastily-prepared graves, roughly near the intersection of today’s Inchbury and Techumseh streets.

If Beasley was worried about spectral visits from accused traitors, he didn’t need to dwell on the possible hauntings for long. By all accounts, Beasley was a man who always stretched himself too thin and tended to run with the wrong crowds at the worst possible times. In 1800, his real estate dealings around the Grand River went sideways, resulting in the loss of some of his land. Then, after the War of 1812, Beasley fell in with a group of radical Reformers (precursors to today’s Liberals). These Reformers convinced Beasley to not only attend their convention in York (today’s Toronto), but elected him president of the whole proceeding. Colonial authorities didn’t like the look of his affiliation and stripped him of his post of regional magistrate. Convinced he would still get a big payout from business affairs, his “lending” his land to the military, and from his time as a local politician, Beasley began extensive renovations on his house. By 1830, he was in thousands of pounds of debt and unable to find a way out. Creditors seized his lands and sold them to an eager up-and-coming young Tory politician named Allan Napier MacNab, who wanted a prime piece of Hamilton real estate on which he could build a sprawling mansion. And the fact that he was able to swipe a piece of land from a radical Reformer must have just been the icing on the cake for ol’ Al.

***

For over 100 years, the area in question was known simply as “The West End”, given its falling at the western edge of the City of Hamilton’s limits. Indeed, the name “Strathcona” wasn’t anywhere near local parlance until shortly before World War 1.

And that’s because, in 1909, Donald Smith decided to give away a little bit of his fortune.

***

Smith was born in Scotland, but, at age 18, moved to Canada to begin work with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Over the next few decades, the ambitious and intelligent Smith worked his way through the company’s ranks to become its commissioner and principal shareholder. On top of that, he ran the Bank of Montreal, co-founded the Canadian Pacific Railway, personally negotiated with Louis Riel and the Red River Colonists, was elected to both the Manitoba legislature and Parliament at the same time, and is the man photographed hammering “the last spike” into the trans-Canada railroad in one of this country’s most iconic pictures.

Because of his prowess, keen mind, and rather Forrest Gump-ian ability to be close by during Canada’s formative historical moments, Sir Mackenzie Bowell selected him personally to be his replacement as Prime Minister in 1896. Smith ultimately refused that offer, meaning that the country’s highest office went to the next best option, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom (basically the ambassador) Sir Charles Tupper. Tupper, happy to have had the path to the Prime Ministership cleared for him, gave Smith his old job. Tupper promptly then lost the 1896 election to Wilfrid Laurier. The new Prime Minister was equally happy with Smith for ensuring his opponent in the election was the ineffectual and uncharismatic Tupper, so he kept Smith as the High Commissioner.

The next year, as part of her Diamond Jubilee, Queen Victoria honoured Smith with a “peerage” in the United Kingdom. The Queen decided that Smith should become a Baron, and Barons are always designated according to the lands that have been “granted” to them. In Smith’s case, he was named the Baron of Mount Royal, in Montreal, and Glen Coe, in Scotland. Glen Coe is, as the name suggests, a “glen” - a long valley, characterized by swiftly sloping mountain sides that fall gracefully into a bucolic Scotch forest. But, unlike other glens, Glen Coe tapers off, with the valley slope growing more and more gradual as one passes through it. It does this until the geological formation changes into a more sparsely wooded and gentle pass which, in the Scots dialect, is called a “strath”.

Smith, ever the innovator, created a new word for his lands that was added to his official title, thinking “Glen Coe” didn’t quite suit his needs. Thus, Donald Smith became the “1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal”. But regular people came to know him simply as the “Lord Strathcona”, cementing Smith’s linguistic creation into the minds of Canadians forever.

***

As the world lurched deeper into the 20th Century, the ever-present threat of war hung over the heads of Canadians. The modest Canadian involvement in the Second Boer War, which concluded in 1902, seemed to many prescient minds like a prelude to a larger conflict.

Top among these minds was the aging Lord Strathcona. The issue of military preparedness evidently weighed heavily on the High Commissioner - so much so that, in March of 1909, he established a fund worth $250,000 (around $7 million today) that would be distributed over the years to, as a report in the Spec noted:

Strathcona recommended the creation of committees to oversee the youth military training comprised primarily of members of the armed forces with some contribution for local civilians. “My object is not only to help to improve the physical and intellectual capabilities of the children by inculcating habits of alertness, orderliness and prompt obedience,” he wrote in a letter to the Canadian government, “but also to bring up the boys to patriotism and to a realization that the first duty of a free citizen if to be prepared to defend his country.” The proposal was so popular that the motion to accept Strathcona’s gift was moved by Liberal Prime Minister Laurier and seconded by Conservative opposition leader Robert Borden.

Hamilton’s school trustees were borderline ecstatic at the gift. At their meeting on April 10, 1909 the trustees rushed a motion to the floor that would rename the “model school” (meaning a school that featured a significant contingent of what we today would call “student teachers”) on Sophia Street after Strathcona.

The Sophia Street school was named for the eponymous roadway onto which it fronted. And that roadway ran along the western edge of Victoria Park.

The motion was quickly ruled out of order, as the board chair determined a “notice of motion” was needed to give trustees and the public a chance to discuss the proposal. A month later, the board reconvened and officially voted to rename the Sophia Street School, settling on the “Strathcona Model School” as their final choice.

***

Seven years later, with many of the youth who benefited from Strathcona’s military training in the trenches of Europe, an entirely expected wave of nationalist fervour settled on Hamilton. This vigourous patriotism meant that the city’s public works committee became fixated on a small street two blocks east of Gage Avenue. The street, that began at Primrose Avenue, crossed Barton, and carried on north before ending near the rail line, had the misfortune of being named “Berlin Avenue”. The committee resolved to rename the offending avenue, but took it upon themselves to consider other streets in Hamilton that could use with a refresh. At some juncture, a suggestion was made to scrap the name “Sophia Street” - possibly because there were a handful of “Sophies” and “Sophias” peppered throughout the royal families of Germany and Austria-Hungary at the time - and honour Lord Strathcona, who died two years prior.

On September 11, 1916, the city’s public works committee voted to change the name of Berlin Avenue to Cavell Avenue, and to rename Sophia Street to Strathcona Avenue. The vote was made official when the name change was so ordered by a local judge in early December of that year.

Despite the change, the area as a whole still wasn’t considered “Strathcona” until the 1970’s. During the urban renewal debates for the downtown, proposals were floated for the wholesale regeneration of what was initially called the “York Street-Strathcona” neighbourhood. The first reference to a “Strathcona” neighbourhood on its own came in 1971, during a tense planning board meeting where councillors and planning officials debated the city’s overall urban renewal scheme. The concept of a neighbourhood called “Strathcona” was so unfamiliar to Spec readers that the paper felt the need to include a description of the community: “north of Main Street West to the harbour, between Highway 403 and Queen Street.”²

Associating in the neighbourhood

Soon, Strathcona was all anyone in Hamilton could talk about. The planning commission began pursuing the expansion of York Street to create a new “super road” with a 36.6 metre (120 foot) right-of-way. In anticipation of this, the commission launched a planning study of Strathcona. Residents organized to push back, forming the “York Opposition Union” or YOU (a decidedly clever acronym). YOU began protesting at City Hall, which seemed to have little impact on members of council who voted to move ahead with the widening of York.

While the group began preparing an appeal at the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), they also took up the cause of Strathcona residents who were concerned about heavy truck traffic along York, which had increased dramatically and created an unsafe and unappealing streetscape for neighbours and pedestrians.

Finding little sympathy at City Hall, YOU opted to take their message to the streets in a dramatic way. On the night of Tuesday, August 29, 1972, a sizable contingent of YOU supporters - 70 in total - erected barricades along York at Queen and Locke, picketing and handing leaflets to confused motorists. Hamilton Police stepped in quickly to wrestle the protesting residents from in front of trucks, though the direct action still lasted for over an hour.

The group called off the protest after a few days, opting to put their energy into fighting the York expansion at the OMB. They evidently became so focused on that effort that, despite 1972 being a municipal election year, the group was unable to run a candidate of their own or influence the candidates in the race, leading to the election of two conservative candidates to the available aldermanic seats in Ward 1.

But YOU kept up their efforts against road widening, staying in the fight for the long years of back-and-forth at the OMB. In March of 1974, they again launched a protest, this time against the widening itself. Attended by provincial NDP leader Stephen Lewis, the demonstration brought 200 people out in opposition to the plan to expand York. The rally saw all of Strathcona Avenue, from the school to York, crammed with people, listening as Lewis said “It doesn’t take much intelligence to know that you cannot drive a highway right through a neighbourhood without providing homes to the people.” Some of the young participants decided a rally wasn’t enough, and ran into the street for an impromptu blockade, linking arms and singing “Solidarity Forever”, until being forcibly moved by police.

That April and May, the OMB heard YOU’s appeal of the York plan, but sided with the city. YOU struck back, pledging to appeal to the provincial cabinet and going so far as to take out ads in the Spec seeking the help of a journalist “to do the research and write a book” that they suggested be called “The Truth About York Street”. No such book was ever written and, in September of 1974, the provincial cabinet finally gave the widening of York the go-ahead, resulting in what would eventually become today’s York Boulevard.

***

YOU tried to remain active, launching a coup against the executive of a kind-of neighbourhood association in the area, the Victoria Park and Northwest Community Organization (VPNCO). The VPNCO, launched in 1971 after the United Church brought a social worker to the Strathcona-area to help with lingering social issues, made worse by the city’s stalled plans around York that led to falling property values and an increase in the prevalence of slumlord-managed homes. The person they brought in, Reverend Gary Quart, hit the ground running, quickly turning the VPNCO into a leading social service provider in the west end. In a few short years, the VPNCO had bought housing, begun providing rent subsidies, published a local newspaper, ran community events, operated a legal aid and social assistance clinic, and offered Italian-to-English translation services.

That isn’t to say that VPNCO wasn’t without its issues. There were concerns in the community about the organization’s lack of fiscal transparency and its inability to hold a promised meeting where a neighbourhood-led executive could be elected. Others critiqued Quart for an apparent attempt to infringe on the editorial independence of the organization’s newspaper, the Community Forum, and his tendency to “forget” things like financial statements and bills. On the flip side, the members of YOU and some more militant neighbours believed VPNCO should have been leading the fight to oppose the widening of York and that the group should have been more radical in their approach to social issues in the community.

The coup resulted in Quart and the paid executive of VPNCO walking out of a hastily-convened convention as the group descended into chaos. A group of neighbourhood members assumed control over the “community association” side of the organization while the paid executive quickly spun off its assets, incorporating under the name Victoria Park Community Homes and starting the “Strathcona Community Project” as a parallel community association to the VPNCO. The saga resulted in the decision by the federal government to rescind $70,000 worth of funding for the organization and a less-than-flattering write up in the Spec under the headline “Victoria Park in revolt”.

Quart’s contingent eventually won out, as the VPNCO rebels were unable to make any headway. In a few short years, the Strathcona Community Project became the responsibility of a new Community Development Ministry of the United Church which, in 1980, merged with other organizations to become Wesley Urban Ministries, led by Quart.

***

No real community group emerged from the rubble of the YOU/VPNCO fight in the 1970’s. Not until 1994 did Strathcona get the “Strathcona Community Council” (SCC), a group formed originally to oppose construction of a 27-storey apartment at the corner of Queen and Market streets. It puttered along without much activity until 2003, when it was formally reconstituted to oppose the Good Shepherd development at King and Pearl.

After a ruling by the OMB in 2004 cleared the way for the development, the SCC vowed to bring the fight to the courts. The SCC’s spokesperson, as identified by the Spec was Carol Lazich, who would go on to become one of the leading voices in opposition to Hamilton’s LRT plan a decade later (during her 2018 city council campaign, Lazich accidentally emailed municipal candidates her plan to distribute anti-LRT propaganda in an effort to influence the vote - she placed third with 12% of the vote).

Like the York widening before it, the Good Shepherd plan went forward anyway.

After the battle over social housing subsided, the group changed membership and, by 2014, became a leading force opposing the big-box style redevelopment of the King and Dundurn Shoppers/Tim Hortons complex, pushing for a more community-oriented design and a promise to replace homes on Head Street with new housing.

Then, in 2023, I became the chair of the SCC.³

A quinquennium for the ages

As I packed up our little unit in the top floor of that duplex on Napier, I got to thinking about all the history there was around me. I got to live atop my little hill - the Iroquois Bar - for five years, surrounded by so much of Hamilton’s heritage. I could see the spot in Victoria Park where the future King Edward VII took in the sites and sounds (and, undoubtedly, smells) of Hamilton’s agricultural fair as he made his way to the Crystal Palace for a banquet held in his honour (see the Incline archive: Children of the Plume). I walked by the spot at Locke and Peter where future cabinet minister Ellen Fairclough struck a man with her car (see the Incline archive: Shut Up and Drive). I knew where all the old hotels and factories and grocery stores in the neighbourhood were (for the latter, see the Incline archive: The Supermarket Sweep).

I lived in a house that was inhabited by countless people and families - the Bulls and Dan Achen included - that were connected to so much good work in politics and music and culture in Hamilton. That humble house with the expansive yard and south-facing windows and sturdy radiators had seen the city grow and change and shift over 145 years, and I got to call it my home.

I had lived in a community named for a school that was renamed in the honour of someone who paid good money to put rifles in the hands of children. I lived on a street named for Sir Allan MacNab’s maternal family, on land he bought from a man whose claim to it amounted to “finders keepers” - land that was, itself, claimed by the crown, who denied access to the people who used it for millennia, and then given to an aging soldier from a war they lost. That was a community where accused traitors had been executed, civic leaders had resided, fireworks factories had exploded, palatial estates had been built, and tiny workers cottages had been lovingly cared for by their inhabitants.

I had come to chair a community group that, at points in its past, both opposed and supported housing, and that could trace its lineage back to a group organized to provide social services and another committed to preventing the destruction of York.

I found community, reveled in the history, and helped make a home in a place I came to truly care about. And then, just before my 35th birthday, my partner and I found ourselves needing to pack up and relocate, leaving behind that place and beginning again close by.

As I look forward to the next five years and to what kind of reflection I’ll write on the eve of my 40th birthday, I don’t know where I’ll be or what kind of history I’ll uncover along the way. But I can say that, no matter what happens, I won’t forget George, Eva, Dan, or any of the neighbours I had in the five years I spent on Napier Street. And I can say without hesitation that I’m happy to have had my Strathcona quinquennium.

1  This section came from years of research and archival work. In contrast to my normal habit of citing each source, here’s a compressed citation list - Spec archival pieces 19/11/28, 6/9/47 pg. 7-8, 6/9/47 pg. 20, 13/9/47, 4/9/48, 10/11/53, 18/11/53, 30/11/55, 8/9/67, 4/8/98, 15/9/23; HPL Vernon’s Directories 1941, 1947; Achen articles from Exclaim! 16/3/10 and the CBC 17/3/10; ON Land Title Search.

2  Citations for this section include - Spec archival pieces 25/3/09, 10/4/09, 14/5/09, 11/9/16, 6/12/16, 22/4/70, 20/8/71, 22/10/71; Aikman, Murray (ed.). Strathcona Remembers. W.L. Griffin Publishing Ltd. 1984; Melville Bailey, T. (ed.) Dictionary of Hamilton Biography Vol. 1. W.L. Griffin Publishing Ltd. 1981.

3  Citations for this section include - Spec archival pieces 11/2/72, 7/3/72, 3/8/72, 30/8/72, 1/9/72, 27/11/72, 29/3/74, 24/5/74, 28/6/74, 28/9/74, 2/12/74, 21/12/74, 15/2/75, 8/3/75, 10/5/75, 16/7/94, 21/2/03, 13/4/04, 4/4/14.