The Tale of a Middle City

Except for a half-dozen years living in the east coast of Canada during my ‘discover myself’ period of the 70’s, I’ve lived in the same city for all of my 58 years.  I was born here.  My family is here.  My friends are here.  My familiarity is here.

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada is a mid-sized heavy industrial town of just over 300,000 people, located in south-central Canada, an hour away from Niagara Falls and the corridor into northern New York state through Buffalo, 3 hours from the Windsor/Detroit border and the bridge into the U.S. midwest, and an hour down the highway from Toronto, Canada – one of the country’s larger cities.  It’s very much a middle city, in between everything, but not really a part of anything.  The city steadfastly maintains its individuality, declaring its non-American identity, struggling to be the ‘other’ town down the road from the bulging metropolis of Toronto, Canada.  Hamilton is different.  It has its steel mills – two giants, one union, one non-union (something for everyone) – industries which maintain control over the local economy, the people and their way of life.  And, as a complete enigma to the heavy, dirty, 3-shift, lunch bucket inner city, there is the beauty of a geological anomaly, the Niagara Escarpment, a 300-foot high plateau which curls around the end of the Lake Ontario, where Hamilton sits, winding through the middle of the city, creating panoramic views, natural habitats (many, part of a protected world biosphere), waterfalls, precipice caverns, canyons and a plethora of natural beauties as the height of the land meets the end of one of Canada’s five Great Lakes.  Hamilton is very much a unique city – not big enough to be a major heavy-industrial power, too close to Toronto to be a choice for artistic, hi-tech or media-related endeavours, and too industrialized to be part of the surrounding farm communities or to take full advantage of the natural geographic beauty of its location.  Hamilton is very much a middle city – not quite this, not quite that.  And in my 58 years on Mother Earth, I’d have to say that other than a few newer sub-divisions in the outer edges of the city, there’s not a street, an address, or an area of this town that I don’t have full knowledge of its people, its customs, its habits and its history.

My childhood was spent in the lower middle-class area of the city’s outskirts – a few houses along one side of the road (tar and gravel, as a child), across the road from a multi-acre working farm, complete with all the usual things – cows, corn, wheat and one incredible hay loft that became my home till puberty hit.  Every morning the entire outskirts of the city would funnel down the escarpment, to the steel mills, to International Harvester, Otis Elevator, National Steel Car, the Studebaker plant (yes, we made the “Studebaker Lark” in Hamilton).  And every night at five, back up the hill they’d come, with the same regularity of the migrating birds that visit the surrounding swamps and marshlands at the end of the lake in the west end of the city.  As soon as I became of age, I took my place with everyone else, in the machine shops, covering myself daily with dirt and grease, becoming ‘at one’ with enormous mechanical devices that, to this day, cause my eyes to open wide with wonder.  Those were good days and Hamilton was very much a part of its motto of:  “Hamilton, the Ambitious City”.  The folks from the much larger, high-end city of Toronto would trot down the highway, attracted by the abundance of work, the rock bottom real estate prices and the natural geographic beauty of the surroundings to offer investment opportunities to the town.  But each offer was given the same answer – this is what is, and the city will do very well on its own, thank-you very much.  Foreign Megagiants that eyed our steel industries were given the same answers.  What we have works well for us.  We are happy with it.  And if you are not, then you can always leave.  And these words rang out in all corners of the city, as it installed its cultural barriers, its economic walls to protect its identity and its individuality.  If you don’t like our city, you can always leave.  The ambitious city was very proud of itself, and during those years, quite rightly so.

But things change.  The world speeds up.  The steel, that was such a part of the city, began to be replaced by plastic, aluminum and silicon.  And although the city’s people remained adamant about keeping their identity, the strength of that identity began to show its weaknesses.  Those long-echoed words of ‘if you don’t like it, you can leave’ rang prophetic, as that is just what people began to do.  The businesses began to leave, as it just became too difficult to elicit change within the limits of a city determined.  The flow of traffic in the morning changed direction as traffic funneled out of town in the morning to new jobs in Toronto and other much smaller (but rapidly growing) surrounding communities, to return back at 5 p.m. to the now empty streets and parking lots.  Now, it was dandelions and crabgrass that fought for room in the parking lots of the steel giants.  The turn-of-the-century angelstone in the city’s core was now patched with sheets of plywood.  And as each new investor looked at the expanses of vacant and abandoned serviced land, attempting to prop things up before they fell for the last time, the dire needs of the now-decaying city drove away any attempts at improvement.

People are still here.  The registered population has actually risen from 300,000 to now over 500,000.  But that is only because the city forcibly annexed scores of surrounding communities – communities who lost their court battle.  I’m still here.  My family is still here.  I still have friends in every corner of the city.  But most of the people I’ve known over the years have left.  As people began taking morning trains out of town to work, each week, the trains would return at 5 p.m. with a few less people on them, as folks found new homes close to their new jobs.  As more businesses left the area, the flow of people out of the city became the city’s new identity.

But I’m still here.  I expect I’ll be buried here somewhere.  I love my hometown.  But as I look out my window at the trees, now bare of leaves, I can feel a strange symmetry with the streets below.  There’s an echo now where there’s not been one before.  There’s still people walking the streets, talking to each other.  There’s still the same feeling that this city is different, that it’s somewhere in the middle, not quite this, not quite that.  The escarpment still cuts a path through the center of the city.  There’s still the familiarity of the city and its traditions amongst the people who live here.  And occasionally, there’s even a new face, a new idea, a new attempt to curb the stagnation.  But in the middle of it all, no longer do you hear anyone say:  “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”  Because we know now.  We’ve learned – at least, a little.

D. Berryman

November 13, 2008