C M Y THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR l THE SPEC.COM SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013 BA5 GAGE TO OTTAWA 1 Kensington Ave. N. Rosslyn Ave. N. Balmoral Ave. N. Grosvenor Ave. N. Ottawa St. N. Cavell Ave. Glendale Ave. N. Belview Ave. Gordon St. Lincoln St. Gage Ave. N. Cavell Ave. Avondale St. Barton St. E. Barton St. E. SOURCE: 1962 VERNON’S CITY OF HAMILTON DIRECTORY Steve Buist, Dean Tweed // THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR m 0 100 THEN: Street-level usage in 1962 Commercial Vacant / Unknown Institutional Residential MAP KEY Kensington Ave. N. Rosslyn Ave. N. Balmoral Ave. N. Grosvenor Ave. N. Ottawa St. N. Barton St. E. Lincoln St. Gage Ave. N. Cavell Ave. Glendale Ave. N. Belview Ave. Avondale St. Barton St. E. SOURCE: Property usage information obtained by visual inspection during Fall-Winter 2012/13. Property usage identifies street-level usage only. Usage may have changed prior to publication. Steve Buist, Dean Tweed // THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR *Usage of some properties has been classified as unknown because usage could not be confirmed. 928 BARTON ST. E. 50 years ago: Stelco Employees Credit Union Now: Vacant 946 BARTON ST. E. 50 years ago: Martin's Sports Town Grill Now: Purple Pear Restaurant 1038-40 BARTON ST. E. 50 years ago: Piccadilly House Now: Vacant (under construction) 1015 BARTON ST. E. 50 years ago: Beaver Lumber Now: Flea market / banquet hall NOW: Street-level usage today m 0 100 Institutional Commercial Residential Vacant / Unknown* MAP KEY “This was a nightmare for me. “It took me three days in court with the police to shut this place down.” That’s Barton Street. Two steps for- ward, one back. One forward, two back. He worries about each business the way a parent frets over a child. He stops in front of one ethnic food business. A competitor has just opened a big new store in another part of the city, and Morelli is concerned it could drag enough customers away that the Barton Street shop would have to close. “I could end up with a bedsheet over this building and, quite frankly, it wor- ries me,” Morelli said. A few blocks further east, he points to an auto repair garage he says was be- ing hassled by the city over a sign issue. To Morelli, it was a tempest in a teapot for an area that has far bigger problems to worry about. “And if he leaves,” Morelli moans, “I’ve got another pair of curtains here, right?” There’s the long-closed Nick Cascia- no’s Custom Tailor, where, as Spectator columnist Paul Benedetti once de- scribed it, “his sign still hangs forlornly above the store, hopelessly advertising Syd Silver formal wear to a street where the party is long over.” Benedetti wrote that in 2008. Five years later, the store is still closed and the sign still hangs there, just as forlorn now as it was then. There’s 628-630 Barton St. E. — the decrepit storefront owned by Rev. Vin- cent Kim Van Toan, a Roman Catholic priest from Vietnam. A Spectator investigation last year revealed the slumlike conditions of two apartments inside the shabby building owned by Kim. Now it’s on the city’s va- cant building registry. So it goes, block after block. Morelli wears out plenty of shoe leather on Barton Street, routinely monitoring alleys, parking lots and the backs of buildings for graffiti or piles of garbage. “I harp away at city staff to at least keep the areas clean,” said Morelli. “The least we can do is sweep it. “If we have to deal with prostitution and we have to deal with dilapidated buildings, fine, we still need to keep it clean.” That sums up Barton Street in rather discouraging fashion. Prostitution? Dilapidated buildings? Wretched storefronts that hide derelict apartments? Or pulling weeds from parking lots and hauling garbage out of alleyways? Where do you start? “I can’t get discouraged,” said Morel- li. “If you want to wrap it up and go home, you can do that. I can’t. “Anyone that’s going to come at you with this magical panacea that ‘I’ve got the solution,’ then show it to me and I’ll step aside,” he said. “For me, I believe we have to work to- gether to correct this, but I’m also tell- ing you there’s no magic panacea to do that.” The business promoter You can learn a lot about what’s hap- pened to Hamilton — good and bad — by simply looking at what’s happened to Barton Street in the span of just two or three generations. Shelly Wonch is the executive direc- tor of the Barton Village Business Im- provement Area. It doesn’t take her long to rattle off three significant factors that helped hasten the flight of businesses from Barton Street and Hamilton’s downtown. There was the mass popularity of the automobile, followed by the develop- ment of large suburban malls. Then came the steady decline of the reliable industrial jobs that once proliferated on Hamilton’s waterfront. “Everyone knows that, right?” Wonch said. “It’s not business in gen- eral or poverty that started the decay of the business districts. “Did businesses just leave and did they just shut down for no reason? No,” Wonch added. “If it took over 30 years for it to have major issues, it’s going to take time to renew it. “Sometimes people are a bit impa- tient and I understand why, but it is go- ing to take us some time and real plan- ning and many community partners to renew this street.” All three factors became intertwined over time. Well-paying blue-collar jobs allowed families to buy a vehicle and move to the suburbs. The advent of malls with free park- ing meant those families didn’t need to return to the core to shop. Everything they needed was under one climate- controlled roof. One standard-sized Walmart Super- centre now has about the same floor space as 100 or so of the shops that lined Barton Street. Then the jobs dried up and the com- panies disappeared. Studebaker, International Harvest- er, Dominion Glass, Firestone, Wes- tinghouse — all gone. The two major steelmakers and sev- eral smaller steel companies that man- aged to survive now employ a tiny frac- tion of the workforce they employed at their peak. Add them up and in the course of not much more than a generation, nearly 25,000 jobs were lost from the compa- nies on and around Hamilton’s indus- trial waterfront — enough to support 100,000 people. That also doesn’t count the spinoff jobs, such as those that once graced Barton Street and catered to those workers and their families. “This is where the working-class family could live and the breadwinner could walk to work at the steel mills or in the port lands or whatever,” said Glen Norton, Hamilton’s manager of urban renewal. “As those jobs left, so, too, did the people living down there.” The street left behind is now at odds with its historic purpose. “Now you have an issue of a very long street, all of it designated commer- cial,” said Norton. “A whole bunch of commercial space opportunities for not nearly as many people living there. “As a secondary thing, the spending power of the people who are living there is not what it might be elsewhere in the city. “So they’re not buying as much and they’re not spending as much,” Norton added, “and there’s nothing there as far as commercial that would attract a re- gional shopper or someone from an- other part of the city.” It’s clear the city has to change the balance between commercial and resi- dential use on Barton Street. “What would be that right balance?” Norton asked himself. HAMILTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS The south side of Barton at Ottawa Street, 1953. SCOTT GARDNER, THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR Ottawa Street at Barton, 2013. Lost jobs, suburban malls haven’t helped. No interest continues // BA6 “There’s always hope. This is Hamilton. We’re a tough breed.” SANDIE MANNING OWNER, SANDIE’S FRESH CUT FRIES ‘It worries me’ continued from // BA4 BARTON ST. E. A CODE RED PROJECT