C M Y

THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR l THE SPEC.COM SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013 BA5

GAGE TO OTTAWA

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Barton St. E.Barton St. E.

SOURCE: 1962 VERNON’S CITY OF HAMILTON DIRECTORY Steve Buist, Dean Tweed // THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR

m0 100

THEN: Street-level usage in 1962

CommercialVacant / Unknown Institutional ResidentialMAP KEY

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Barton St. E.

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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 UnionNow: Vacant

946 BARTON ST. E. 50 years ago: Martin's Sports Town GrillNow: Purple Pear Restaurant

1038-40 BARTON ST. E. 50 years ago: Piccadilly HouseNow: Vacant (under construction)

1015 BARTON ST. E. 50 years ago: Beaver LumberNow: Flea market / banquet hall

NOW: Street-level usage today

m0 100

InstitutionalCommercialResidential

Vacant / Unknown*

MAP KEY

“This was a nightmare for me. “Ittook me three days in court with thepolice to shut this place down.”

That’s Barton Street. Two steps for-ward, one back. One forward, twoback.

He worries about each business theway a parent frets over a child.

He stops in front of one ethnic foodbusiness. A competitor has justopened a big new store in another partof the city, and Morelli is concerned itcould drag enough customers awaythat the Barton Street shop would haveto close.

“I could end up with a bedsheet overthis building and, quite frankly, it wor-ries me,” Morelli said.

A few blocks further east, he pointsto 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 teapotfor an area that has far bigger problemsto 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 Spectatorcolumnist Paul Benedetti once de-scribed it, “his sign still hangs forlornlyabove the store, hopelessly advertisingSyd Silver formal wear to a streetwhere 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. — thedecrepit storefront owned by Rev. Vin-cent Kim Van Toan, a Roman Catholicpriest from Vietnam.

A Spectator investigation last yearrevealed the slumlike conditions of twoapartments 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, routinelymonitoring alleys, parking lots and thebacks of buildings for graffiti or piles ofgarbage.

“I harp away at city staff to at leastkeep the areas clean,” said Morelli.“The least we can do is sweep it.

“If we have to deal with prostitutionand we have to deal with dilapidatedbuildings, fine, we still need to keep itclean.”

That sums up Barton Street in ratherdiscouraging fashion.

Prostitution? Dilapidated buildings?Wretched storefronts that hide derelictapartments?

Or pulling weeds from parking lotsand 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 gohome, you can do that. I can’t.

“Anyone that’s going to come at youwith this magical panacea that ‘I’ve gotthe solution,’ then show it to me and I’llstep 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 dothat.”

The business promoterYou can learn a lot about what’s hap-pened to Hamilton — good and bad —by simply looking at what’s happenedto Barton Street in the span of just twoor 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 helpedhasten the flight of businesses fromBarton Street and Hamilton’sdowntown.

There was the mass popularity of theautomobile, followed by the develop-ment of large suburban malls. Thencame the steady decline of the reliableindustrial jobs that once proliferatedon Hamilton’s waterfront.

“Everyone knows that, right?”Wonch said. “It’s not business in gen-eral or poverty that started the decay ofthe business districts.

“Did businesses just leave and didthey just shut down for no reason? No,”Wonch added.

“If it took over 30 years for it to havemajor issues, it’s going to take time torenew 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 torenew this street.”

All three factors became intertwinedover time.

Well-paying blue-collar jobs allowedfamilies to buy a vehicle and move tothe suburbs.

The advent of malls with free park-ing meant those families didn’t need toreturn to the core to shop. Everythingthey needed was under one climate-controlled roof.

One standard-sized Walmart Super-centre now has about the same floorspace as 100 or so of the shops thatlined 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 attheir peak.

Add them up and in the course of notmuch more than a generation, nearly25,000 jobs were lost from the compa-nies on and around Hamilton’s indus-trial waterfront — enough to support100,000 people.

That also doesn’t count the spinoffjobs, such as those that once gracedBarton Street and catered to thoseworkers and their families.

“This is where the working-classfamily could live and the breadwinnercould walk to work at the steel mills orin the port lands or whatever,” saidGlen Norton, Hamilton’s manager ofurban renewal.

“As those jobs left, so, too, did thepeople living down there.”

The street left behind is now at oddswith its historic purpose.

“Now you have an issue of a verylong street, all of it designated commer-cial,” said Norton.

“A whole bunch of commercial spaceopportunities for not nearly as manypeople living there.

“As a secondary thing, the spendingpower of the people who are livingthere is not what it might be elsewherein the city.

“So they’re not buying as much andthey’re not spending as much,” Nortonadded, “and there’s nothing there as faras 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 thebalance between commercial and resi-dential use on Barton Street.

“What would be that right balance?”Norton asked himself.

HAMILTO

N PUBLIC LIBRARY, SPECIAL CO

LLECTION

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The south side of Barton at Ottawa Street, 1953.

SCOTT GARDN

ER, THE HAMILTO

N SPECTATO

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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 MANNINGOWNER, SANDIE’S FRESH CUT FRIES

‘It worries me’ continued from // BA4

BARTON ST. E.A CODE RED PROJECT