Seeing the City

Before the fall of the World Trade Centre in ’01, there was a poster on the 110th floor of one of the towers that read It’s hard to be down, when you’re up.  The irony of such a statement has painfully proven itself wrong in the physical sense, but there are other implications that come with towering above a city, and what that implies for those under foot. In relation to Hamilton, I was up in the sense that I used to live on the Hamilton Mountain, but on the inside, I was down as I was detached from the heart of the city.  

I write this post to those who don’t frequent the downtown Hamilton area, not to condemn, but to highlight what was missing from my own everydayness lived out on the mountain.
About a year ago, my family sold our house on the Hamilton hill and bought a house downtown, to be closer to the center of the city.  I can’t tell you what great things it has done for us, despite the array of confusion received from family members.  My life experience on the mountain was secluded.  I had to get in my car if I wanted to go anywhere and that was usually to Limeridge Mall.  It was this dissatisfaction of my everyday routines that lead me to move downtown.  I often thought that Hamilton, like many other cities in the GTA, didn’t have a core to the city.  For me, downtown Hamilton was nothing more than a drive-thru to get some place else.  How very wrong I was and how very much is changing in my understanding Hamilton. 

Being downtown has freed me from seclusion.  It means I can walk to the center of the city, if only to stare at the fountain in Gore Park.  It means I can walk to the bank, the market, and the library, or check out a couple shops I’m getting to know on King St.  It means I’m getting outside and interacting with many individuals in ways that weren’t possible before.   
In the past 7 months, I’ve met quite a few welcoming neighbours on our street.  The entire area seems to be undergoing a transformation that’s had a unifying effect on all of us.  Everyone here has a story - a conscious reason why they live here. We’ve met a handful of people who came from Toronto and commute to work every morning.  We’ve met others who moved downtown because of the architectural beauty and construction of the homes.  The house to our immediate left is rented by one of the hardest working single moms of two I have ever met.  She also takes pride in the house she rents, and cares for it as her own.  There’s a current of change that my family has been caught up in and I wonder if we would’ve missed it, had we stayed on the mountain. 

Despite my new found love for downtown Hamilton living, I often hike up the Wentworth Stairs to catch a glimpse of the city from above.  There’s a certain illusion of empowerment that comes with seeing the city from its plateau; like a Celestial Eye with all-seeing powers, I can sum up the city in one quick glance.  It temporarily makes the complex readable. It’s a very different view though, one I would argue is incomplete and inaccurate.  As Warren Breckman said, when a city is seen from on high, “Its unruliness is tidied by distance, its mobility is captured in a frieze, its impact on all five senses is reduced to disembodied vision, and will always be different from the city viewed in the street, amid people, and buildings.”  To further explain this concept, think of a film that opens with a cityscape.  The camera will show the city from a distance, but has to zoom in to street level to tell the story.
So it is with Hamilton, if we want to understand our story, we have to get out and start creating it, defining it, and living it out under the figure of the city.  When we explore the secluded places of a city, we begin seeing it as it truly is.  From that place, there is nowhere else to go but up.