Raise the Hammer

Ryan: "Downtown Hamilton positively thrived when the streets were two-way and served by LRT (quaintly known back than as "streetcars"). Its long death spiral started when the streetcars were decommissioned by bus interests and accelerated when the streets were cut to one-way. The construction of suburban malls served by arterial throughways was only the final straw."

Correlation does not imply causation.

An alternate storyline might point out that the two-way street/streetcar era coincides almost exactly with the expansion of the steel industry as an economic power. The departure of streetcars in 1951 and the arrival of one-way streets in 1956 comes in the steel industry’s twilight decades (the famous Strike of 1946 arguably being a turning point), and also on the eve of the Civic Square debacle, which provided a double-whammy for downtown commerce and investment. The widespread collapse of the steel industry circa 1970 had a slow but corrosive impact on many rustbelt cities and definitely hit the economy of lower Hamilton. (Our ingenious solution, which has involved shoring up private sector job losses and tax base erosion with private sector investment, also changed the distribution of disposable incomes, and the spending priorities of a white collar professional sector are not harmonized with those of blue collar industrial workers, so downtown did not roundly benefit from the broader rescue strategy.) Jackson Square construction ground slowly on from 1967-1972; private investment languished and we filled in the blanks with public money over the following decade, building The Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Police HQ, the Central Library, the Farmers’ Market, the Hamilton Convention Centre, the Ellen Fairclough Building. And the 80s were devastating for downtown (the ‘81 Stelco strike, the ‘81-82 recession, the dawn of Lime Ridge Mall in ‘81, the Gore Park clearcut of ’84, the ’87 recession). That presumably set the stage for the wave of commercial closures in the core during the early ’90s recession, aided by the arrival of the Meadowlands and the advent of the downloading festival that was the Harris years. In short, a few years ago downtown was most assuredly not a thriving and bustling place.

That said, I’m sure that one-way streets and the absence of bike lanes didn’t help, but they’re no more the lone flaw in the equation than they are the only cure for a chronically diseased urban ecosystem.