Personal lessons learned from a City

Hamilton is considered the armpit of southern Ontario, Canada. 

It knows this, but keeps on anyway. 

It has mouths to feed. 

There are a number of huge multi-national Steel manufacturers that dominate 

the landscape in many more ways than one 

- one being the smokestacks. 

   

Another being a blighted downtown. 

 

Downtown Hamilton has lovely bones - as you can see above, 
but the bones are often neglected.Though there are bits of revival, 
money lives in the bland burbs upstairs...with fear. 
Perhaps downtown is too close to the dirty interior of our lives? 
a little too disarming? naked?

Downtown Hamilton is a stone's throw from the manufacturing core. 
It carries on its shoulders the burden of stench and scum that accumulates when you are a steel town - a manufacturing town - the bi-products of all of our consumer desires, strewn about like someone's dirty laundry.

 

Yet there are a growing few who find respite in the grit of downtown - those who can live with and derive life from the chaos, and those who have no choice.

Other than Canada's favorite coffee place - Tim Horton's

- which found its birth in this city, 

there are hardly any big box type stores or franchises 

anywhere in the downtown core. 

Most stores are mom and pop shops, all with their unique names and store displays

- everyone is free to BE in their own store - to add their personality to the place,  

to name it whatever pleases them - maybe name things as they are.

No fancy pants about it.

                                                            

The tired conformity of the Martha Stewart aesthetic 

is nowhere to be found.

And Lululemon, if she ever was here, would have fled, 

screaming up the hill, a long time ago. 

The thing is, downtown Hamilton is real, terribly real. 

It does not hide from itself, but rather, 
makes itself at home -  with itself.

It can relax and does not fear its own motled skin.

It is OPEN to itself and embraces the balance of Yin and Yang. 

It does not resist what is real, but nods to it.

                              
it does not wait for itself to be acceptable

      before it loves itself. 

All photos taken by Marcella Corroeli Jager, 2008.