Edgar’s posters have become the symbol of the No! Downtown Hamilton Casino group, a collection of activists, businesses owners and Hamiltonians that is extensively involved in raising awareness about the casino. Graham Crawford, owner of the Hamilton HIStory + HERitage storefront museum on James North, is a prominent member of the No! Downtown Casino group and has made a different poster opposing the casino every day for nearly the last two months.

“I’m almost embarrassed to say to people how little time it takes to make the posters,” said Crawford modestly. “I can’t draw, so the posters become my editorial cartoons because you don’t have to have much skill to make a poster.”

Crawford’s posters, which he shares through his Facebook page, make it clear that the result of the casino debate is something he cares deeply about. But the posters have convinced a lot of other people to care as well.

“My first ‘the new Hamilton’ poster focused on Supercrawl,” said Crawford, “and even I am social media savvy enough to know that when you get 236 shares in one day about something local that doesn’t involve cats it’s a big deal. The reach of the poster was probably tens of thousands. I’ve never had anything shared that much, ever.”

Everything that has changed James North over the last few years – the galleries, art crawl, Supercrawl – has done so slowly, deliberately and empathetically. Downtown Hamilton has showed us is that there’s a way for development to be good for everyone. Countless arts programs like Roots 2Leaf, the Urban Arts Initiative and Hamilton Artists for Social Change are dedicated to addressing poverty in many forms. What makes Crawford’s Supercrawl poster so affecting to so many people is that it puts into stark contrast Hamilton’s recent downtown development and the type of development that a casino represents - fast, less engaged with the rest of the city and harmful to at least some.

“A casino is completely inward facing by design, not by accident,” said Crawford. “Once they get you in there they don’t want you to leave. It’s why there are no windows. It’s why there are no clocks.”

Certainly PJ Mercanti, one of the main people involved in the proposed casino, is not evil. I’m sure he doesn’t see the city as just a source of income. It’s just that his vision and Crawford’s vision for the future of Hamilton are fundamentally different. One will probably never agree with the other, no matter how much debate. But even if a resolution will never be reached, at least there are people who care enough the city to see that it’s worth arguing about.

By: Jaslyn English and Mary Ann Boateng

 

On Sunday Sept. 23, McMaster hosted its first Open Streets event - a day in devotion to the idea of closed off streets making a more open community. The event lasted from late morning to late afternoon, running in conjunction with Open Streets Hamilton happening on James St N.

Open Streets Hamilton brings together different communities within the city in an attempt to bridge the gap between residents, small businesses, cultural organizations and special-interest groups.

The McMaster event featured a closed off portion of Sterling Street, turned completely pedestrian for the day, as well as a campus section stretching the length of University Ave. from the student center to the edge of the BSB field.

The Hamilton event is part of a broader movement in various cities across North America. According to its website, openstreetsproject.org, the object of Open Streets is to “temporarily close streets to automobile traffic, so that people may use them for walking, bicycling, dancing, playing, and socializing.”

Hamilton has been running the event biannually on James St North since spring 2010, and this is the first time it has come to the McMaster campus.

Mary Koziol, former MSU President and Assistant to the President on Special Community Initiatives, was one of the organizers of the event.

“We started the project because we wanted to eliminate some of the barriers people perceive to be around campus,” she said of Open Streets. “We wanted a way to welcome community members onto campus and vice versa.”

University Ave. was lined with booths representing several clubs, organizations, and events within McMaster itself. The campus was also equipped with a stage for live performances.

The festival continued down Sterling Street, where booths of many Westdale shops as well as community-based organizations were located. This area of the event promoted the idea of outer-campus community that Westdale provides for McMaster’s students.

“I’ve seen a lot of familiar faces,” said the vendor at the Hotti Biscotti table, commenting on the similarities between this event and Clubsfest, hosted during Welcome Week on the McMaster campus.

Nate Walker, owner and operator of Nate’s Cakes, an eco-friendly alternative to the food truck, explained how vendors benefit from a festival like Open Streets.

“The event provides me the opportunity to know all the university students, he said on Sunday. “Festivals like this are where it’s at… If [it] happens again, I will definitely come back.”

Vendors and community members alike remarked that the event brought the community together, a notion mirrored by McMaster president Patrick Deane’s message recorded before the event took place.

The president saw the event as “bring[ing] down the boundaries between the university and the community” and was hoping for a “cross-pollinating effect” between McMaster and the broader Hamilton area.

While there was a diversity of age groups and walks of life from both the university and neighboring communities, the event failed to grasp the attention of the “broader Hamilton community” that the President was seeking to attract.

“It’s too bad there aren’t more people,” remarked a Westdale woman to her family, two hours after the event had started.

Yet after using one of the every-half-hour shuttles equipped with its own student tour guide, and taking in the atmosphere of the downtown portion of the event, it became evident that a crowdless, laid back vibe was as much a part of the Open Streets project as were the street vendors, and added to the neighborhood feel of the event.

McMaster participated in Open Streets as part of its celebration of the University’s 125th anniversary, but Koziol hopes the festival will continue in the coming years.

“What we are trying to do is a better job of opening our arms and welcoming the community and creating more and more partnerships and a broader network so that people don’t see McMaster as a community in itself but as just one part of this broader tapestry.”

As part of OPIRG’s Alternative Welcome Week, a presentation called “Gentrification and the Art Crawl” was held in the Student Centre on Sept. 14 about an hour before Supercrawl began. The talk addressed the changes happening on James Street North, and how the coffee shops and art galleries that have opened on the street are influencing this change.

“When I hear about that kind of thing, I always get tense,” said Tim Potocic, one of the main organizers of Supercrawl and an owner of the downtown Hamilton record label Sonic Unyon. “And it’s purely selfish, because I spend so much time trying so hard to avoid conflict, to try to appease as many people as possible.”

The basic idea of gentrification starts with a neighborhood where everything is cheap. People might not make much money, and there’s low-income housing and social services designed for the people living there. At some point, a person who is drawn to the neighborhood by the cheap rent is inclined to take a bit of a risk, and they start something that appeals to people outside the community. Quite often, these are artists who open galleries. The area then becomes trendy, and everyone wants to go there. Slowly, everything becomes more expensive.

“Instead of offering them food co-ops and affordable housing initiatives, we’re giving them very expensive café’s and galleries and apartments that aren’t going to be able to house low-income people,” said Riaz Sayani-Mulji, an organizer and facilitator of the gentrification talk.

In theory, the problem with gentrification is that the concerns of low-income people are forgotten. But the question is whether the way gentrification is theorized is actually the way it’s playing out on James Street North.

“Nobody has the thought, ‘I’m going to buy that building and I don’t care about those people that I’m going to put on the street,’” said Potocic. “These are not people that are buying buildings and turning them into giant Wal-Marts and only care about the mighty dollar and don’t care about the people they are putting on the street. They do, and they feel guilty about it. And they – actually, which nobody sees – make efforts to help those people.”

Potocic said that his ideal street has a diverse group of people with all different levels of income, and that new development doesn’t necessarily mean that low-income people are displaced. But, just as gentrification might be different in theory than in practice, Potocic’s vision of a street could have some problems.

“The one thing that I see most clearly when I’m at work is the increase in police presence on James,” said Sayani-Mulji. “With gentrification, when you’re trying to clean up the street and get rid of all the ‘undesirables,’ with that comes a social policing as well. And I’ve seen a lot of, I wouldn’t say brutality, but definitely rough-handling of youth, very aggressive behaviour. I’ve had to report the police on more than one occasion while I’ve been at work.”

Sayani-Mulji recently graduated from McMaster and has worked at youth shelters downtown for several years. He said that the Jamesville Community Centre, which he used to work at and was located a block away from James North, went into decline before being closed and relocated last May. The Hamilton Spectator reported that the relocation of Jamesville was always planned, and that it was simply because of more opportunities in the new location. But Sayani-Mulji said that the gentrification on James North also had a role.

“I think it’s just a difference in priorities,” he said. “The city has made its commitment to this creative class and revitalizing the community through art, but that comes with a sacrifice.”
The extent to which art is influencing City funding priorities is questionable, but Sayani-Mulji also had a more explicit example of how the changes on James North are affecting the community.

“The Notre Dame House, a shelter I used to work at, has received enormous pressure over the last few years to relocate because it’s almost seen as an eyesore along James Street North,” said Sayani-Mulji. “But what they’re doing, and what is great to see, is that they’re taking part in the Art Crawl. So the youth that are staying at the shelter and the youth they serve are getting involved in things like the Urban Arts Initiative and saying, ‘We’re part of this community, and like it or not, we’re going to take part in the events that you’re running, like the Art Crawl.’”

What remains to be determined is whether a coffee is shop just a coffee shop, or if it really does have some larger role in gentrification.

“I think that we all have to be cognizant that, and this is very true for McMaster students, that we’re entering into a living community,” said Sayani-Mulji. “It’s not something static that we can mould into what we like.”

 

Nolan Matthews, Senior ANDY Editor

The first time Hamilton saw HAVN (Hamilton Audio Visual Node) was at June’s art crawl, but the collaboration began many months before that, even before the founders moved into the studio/gallery space at 26 Barton St E. The members of HAVN – Aaron Hutchinson, Amy MacIntosh, Andrew O’Connor, Ariel Bader-Shamai, Chris Ferguson, Connor Bennett and Kearon Roy Taylor — came from diverse backgrounds at McMaster, with interests in new media, music and fine art. Despite these differences, they founded HAVN with the goal of creating a sustainable collaborative space with events involving interactive installation art and performance pieces.

People often come to Hamilton only for university and leave after graduating, but four of the seven HAVN members are Mac grads that have decided to stay. They’re all energized by Hamilton’s up-and-coming art scene.

“I just noticed there was this incredible rate of change taking place in the downtown community, and it was just a really inviting and supportive place to start out as a young artist,” said Taylor.

He emphasized the broader context for art in Hamilton and pointed to the city’s industrial past and more recent industrial decline.

“For this art scene to kind of come out as a really sincere cultural revival of the city, I think that there’s this general attitude of people downtown that this is something really special that has to be fostered and encouraged,” said Taylor.

Ferguson continued this idea, and said that Hamilton is “a good community because it’s supportive without being insular,” and that the way to help a community develop is not by being competitive or exclusive.

The members of HAVN readily made comparisons to Toronto, whose reputation as a cultural hub often overshadows Hamilton. Hutchinson agreed that entering the Toronto scene “seems super daunting,” and that in Hamilton “as long as you are saying something honest, people will dig it.” Bader-Shamai added, “It’s not competitive here like in Toronto.” Bennett nodded and continued, “It’s way harder to do what we’re doing in a more saturated environment like Toronto. I think that’s a really unique thing about the Hamilton art scene.”

Though James Street North is lined with galleries, getting to HAVN, which is located just off the street, is a bit like looking for a diamond in the rough. “Barton Street has this notion of being, like, the bad side of the tracks in Hamilton… It gives us some grittiness,” said MacIntosh.

All founders of HAVN feel that they are part of a big change downtown. “We’ve been here for four months and a print business across the street is opening and a ceramic studio is opening right beside us,” said MacIntosh. “I hear people talking about Barton Street like it’s like Parkdale, like it’s going to be the next hip place,” said Bader-Shamai. “So, maybe we’re just ahead of everybody else?” she added. “I kind of like that idea of being a pivotal space in Hamilon, like in terms of being at this crossing point… you’re starting to see spread off James Street North,” said Taylor.

Being so close to James Street has certainly provided opportunities for HAVN, with art crawls and Supercrawl attracting crowds. But the HAVN crew avoided the idea of being an art crawl-oriented space, and had lots of their own ideas for the future. “A community-based meditative painting practice that could happen any weeknight,” said Bennett. “Maybe lectures, maybe movie screenings,” he added.

HAVN is also going to be the new practice location for the Cybernetic Orchestra, who use live computer coding to make music. “[We’re going to] open it to the community… for participation as opposed to just being affiliated with McMaster,” MacIntosh explained.

But the biggest step for HAVN is their call for submissions, an open invitation to anyone who wants to do a project there.

“They can essentially have free reign as long as they don’t destroy it,” said Taylor. It all seems very fitting with the intended meaning of the word “node” in HAVN’s name. “It’s supposed to be like the intersection of a lot of different mediums, the intersection of ideas and art forms,” said Ferguson. The lines all come together but at the other ends they’re also going off in their own directions.”

If you are interested in checking out their work or submitting a project idea, go to havnode.com.

 

Isabelle Dobronyi

Tim Potocic has the job of being one of the main organizers of Supercrawl, and it’s a huge task for a huge event. Last year, 50,000 people attended the festival, and this year’s expected attendance was around 75 000.

Planning Supercrawl for so many people was a year-long job for Potocic. And as that year of organizing was whittled down until just one week was left before the event, the panic set in.

“I had late nights that weekend before, as well as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” said Potocic. “It’s pretty panicked. I wish we were more organized.”

After Thursday, Potocic’s experience planning Supercrawl starts to sound more familiar to any student who has left a massive assignment until the day before it’s due.

“When I got up on Friday it was full-on,” said Potocic. “I didn’t get home until seven in the morning on Sunday, and I only slept for two hours on Friday night. And that’s the way it is. You just run on adrenaline because you know there’s an end. We know the street has to open up at 8 o’clock on Sunday morning.”

Even by forgoing sleep, Potocic didn’t really get to see much of the festival he was responsible for.

“This is the first year I’ve actually been able to catch one set of one band,” said Potocic. “I saw Change of Heart. They are reuniting to do very few shows, so I needed to see it.”

Before Change of Heart and the huge crowds, Supercrawl began four years ago as something much smaller. Potocic has been there since the very beginning of the idea.

As one of the founders of the Sonic Unyon record label, located just off James Street North, Potocic has always been part of the monthly Art Crawl, but he wanted the event to grow, to really push it and see what it could do.

“We got a big group of people together, there was at least 20 people in a room,” said Potocic. “We said that we wanted to close the street, because we thought it should be closed anyway during the regular monthly art crawls, even at that point in time, and we thought, let’s try to do a street festival. That was literally in June. Then everyone sat around and was like, ‘Yeah, it’s a cool idea.’ And we had twelve weeks to plan it, which is not enough time.”

With the initial plans approved by the city, the next problem was deciding what to call the event.

“We were batting names around, and I was like, ‘Well, its going to be super! Let’s call it Supercrawl,’” said Potocic. “It’s a dumb name, really. We’re specialists in dumb names, so it kind of fits. I mean, Sonic Unyon is a weird, dumb name.”

So with the name decided, the organizers rushed to get everything else finished under the impossibly tight timeline of a couple of months. Instead of happening in September, like the other Supercrawls, the first was pushed to October to give the organizers more time. And when that time was up, Potocic and the other organizers prayed they would be lucky with the one thing they couldn’t plan.

“It poured rain,” said Potocic. “But we still had thousands of people out with umbrellas, and we were like, ‘Huh, thousands of people came out and it was pouring rain, so clearly there’s a need for a street closure festival style-thing, so let’s start working on 2010 right now.’”

Since then, planning future Supercrawls has taken all year, and that means Potocic hasn’t really been able to catch his breath even though this year’s event has just ended.

“I’ve already had two conversations with two agencies that are good friends of mine about what we’re going to do next year,” said Potocic. “We’ll really need to have our wish-list of top five acts that we’re looking at to headline potential stages locked in before the end of the year.”

Though Potocic is responsible for organizing the big stuff, that’s only part of what allows Supercrawl to happen because, ultimately, the whole James Street North community is involved.

“That’s the key to making Supercrawl and art crawl and James Street North as amazing and vibrant as it is, because it is a community initiative,” said Potocic.  “We do a lot of community outreach to make sure that we’re not taking liberties that we shouldn’t. I mean, there will always be critics, but we try our best to reach out with the limited staffing and resources we have to run something like this.”

Next week, part two of this article will look at what the critics are saying and Potocic’s response. Hint: it has to do with gentrification.

So here we are. It’s the year’s first ANDY. Only this time I’m behind the scenes, and I’m a bit nervous. I really hope you like the issue. In the future, I’m sure the layout will be nicer, the writing more expressive, and the criticism more humorous and true. But for now, we have this. What is this, anyway?

I think ANDY can be so many things. There’s the old standbys: interviews with artists, shrewd pop-culture analysis, and entertainment writing that is actually entertaining, like Bahar’s hilarious and expressive “Bahar’s Book Bag”.

We need all that stuff, but there’s something else ANDY can be. I think we have a great opportunity, being in Hamilton, to see the arts being an active part of this city’s growth. To see what I mean, check out Alex Epp’s thoughtful “Provoking Thoughts”.

Within the last 30 years, Hamilton has been trying to dust itself off after the decline of the industry that built it. You may have seen t-shirts around saying “Art is the New Steel”, and while the slogan might be unintentionally dismissive to the people who have lost their jobs, the shirts have a message: that when there’s nothing left, you have to make something yourself. And part of what people are making is art.

James Street North is the go-to example. In the 90’s, the street was written off by city councilors who said that shops would never return to the area. Now it’s the site of the city’s biggest arts street festival of the year, Supercrawl.

We have the chance to see why art mattrs in the growth of a community, and hopefully ANDY can be a part of documenting it.

On July 7, the Art Gallery of Hamilton opened the Design Annex on James Street North. Located in the same building as CBC Hamilton, the Design Annex is thoroughly slick, with warm lighting, exposed brick walls and restored ceiling tiles from the 1920s.

The Design Annex sells art, furniture and other home-related items from Canadian artists and designers.

“We found that we were losing a lot of social, cultural and economic impact of the design industry from people who were interested in these products having to go out of Hamilton,” said Mark Stewart, the AGH’s Director of Commercial Activities.

The back of the Design Annex can be rented and will also be used for music performances, and the space allows the AGH to be more diverse in its featured artists.

“At the AGH, we’re what’s considered a category ‘A’ gallery, which means that we can host and show exhibitions from any gallery in the world. In order to do that, we have to meet very strict international requirements related to security, humidity and temperature. But we don’t have those qualifications in place at the Annex,” said Stewart.

The diversity of the art at the Design Annex makes it seem like a place that would appeal to many different kinds of people, and this diversity is important for the kind of vibrant street that Jane Jacobs imagined.

She writes in the seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities that city districts must serve multiple purposes so that people are drawn to a street at all times, and ideally the afternoon furniture shoppers at the Design Annex would be replaced by evening restaurant customers, then followed by the late-night bar crowd.

It’s clear that James Street North is changing, but what is less certain is how these changes can benefit everyone.

“Instead of initiating an operation that emphasizes the social and economic disparity that exists in Hamilton, the AGH could have given thought to programs that help people to understand and appreciate the value of art and what artists do,” said Bryce Kanbara, who helped found Hamilton Artists Inc. in 1975 and owns of the You Me gallery on James North.

“The on-the-street location could have created possibilities for on-the-street involvement”.

Given that one third of the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s annual budget comes from federal, provincial and municipal public funds, it seems reasonable to think that the AGH could reach out to more of the community.

“I have often thought that AGH could designate itself a cooling centre in the summer,” said Kanbara. “It has terrific AC. Folks at Jackson Square need only to cross King Street”.

“For us, there was certainly a conversation of how to best integrate into the street, respect what’s going on here and help do things that are for the benefit of everybody involved,” said Mark Stewart.

While the AGH and the Design Annex have good intentions with their involvement in James North, it will be important that the conversation between the James North community and the AGH continues so that by telling one story about the street, another isn’t overlooked.