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WOW! It looks incredible! And the ground floor retail spaces look so bright and inviting, which is good because it's an imposing building. :)
 
Wow! This is fantastic! It makes me so happy to see this building so beautifully restored, especially when I know how close it was to being destroyed.
 
It's exciting to see the restoration of such a historic building in Hamilton. I'm looking forward to seeing the restored interiors, too.
 
Fantastic! Congratulations and applause for Hamilton. It looks wonderful.

I used to walk by this building on my way to see a movie at The Tivoli. This part of downtown was quite busy in the '70's, but - despite all efforts - was really in decline for some time. Seeing this restored really cheers me up.
I hope downtown Hamilton gets more of this treatment, as it has a lot of really spectacular architectural stock.
 
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This is spectacular, just spectacular.
Hamilton gets a bad rap and it really doesn't deserve it. It's a nice enough mid-sized city, great people, an old but beautiful and struggling downtown, plenty of amenities, a decent transit system, good healthcare and educational facilities, plenty to do - everything a good city needs. They've been trying for a few decades now, I'd love to see their downtown succeed. Problem is it has a bad rep. with locals, namely those who live up on the mountain.
 
dt_toronto_geek said:
This is spectacular, just spectacular.
Hamilton gets a bad rap and it really doesn't deserve it. It's a nice enough mid-sized city, great people, an old but beautiful and struggling downtown, plenty of amenities, a decent transit system, good healthcare and educational facilities, plenty to do - everything a good city needs. They've been trying for a few decades now, I'd love to see their downtown succeed. Problem is it has a bad rep. with locals, namely those who live up on the mountain.
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Some of the bad rap is deserved. The Hamilton municipal government was appallingly bad for decades. While some recent initiatives have shown promise they are mostly just on the books and not actually being implemented. The stadium debacle shows there are still major governance issues. The city's debt is huge and much worse are the hidden infrastructure and pension liabilities. They are still slaves to plans from the past (like the TTC) where projects proposed in the 60s sit on the books with old cranks blocking any updated visions. The post-amalgamtion mix is a sprawling mess of dense urban areas, cul-de-sac suburbs and huge rural areas. There are hundreds of people who live in Hamilton but are only a 5 minute drive to the centre of Cambridge! There is a lot of land along rural Highways being gobbled up for the worst suburban sprawl I have ever seen.

EDIT: Look at the new sprawl extending from the village of Freelton. There is nothing in this area except houses. There are no businesses at all of any kind! You have to drive at least 20 minutes away to buy anything. But when you have a city desperate for development fee income this is what you get. Here's another example. Sprawl plunked down in a tiny rural hamlet. But hey, it has a roundabout! How progressive.

There is merit to trying, and it's great this building was saved from death row, after 10 years of squabbling, but many didn't escape death row during the same period, the Tivoli theatre for one. The old Royal Connought has taken the Lister block's place on death row and the question now is will anyone bother to save it?
 
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First of all, a building like this could be saved in Toronto and not just reduced to a facade. The late Paul Oberman, whose memory should not be forgotten, did it several times. Many great buildings don't end up in this derelict state in Toronto. Second, beyond this achievement Hamilton needs to step it up after so many years of questionable governance. The old city is very dense and overall Hamilton has a half a million people yet no urban transit besides ordinary buses. Most GO trains don't even go as far as the city. Wealth is too concentrated in the affluent car-oriented suburbs. Arguably as a result of this, the city's great urban places feel disjointed, separated by vast boring areas without much investment. Yet the city has great assets and with some progressive leadership and economic development, it can become more of a connected destination.
 
dt_toronto_geek said:
This is spectacular, just spectacular.
Hamilton gets a bad rap and it really doesn't deserve it. It's a nice enough mid-sized city, great people, an old but beautiful and struggling downtown, plenty of amenities, a decent transit system, good healthcare and educational facilities, plenty to do - everything a good city needs. They've been trying for a few decades now, I'd love to see their downtown succeed. Problem is it has a bad rep. with locals, namely those who live up on the mountain.
Click to expand...

Hamilton is awesome. It's the secret gem of the Golden Horseshoe. Hamilton has almost everything Toronto has to do but just on a much much smaller scale with less choice, but then again with no lineups and whack of affordable neighboruhood choices and very low-cost housing. I know of at least three people who commute into our office from Hamilton. People think they're nuts but I totally get why. When your mortgage is paid off in 9 years all of a sudden the commute don't seem so bad. My spouse works in Toronto though so both of us commuting just wouldn't work. If you can get a decently-paid job in the Hamilton area, jump at it.

A lot of Hamilton's problems are actually not self-inflicted - amalgamation, sprawl, rural communities meshed into a spearate community that is a surburban-urban split. Amalgamation was silly to begin with, but particularly silly in the Hamilton context - like someone said, a lot of the rural communities orbit around the K-W-Cambridge hub and shouldn't have been put into Hamilton. Hamilton also screwed itself in the 60s/70s when it started planning to be a city of 600 000 or 700 000 people only to find out that all of the free trade, manufacturing collapse and economic changes meant that it would never ever reach that level, rendering the downtown overbuilt and underused as people fled to the burbs, only to have the balance of power even more whacked-out by amalgamation with a bunch of rural communities that it has little relation to.
 
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And the interesting thing about that overbuilt Hamiltonian downtown is that the funky (and often shockingly unmolested) 60s/70sness of all those downtown apartments is back in style...
 
They could have saved the building and
use it as the base of a new office or condo tower.
The old lady looks great though!
Did they redo the inside too?
 
You're absolutely right, jeff316, and Hamilton isn't the only city with massive 60s plans for its downtown. The Kitchener 2000 plan from the early 60s is absolutely astounding. Designed as the centre of a metro area of a million people, it would have involved razing the entire current downtown, building a subway line and underground passageways and roads. Duke and Charles would have become ring roads for a multi-level pedestrian mall along King. There were to be big plazas and tall buildings everywhere. Definitely a pretty cool plan but alas they only got as far as doing some of the demolition for it and never quite got to building the cool stuff. Kitchener was the earliest city in Canada with a city plan. The 1911 plan was designed by one of Olmsted's students.
 
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