It’s been a while since I’ve driven into the city closest to me. It always surprises me to see just how it perseveres despite the business closures, the continuing onslaughts of WalMart, the persistence of what one can only conclude to be deliberate neglect and decline in the area when so much begs to be done with it. I know others feel the same potential there, too, because each time I visit, someone has found another way to try to keep the area alive.
St. Paul Street, the core’s main strip, is still littered with empty store fronts, deteriorating sidewalks, and building crumble. Poor parking (complete with ticket givers who’ve been contracted out of Hamilton, and don’t care a whit for the businesses affected by their actions) and the general weekly blight of vomiting university kids who come up from Brock and Niagara have kept people from coming, unless it’s to drink with the school kids on weekend nights. So it’s seemingly unchanging. But the streets looming up from St. Paul, like James Street, have become slowly transformed, with a flurry of small boutiques carrying specialty items (granted, they are items the wealthy are more likely to afford) and a few very good restaurants. So many of the area’s old buildings need preservation and it’s clear the only way this will take place is if people with a lot of money and some good ideas for some kind of viable business dreams will act on their desire to restore the area’s charm no matter how little help they get from the city itself. Or, rather, despite the city’s efforts to stifle all they’re up to.
Stella’s Restaurant, for example, seems to have that sleek art deco feel about its exteriors, and the interiors of gleaming polished walnut, bakelight bars and surfaces, and spacious towering ceilings makes the restaurant seem glamourously implausible in this small city. And yet, there it is, lustrous and spared from decay after the fabric store that once operated within shut its doors 10 years ago. From the street you can peek in and see the very tall Christmas tree, and yes, it’s real and decorated to a crisp, chic understatement. The thing is, the space is vast and empty. At five p.m. on a Thursday afternoon a bustling downtown supper hour doesn’t seem likely. But it’s early in the day yet, and I hope I’m wrong. I hope they’re teeming with customers, as long as dinner is served.
I go into the Watering Can’s flower store (not its Wedding store, or its market which is closer to where I live anyway, away from the downtown core) and try to find some cut flowers which remind me of poetry and a place in the UK. There are anthuriums: small and large, in reds, pale greens, and pinks; orchids on stems so long and full and rich they reach up like trees; and roses in colours of apple green, gold and persimmon, and copper. The store is filled with all manner of boxwoods and poinsettia and paperwhites for the Christmas season, but I want the roses. I choose half a dozen of the pale green, and another six of the persimmon tinged gold. They are extravagant, and wasteful; I know rose growers who could sell these roses to me at a fraction of what I will pay in this airy and pale downtown shop (but I’d have to wait till market day, or drive to the lakeside and pick through a greenhouse; or arrive at sunrise to pull from the day’s best rejects). Today I want the luxury of their rare hues, their full cost. I buy them as if I were presenting them to my lover, and for this they must be perfect. Despite the impossibility of my intentions.
At home, I pull my failing car into the gravel drive, and face the same old rooms and reality of who I am, and where I am here in the country. It’s not until much later that I realize I’ve left the russet paper cone holding the blooms on the back seat of my car, chilling silently until four in the morning. When I rush outside before dawn, answering their power to pull me from my sleep and my bed, they are still perfect.
I wonder how that small, dying, quiet city will fare.
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