Even better than I thought.
Old hotel gets 'artistic' makeover
One-time flophouse morphs into home for creative entrepreneurs
February 02, 2010
PAUL MORSE
THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR
(Feb 2, 2010)
Inside, the 122-year-old Hotel Hamilton has been stripped down to its skeleton. You can touch its bones and veins of bare studs and new wiring.
Mere months ago, construction workers had to use special gloves to avoid being pricked by discarded drug needles. The old flophouse on the corner of James North and Mulberry Street had rooms knee-deep with filthy clothes, and the smell was powerful enough to gag you.
Now, the venerable Jamesville building is the latest target of a metamorphosis driven by a new wave of artistic entrepreneurs, and dreamers -- the creative class -- who believe Hamilton is the place to be.
"Toronto is already quite successful. And Toronto is full," said Martinus Geleynse, a 25-year-old local film producer and musician. "The beauty of Hamilton is that it's a frontier, it's a Wild West, and you can create your life here. And you can make money here."
The city has long suffered an artistic brain drain as Toronto siphoned off the cream of the creative class, he said. That now is changing as the trickle of artists, who have quietly been setting up shop in areas such as James North, threatens to become a flood.
"All the kids left here for the cool city," Geleynse said. "Now anybody can come here and be one of the cool kids.
"In Hamilton, there is a reason to get up every morning and contribute something."
Hotel Hamilton -- it's full name is Studios At Hotel Hamilton -- is a clear example of the change. The 9,000-square-foot building had ended up as a rundown boarding house that spawned numerous complaints from nearby merchants and residents about prostitution and hardcore drugs.
Enter Glen Norton, a developer who became the senior business development consultant of Hamilton's downtown renewal division.
Norton and three investors, using only private money, bought the three-storey building that started life in 1887 to house soldiers from the armoury across the street.
"The idea is that creative professionals need a small space and benefit from working in close proximity to each other," Norton said.
"There's that synergy, that sharing of ideas, that energizing each other, that opportunity to do projects together."
Norton and his partners have set out to show one can take an old building in downtown Hamilton, fix it up and repurpose it and it works as a business model.
"We worked backwards to what a traditional developer might have done. We said, 'Let's find an old building and then let's figure out what we can use it for.'"
The ground floor, which includes a magnificent terrazzo floor and 11-foot ceilings, will house a boutique cafe and a gallery.
Roger Abbiss, owner of My Dog Joe coffeehouse in Westdale, managed to snap up the space ahead of other cafe hopefuls. He hopes to duplicate his success on King West with his fair-trade coffees and good food.
His second My Dog Joe "will cost $200,000 and take up the whole downstairs at 2,000 square feet."
Abbiss is particularly excited about the 68-foot-long patio that will run the length of the building on Mulberry Street.
"It will be south-facing and west-facing and get great sun right in the heart of Jamesville," he said. "We want to be a hub for the area."
The second and third floors will contain 20 studios. Half of them have already been snapped up, even though the owners have not spent a cent on advertising. One web designer wants four.
"It's been pure word-of-mouth," Norton said.
The building is fully wired with fibre optics, and tenants get to use a communal boardroom, kitchen, showers and a storage locker.
Geleynse, who runs the HAMILTON24 arts festival, moves into his new film office this week, as does Julia Veenstra, a Waterdown artist who has outgrown her home-based studio.
A client told Veenstra about Hotel Hamilton and she decided to check it out. She set up some of her artwork during recent Arts Crawls and was astounded at the reaction.
"Every crawl, I made enough to cover the future rent," she said.
Veenstra, who recently returned from missionary work in Tanzania where she helped set up a crafts co-op, will also use her studio to promote expert beadwork from Maasai women.
Brian Pincombe, president of IATSE Local 129 of Hamilton, which represents theatrical, film and arts workers, is sharing a studio with a friend to work on his own artistic endeavours.
Hotel Hamilton is being managed by Jeremy Freiburger, executive director of the Imperial Cotton Centre for the Arts.
"People are moving here (to Hamilton) from Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and they're moving here because rent is cheap, buying is cheap and this is a town where you can actually afford to experiment," he said.
"As an artist, you can make money, but you are not forced into the grind of overly commercialized activity all the time."
pmorse@thespec.com
905-526-3434
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