Bulldozed Brightside neighbourhood to live on in name of future Hamilton park
Two old friends named John - Michaluk and Brodnicki - drive slowly through a muddy commercial lot in northeast Hamilton, pointing out where their homes used to stand.
The modest dwellings of their Brightside neighbourhood are gone, so are its businesses, even the streets - all swallowed up for expanding heavy industry decades ago.
But Michaluk, behind the wheel, and Brodnicki, riding shotgun - friends since the 1940s - can still picture it all.
I'm going to drive right down Lancaster Street," says Michaluk, gesturing where his home, No. 48, and his grandmother's, No. 23, once were. It would be right there."
We were surrounded," remarks Brodnicki, referring to the nearby railway tracks, steel mills and factories.
By the late-1960s, city officials and industrial captains had worked together to acquire and raze more than 200 homes and businesses in the working-class, immigrant enclave.
Brightside, initially established in early 1900s to lure workers from Britain, was all but obliterated, with parking lots, wider streets and an overpass through its heart.
The area was given a name to suit its drab, grey landscape: Industrial Sector C.
Only about 20 homes that formed part of what was a vibrant residential and commercial area are left standing on Burlington, Birmingham and Leeds streets near Gage Avenue North.
But Brightside's legacy will be celebrated in the name of a future city park in a neighbourhood to its south that's full of grey surfaces and bereft of green space.
A city subcommittee that handles the naming of public assets announced last week the site of the demolished Dominion Glass factory just north of Barton Street East by Gage will be called Brightside Park.
Construction of the 4.5-hectare green space is expected to start next year. Staff continue to work on a detailed design that incorporates trees, gardens, a recreation path, spray pad, playground, sun shelter, skateboarding area and outdoor fitness equipment.
Appearing via video, Michaluk regaled city councillors with a chronicle of his ethnically diverse, tight-knit neighbourhood, where residents walked to shifts at Stelco, planted vegetable gardens, watched each other's children and shopped at local businesses.
His parents were Ukrainian. Italian families lived on either side of them. Other neighbours were from England. Brodnicki's parents were from Poland.
We were multicultural before multicultural was a word or a government program," said Michaluk, a former Ticat, broadcaster and banker.
He also evoked a freewheeling childhood of kids forging friendships in the footprint of an industrialized economy.
As kids, we played on the streets, played at the city dump, along the railway and the streetcar tracks. And in the wintertime, we spent every weekend on the frozen pond of a company whose wastewater flowed into it."
Michaluk then lamented how civic leaders and industrial players hatched plans to bulldoze the homes and businesses of Brightside: a neighbourhood decapitated" and its longtime residents displaced.
Comfort, trust, familiarity, respect - all evaporated to be replaced by a sense of betrayal."
But Brightside Park will be a chance to celebrate its legacy and provide a space for youngsters to play and foster friendships, he offered.
Let the park be a jewel in our city. Let it stand beside the other parks in Hamilton and the wonderful tradition of being a meeting place, a storytelling haven and a timeless memory maker."
Coun. Nrinder Nann, whose Ward 3 office suggested the homage to Brightside, said the name will honour the historic, working-class and immigrant neighbourhood."
Nann added the prospect of the park in the host Stipley neighbourhood is raising spirits" during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has brought hope and optimism, and reinforces to our neighbours adjacent to the industrial north end that they deserve to be invested in."
Coun. Sam Merulla noted it was the late Ward 3 representative Bernie Morelli who pushed the city to acquire the former glass factory site in an overarching land shuffle that led to the revamped Tim Hortons Field precinct.
This was his vision, no ifs, ands or buts about it," the longtime Ward 4 councillor said.
The city bought the brownfield from a numbered company for $5.5 million in 2014. Staff are working with a consultant and the province to secure environmental approvals to convert the industrial parcel into parkland.
Michaluk and Brodnicki, meanwhile, still want to remember Brightside where it used to exist.
And as the band of Brightsiders thins out, preserving their legacy takes on a greater urgency.
We're in the ninth inning of our life," Michaluk says outside a Husky gas station on Gage Avenue North and Burlington Street East where Brightsiders once shopped at Panek's grocery.
A rock with a plaque, a neighbourhood sign, a commemorative parkette, a stretch of roadway renamed Brightside Way" would do the trick, the old friends say. That's easy.
Really it is, in the grand scheme of things ... the ball's rolling now," says Brodnicki, who has operated a printing business for years and keeps photographs, documents and other mementoes from his old stomping grounds.
Homer & Wilson, a small metal-stamping factory that dates to 1913, is still open on a truncated version of Lancaster Street. The rest that was lined by homes is long gone and is now a Budget Bin lot.
A sold sign hangs on a red, brick building at the corner of Burlington that since the 1950s has housed Venetian Meat and Salami, which has plans to move to Stoney Creek.
But enough is enough. Michaluk doesn't want to see any more bulldozing, not of these surviving remnants of Hamilton's working-class bedrock.
This is why we got the name Ambitious City - because these guys were ambitious. And they made these mills."
Teviah Moro is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: tmoro@thespec.com