Celebrating Hamilton’s heritage in miniature and multimedia
Imagine being able to time travel to the early 1950s in Hamilton, to an era when the city was booming with postwar industrial growth and punctuated by clickety-clack trains that helped drive the prosperity.
Or, how would you like to go further back to the clip-clopping horse and buggy days of the 1860s, and take a walk, or a carriage ride, through Gore Park?
Well, a couple of ambitious modelling projects are helping to show what it was like in the city during those bygone eras. One is a massive 1,500 square foot Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo (TH&B) Railway focused model that replicates in miniature local scenes from the mid-20th century. And the other is an online showcase of the city's downtown in Victorian times on the multimedia platform Second Life.
And while the people who work on railway renderings and the online project are independent of one another, their motivation, love of history, and meticulous dedication to detail are remarkably similar.
They feel Hamilton has lost so much of its heritage over the years, and modelling is a way to recapture some of the former glory.
People in Hamilton have been so quick to tear stuff down. We want to show the way it used to look," says railway modeller Dave Paterson, 66, who has been with the HO Model Engineers Society since the early 1970s.
We're a bunch of guys taking a period of time and making it come to life. We try to make it exact, as best we can ... so we can show people what used to be."
That involves studying old photos, architectural drawings and archival documents and then using handy skills to put together the miniaturized scenes.
Ron Tuff, 64, a retired Stelco rail yard employee who is the secretary of the group, says it's a time-consuming hobby that requires everything from carpentry to electrical to computer skills."
Major landmarks are designed from scratch and there is always something else to build to try to make the scenes more accurate.
Occasionally, society members will run re-enactments of passenger and freight train movements through the city 70 years ago based on old schedules they have.
One of the sections of the layout that stands out is the seven-storey TH&B train station on Hunter Street.
The station model took a year to build and - like everything else in the overall display - is precisely scaled down from the real world with extensive detail.
I painted it four times before I got the colour right," says Paterson. I actually went to Hunter Street with a piece of styrene and my paints on a hot sunny day in the summer and held it up against the actual building until I got a match."
He made a similar effort building a model of the nearby MacNab Street Presbyterian Church.
Stelco Hilton Works used a lot of freight trains in the 1950s and is featured showing a bar mill, plate mill, blast furnace, coke ovens and open-hearth steel making operations. Much of those operations no longer exist today at the present steel company.
In all, there are more than two dozen members of the modelling society who work out of the Eva Rothwell Centre on Wentworth Street North. The centre, which used to be the Robert Land School, is the latest of about half a dozen locations the society has used since being formed in 1948. Models have varied in size - to as much as 2,400 square feet at one point - and there have been different focuses of attention over the years.
The members, who are mostly retirees, have had limited access to the Rothwell centre over the past two years because of COVID restrictions. Only in recent weeks have they been able to resume regular work on the project.
They hope to have an open house for the public in November and are planning special events in 2023 to celebrate the society's 75th anniversary. Information about the HO Model Engineers Society can be found on Facebook.
For amateur photographer Jim Charlton, 75, his Second Life project arose out of a passion for photographing old Hamilton buildings and collecting historical photos. He runs a Facebook page called Historic Hamilton Architecture" that displays pictures he takes, among other things.
When I look at an old photograph my mind starts to wonder what it would have been like to be there at that time," he says. I don't just look at the picture. I think of the story behind it and the world it represents."
The chance to crawl inside a historical photo was what led him to online virtual world of Second Life.
The San Francisco-based multimedia platform has hundreds of thousands of users and has been around since 2003. People are given an avatar and live a second life" in a virtual world travelling to different locations, meeting other avatars and taking part in an online marketplace.
Charlton used some photos of Gore Park from the 1860s as a starting point for the design of the virtual setup, which has limitations in accuracy because of technological constraints. Designers from Second Life did the actual work which cost $300. Charlton also pays $229 per month for hosting. He's hoping to offset the costs by creating online stores that would fit into the Victorian theme. Second Life can be found at secondlife.com. Joining is free.
Maestro memory
Boris Brott meant a lot of things to a lot of people. But the thing I remember most about the maestro is him being a good sport.
In August 2009, I put together a video for thespec.com with Spectator photographer/videographer Barry Gray about the primal appeal of the opening guitar lick from the iconic 1970s song Smoke on the Water."
I thought it would be amusing to do a newspaper story and video - in advance of an event that celebrated the song - to show how it is played. I decided the esteemed orchestra conductor would be the perfect person to learn the song for demonstration purposes, with me being the instructor.
The guitar was not an instrument he knew how to play, but he was a fast learner. I remember joking that he showed great musical promise and should try to develop his talents.
When Boris Brott died April 5, after being struck by car that didn't stop, I found myself thinking back to that day 13 years ago. I vividly remembered the brief time we had some musical fun together, and how agreeable he was to take part.
Unfortunately, The Spectator video has been lost in the ether of internet, but a different video shot by the Brott Festival people of the guitar lesson is still online. Search Boris Plays Guitar" on YouTube.