Ken Cruikshank Nancy B. Bouchier

Blighted Areas And Obnoxious Industries: Constructing Environmental Inequality On An Industrial Waterfront, Hamilton, Ontario, 1890–1960

IN 1947, WITH apparent concern about the environmental hazards associated with a wartime industrial boom, town planner E. G. Faludi created a master plan for the port city of Hamilton, Ontario, a place affectionately known as "Steeltown." Faludi's plan was to undergird Hamilton's first comprehensive zoning regulations. It aimed to isolate residential districts from industry by designating existing neighborhood areas as "declining," "blighted," and "slum," while identifying appropriate locations for the placement of "light," "heavy," and "obnoxious" industries.¹ Unfortunately, it proved insensitive to dilemmas faced by many working-class Hamiltonians who sought affordable housing nearby their industrial workplaces. According to the 1947 plan, a number of Hamilton's working-class neighborhoods either did not exist by definition, or were blighted areas in need of transformation. Both views had serious social and environmental consequences for local residents.

The failures of Faludi's 1947 plan were not unique by any means. From the first years of Hamilton's rise as a major industrial port city, both private and public decision-making had created environmental inequalities for the city's residents. Throughout the twentieth century, town planners like Faludi had repeatedly promised to make the city's growth more orderly and attractive, yet their initiatives did not solve the environmental and social problems caused by the city's urban growth and industrial development. Indeed, the efforts of planners often ratified and even exacerbated the burdens born by the city's working class residents. The environmental costs and benefits of urban and industrial growth were not equally shared or agreed upon by all who lived there.

Twentieth-century urban planners like Faludi sought to harness public authority in order to allocate separate spaces for different kinds of human relationships with nature. In thinking about urban nature, as Matthew Gandy argues, historians need to be attentive to nature both as a "biophysical fabric" and as a cultural construct. Nature and natural processes played a role in shaping the development of cities, but they inevitably interacted with human conceptions of nature.² Hamilton's planners saw the environmental and social problems of the city in spatial terms. In their view, problems inevitably arose when private and public decisions jumbled together industrial, residential, and other land uses, and when urban dwellers did not have access to rural or even wilder forms of nature. They and their political allies presented their vision as a corrective to the chaotic, and therefore unhealthy, development of the city: They were allocating urban space in a more rational manner for the benefit of all residents.³

Urban planners and their allies bore a complex relationship to social power in cities, as a number of historical studies have demonstrated. Historians continue to pay planners considerable attention, often focusing upon their lack of power. Greg Hise and William Deverell, in reprinting the Olmsted-Bartholomew plan for the Los Angeles region, and Bruce Stephenson, in studying John Nolen's plan for St. Petersburg, Florida, offer readers alternative urban visions, and show how powerful economic and political actors undermined these schemes.⁴ Christine Boyer's provocative work agrees that planning visions did not shape the actual structure of the city, but that is not her point. The city was never meant to be planned, she contends, but the planning mentality was "simply used to reinforce a type of disciplinary power to the ends of capitalist development."⁵ She therefore focuses on urban planning as an example of "capitalist thinking," changing in response to particular phases of economic development, but always necessarily abstract so as to overcome "contradictory capitalist interests" and "speak for the general interest of capital."⁶ As capitalist thinking, Boyer concludes, urban planning was "not capable of grasping the actual substance of life."⁷ Although her analysis is very different, then, she forwards similar conclusions about the impact of planners on urban development.

Viewed from the perspective of less powerful interests—like the working-class immigrants who settled in Hamilton's industrial waterfront neighborhoods—planning, and even the abstractness of planning, looks very different. We situate our study of planners and urban development in the context of the literature on environmental inequality. Those focused upon environmental inequality have raised important questions about the distribution of the environmental costs and benefits in the city. Some contemporary environmental justice scholars and activists have drawn attention to the unequal impact of particular environmental hazards: toxic waste sites and dumps. Others dispute a number of important issues, such as the means of measuring endangered communities, the relative significance of race and class, and, because it has important legal and policy implications, the explanations about why some communities became hosts to such dangerous sites.⁸ As Craig Colten shows in much of his work, however, there are significant problems with contemporary analyses, which concentrate on the period after World War II, since some industrial wastes produced before 1940 are hazardous substances still lingering in the environment today.⁹ Moreover, as historian Andrew Hurley shows in his outstanding work on postwar Gary, Indiana, a fuller assessment of environmental equality needs to consider the social allocation of a broad range of environmental hazards and environmental amenities, including people's access to beaches and other outdoor recreational facilities.¹⁰

In this article, therefore, we explore the interaction between the planning impulse, the development of Hamilton's waterfront, and issues of social justice and environmental inequality in the industrial city. To what extent did development increase or diminish environmental inequality in a mid-sized industrializing North American city, and what role, if any, did town planners play in alleviating or sustaining environmental inequality? Like Hurley, we are interested in the distribution of both environmental hazards and amenities in the city, but we focus more narrowly on waterfront environmental change and less on other important environmental issues, such as air quality and workplace environments. In thinking about environmental inequality, we consider the occupational and ethnic characteristics of neighborhoods affected by environmental changes.¹¹ Both occupation and ethnicity shaped the opportunity structure experienced by Hamilton residents. From the 1920s to the 1950s, for example, real estate sales contracts in one west-end suburb of the city forbade homeowners from selling their homes to, "Negroes, Asiatics, Bulgarians, Austrians, Russians, Serbs, Rumanians, Turks, Armenians ... or foreign born Italians, Greeks or Jews."¹² Although some groups may have had a greater chance to evade restrictive covenants, their existence reminds us that some southern and eastern Europeans—and not just what modern analysts would identify as visible minorities—experienced restricted mobility in Hamilton. These covenants bound some groups to the neighborhoods in which they first settled, although as Andrew Hurley notes in his study of Gary, Indiana, so too did people's attachments to neighborhood community organizations, social clubs, and religious institutions.¹³ By focusing upon occupational and ethnic identities, we can examine the different ways in which Hamilton neighborhoods experienced environmental change.

Unplanned Hamilton: To World War I

THE FIRST STEP in planning, according to the famed American city planner and landscape architect John Nolen, was to undertake "a careful study of the underlying physical, business and social conditions of the city." Practical visionaries, urban planners prided themselves on working with, and building upon, the existing natural and human environments of the cities they aimed to transform.¹⁴ By the time Hamilton's elites embraced town planning, their city had acquired a particular urban form based upon the area's natural terrain and a number of key private and public decisions. This urban form created different relationships between particular social groups and their environment, and different perceptions of what constituted a healthy or unhealthy environment. We cannot make sense of the planners or their visions, or assess their influence upon environmental inequality, without first understanding the city's early unplanned history.

Map 1. Changes in the Hamilton Harbour Shoreline, 1909–1996.

Based upon, Canada. Department of Militia and Defense, Geographical Section, General Staff, No 2197. Topographic Map. Ontario. Hamilton Sheet No. 33 (1907–1909) 1:63,360; and Canada. Department of Energy Mines and Resources. Canada Centre for Mapping. Hamilton/Burlington Ontario. 1: 50,000 (Canada. Sheet 30 M/5 Ed.9).

Settlements around Burlington Bay (renamed Hamilton Harbour in 1919) developed in ways that both accommodated and defied the physical landscape. Located at the western end of Lake Ontario, the bay area held a potentially strategic position within Ontario's transportation network. To the southeast of the lake lay the Niagara peninsula and access to the northeastern United States via Buffalo, New York. To the northeast lay Toronto and access to eastern Canada, while to the west shippers could reach southwestern Ontario and the American Midwest via Detroit. Although well situated, not all of the land around the bay could be developed easily. Deep ravines cut the northern shoreline off from inland settlements and transportation routes, and steep shale bluffs made it difficult to land goods on the shore. A high and relatively narrow ridge known as Burlington Heights, which separated the bay from an extensive marshland known as Cootes Paradise, undermined the usefulness of the western shoreline. The marshland had to be dredged and a passage carved through the heights to create the Desjardins Canal, which offered limited and still imperfect access to farming communities farther west. Of all the shorelines, therefore, only the flat, low-lying land on the southern shore, which was inundated with creeks, ravines, and inlets, offered accessible land for settlement and port development. Even here, however, settlement initially proved unpromising, because a thin sandbar on the eastern side of the bay prevented ships from entering the enclosed harbor from Lake Ontario. By cutting a canal through the beach strip in the late 1820s, Hamilton's political and business leaders overcame the natural limits of the area, and transformed the southern shore into a bustling port.¹⁵

The residents of the port town never enjoyed a golden age of environmental equality. The terrain of the south shore influenced where people chose to live and how they used the land. The homes and enterprises of Hamilton lay squeezed between the bay and the Niagara escarpment (known locally as the Mountain), with its three-hundred-foot limestone face, a couple of miles inland to the south. Within this area, as historians Michael Doucet and John Weaver have shown, wealthier residents claimed the high ground near the escarpment, and on a ridge that meandered from the escarpment toward the Desjardins Canal on the west end of the harbor. On that ridge, the city's mercantile and political leaders had their homes built on well-drained land that afforded them vistas of the city and harbor seemingly appropriate to their social ambitions. These homes would be high and dry, with drainage flowing to the lower lands on either side of the ridge, or toward the harbor. The town center, with its administrative buildings and merchant houses, would develop nearby. Hamilton's working classes, on the other hand, settled on the low, flat, and poorly drained lands east of the ridge, or north and northeast close to the shoreline of the bay.¹⁶

The arrival of the Great Western Railway in the 1850s, connecting Hamilton to Toronto and the border cities of Niagara Falls and Windsor, reinforced environmental inequality. Because most elite homes were built well away from the harbor, the railway could be located as close as possible to the docks and warehouses of the port without disrupting the quality of life of Hamilton's wealthier residents. The Great Western Railway located its main yards, repair shop, and rolling mill along the western harbor front. The presence of this railway complex, in turn, attracted many of the region's metalworking firms to this area. Other industries, including oil refineries, soap factories, tanneries, and meat packers, located farther to the east, at the end of several marshy inlets where they had easy access to rail and water connections and to supplies of water.¹⁷

The decision by Hamilton's city council in the mid-1850s about where to get their city's water shaped the environmental development of the city's waterfront tremendously. Following a string of fires and a cholera outbreak in the 1850s, the city sought a water supply more safe and reliable than area wells and creeks. Although several engineers recommended bringing drinking water in from the bay, a lead engineer consulted with two experts from New York's Croton waterworks and convinced city aldermen to build a waterworks system that took in water from Lake Ontario from a place three to four miles from the city's center. This enabled city residents and factories alike to use the harbor as a sink for their wastes, without much affecting the city's drinking water.¹⁸ Hamilton's waterborne waste particularly affected the ecology of the shallow inlets along the harbor's southern shore. Hamiltonian John William Kerr, the fisheries' inspector for western Lake Ontario, reported in the 1860s that fish caught in the Sherman Inlet tasted of coal oil emitted from two refineries at the water's edge alongside the railway tracks.¹⁹ He also noted that dead ducks, muskrats, and fish covered in oil floated on the water's surface. Kerr estimated that about 360 gallons of sulphuric acid ran into the inlet every week.²⁰ Although the Fisheries Act of 1868 authorized him to stop industries that hurt the fishery by dumping waste into the water, his efforts to prosecute offenders found little support from the local business community, political leaders, or authorities in the provincial ministry.²¹ Even so, he won a few convictions against companies, including an oil refinery, sheep skin tannery, and a meat packer.²² As importantly in Kerr's eyes, he persuaded some local industrial manufacturers to improve their industrial waste-storage systems and at least dilute the waste with water before dumping it into the inlets.²³ These appear to have been minor victories, however, slowing the pace of—rather than preventing—the polluting of the inlet waters. By the mid-1880s, Kerr complained of an equally serious source of pollution—the "filth" flowing into the inlets and the shores of the bay from the city's sewer pipes.²⁴

Environmental historian Joel Tarr argues that late-nineteenth-century medical health concerns over household sewage often directed popular attention away from the wastes created by industry.²⁵ Inspector Kerr's observations and his reports to the Board of Health suggest that this also happened in Hamilton, where sewage floated on the water for all to see.²⁶ Although preliminary work on Hamilton's sewer system had begun in the 1850s, by 1876 only one house in ten had access to sewer frontage. Twenty years later, sewers served more than half the city's houses, and outdoor privies had become largely a relic of the past by World War I.²⁷ Fecal and other matter doubtless had made its way to the bay as runoff and overflow from outdoor privies, but the gravity-based water-carriage sewer system ensured that residential and industrial waste flowed efficiently into the bay's waters.²⁸ This system first served Hamilton's wealthier residential areas. By the late nineteenth century, the local officer of medical health advocated bringing sewers to other areas of the city to help solve the health problems plaguing working-class neighborhoods.²⁹ The extension of the sewer system aimed to serve people of all social classes and benefit those workers living in poorly drained sections of the city. Yet those who lived near the shoreline and shallow inlets of the waterfront encountered new problems caused by city sewer building. Examining one sewer outlet in the north end of the city in 1886, a delegation from the Board of Health "found an accumulation of the most disgusting and filthy matter, which was being covered with earth."³⁰ It recommended that the city purchase the adjoining property and increase the pay of the men working at the outlet! Such conditions concerned local political leaders for reasons of public health, and because they feared landowners would sue the city for damages to their waterfront properties.

Although the city had a clean source of water pumped in from Lake Ontario, ice harvested for the refrigeration of Hamilton's food and for customers as far away as Buffalo came from the increasingly dirty harbor. The Board of Health "solved" the problem of polluted ice through regulation: It monitored ice quality, requiring ice to be harvested only in certain areas far from sewer outlets and other sources of pollution.³¹ City officials found the damage to private properties caused by the city's residential waste a more difficult problem to solve. Worried about "nuisance" lawsuits brought against the city by owners of damaged property, Hamilton's city council bought up some of the most seriously polluted waterfront properties. The city then began to divert sewage away from privately owned inlets near more populated areas into new publicly owned ones that industry already had damaged badly. In the 1880s, for example, city engineers diverted the city's sewage from the small inlet at the end of Ferguson Street into the adjacent Coal Oil Inlet (at Wellington Street), a place already heavily polluted by a tannery and soap factory. They also diverted sewage into the Sherman Inlet, the very area where Kerr had prosecuted oil refiners and meat packers. When the city lost two nuisance lawsuits in the 1890s, it moved its sewage pipes to inlets even farther eastward.³²

Figure 1. Hamilton Harbour Southern Shore Inlets before Infilling.

Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections. Ogg's Inlet.

The way that city officials dealt with the heavily polluted land along the sewer outlet at the end of Ferguson Street would become a model for how Hamilton dealt with environmentally damaged areas of its waterfront. By the turn of the century, a local newspaper editor and alderman, John Morrison Eastwood, championed the reclamation of the city's north-end shoreline and inlets. He spearheaded a campaign to clean up the area by building a revetment filled with dredged material and other waste products.³³ To this end the city directed its scavengers to deliver "clean" garbage (free of rotting vegetable matter that would attract rodents) to the site. Using coal ash and all manner of refuse as fill, the city created a park for north-end residents on the reclaimed land. By World War I, the city had filled much of the Coal Oil Inlet running east of Wellington Street, and it began similar work on parts of the Sherman Inlet. In contrast to Eastwood's park, however, much of this newly reclaimed land eventually was used for industrial and residential development.³⁴

By placing sewer outlets farther to the east and reclaiming land from the inlets, civic leaders could encourage industrial development in the areas east of the Sherman Inlet and north of the main railway line. In 1902 and 1903, not coincidentally after voters rejected a municipal bonus to attract an industry, the council annexed more than 650 acres of land and created a special district with a low tax rate (based upon a rural rate) to promote the industrial development of the area.³⁵ Their plan worked; many industrialists took advantage of the tax break and placed their factories along the waterfront's northeastern shore. This happened just as increased competition and new industrial processes were creating demands for better coordinated flows of material, and as larger industries sought locations that had direct access to both railway and port facilities. In 1895, a company that would later amalgamate with others to become the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco), placed its blast furnace on Huckleberry Point between Sherman and Harvey's Inlets.³⁶ International Harvester, an agricultural tool manufacturer, joined the large steel manufacturer on the annexed industrial land.

Figure 2. Industry along Hamilton's Northeastern Shore at Gage's and Stipe's Inlets.

Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections. Stipe's Inlet. Grasselli Chemical Company.

City aldermen believed that these new industries would be less likely to complain of pollution damaging their property than private individuals. Indeed, new industries might even help the reclamation of the inlets. This happened in 1910, when the steel company began dumping its slag to fill the Sherman Inlet for the other manufacturers found there.³⁷ The shallow inlets, however, both before and as they were being filled, represented serious environmental hazards for the people residing nearby. Fire insurance maps for the city of Hamilton show that the city's early industries—such as tanneries and oil refineries—first sprang up alongside the inlets in the old port section of town. Residential neighborhoods soon followed them.³⁸

Tables 1 and 2 provide social profiles of the various neighborhoods adjacent to the shoreline and inlets of the bay—the North End and Waterfront areas, along Wellington, Oliver, Sherman, and Gage Streets, and in the small development of Brightside near the Lottridge inlet. They are based upon information extracted from city directories and aggregate censuses.³⁹Table 1 shows the occupational profiles of selected waterfront residential areas—particularly the areas beside filled-in inlets noted in bold—suggesting the general working-class nature of waterfront neighborhoods.

Figure 3. Lottridge Inlet and the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco), 1920s.

Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections. Lottridge Inlet and Stelco, 1920.

In 1911, the areas most seriously affected by the polluted waters and shoreline were along Wellington and Sherman streets, the former of which had proportionately more laborers and fewer professionals, proprietors or even clerks than most other Hamilton neighborhoods. Around the seriously damaged and heavily polluted Sherman Inlet, occupational profiles reflect more diversity, the kind more typically found elsewhere in the city. Yet Sherman-area white collar workers were underrepresented. Unlike other parts of the city, especially the southeastern neighborhoods built upon the well-drained land nearer to the escarpment, the Sherman neighborhood had few professionals or proprietors, other than local grocery store or restaurant owners. Whatever their social background, however, everyone who lived in the area faced exposure to significant environmental hazards.

Table 1. Occupational Profiles of Selected Waterfront Residential Areas, 1911.
	Proprietors, White Collar	Semi-skilled, Skilled Workers	Unskilled Laborers

Total City	25%	48%	27%
North End	16%	49%	35%
Waterfront	14%	48%	38%
Wellington	16%	51%	33%
Oliver	29%	53%	18%
Sherman	22%	47%	31%
Brightside	0%	50%	50%
Gage	n/a	n/a	n/a
All Areas	17%	50%	24%

Total n.=552; note—neighborhoods surrounding existing or filled in inlets indicated in bold letters. Sources: Vernon's City of Hamilton annual street, alphabetical, general, miscellaneous and classified business directory. (Hamilton: H. Vernon, 1911); Canada. Census of Canada, 1911. (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1911).

Map 2. Neighborhoods Indicated on Tables 1, 2, 4, and 5.

Based upon Canada. Department of National Defense. Topographic Map. Hamilton Sheet, Ontario, 1:63, 360. (Sheet number 33 1909; Reprinted with Corrections, 1923).

As Table 2 shows, in the middle of the first great wave of immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, these neighborhoods had the same British and Western European ethnic profile as the rest of the city. Yet things unfolded slightly differently east of the Sherman Inlet. There residential populations remained small. Since statistics for those neighborhoods are not as reliable as older areas of the city, they must be examined with some care.

Table 2. Ethnic Profiles of Selected Waterfront Residential Areas, 1911.
	British or Western European	Other	Italian	Eastern European

Total City	98%	11%	2%	4%
North End	*96%*	4%	1.5%	1.5%
Waterfront	*96%*	4%	3%	1%
Wellington	*98%*	2%	1%	1%
Oliver	91%	9%	4%	2%
Sherman	*99%*	1%	0%	1%
Brightside	87%	13%	13%	0%
Gage	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
All Areas	97%	3%	1.5%	1%

Total n.=928; note - neighborhoods surrounding existing or filled in inlets noted in bold letters; over-representation by more than 5% above the city total in italics; under-representation by more than 5% below the city total underlined. Sources: Vernon's City of Hamilton annual street, alphabetical, general, miscellaneous and classified business directory. (Hamilton: H. Vernon, 1911); Canada. Census of Canada, 1911. (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1911).

Figure 4. Advertisement for Brightside Development, 1911.

Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections. Hamilton Times Advertisement Scrapbook, p. 18.

The story of Brightside, a small neighborhood that had fewer than fifty households in 1911, suggests the nature of the city's development through the northeastern areas of the harbor.⁴⁰ In 1910, real estate developer W. D. Flatt proposed to develop Brightside at the base of Lottridge and Stipes Inlets, just east of Sherman Inlet, close to the Steel Company of Canada's site located just north of the railway tracks.⁴¹ While he assured potential buyers that the land was not as marshy as the surrounding inlets, and that their homes would enjoy the bracing winds of the harbor, Flatt was clear about the kind of neighborhood that he aimed to create. The names selected for its streets—names like Sheffield, Birmingham, and Manchester—suggest the industrial character that the place was to take. Advertisements for the Brightside development emphasized the amounts of time and money homeowners would save by living close to their factory workplaces.⁴² By 1911, it attracted industrial workers, and, in spite of the British street names, more people of southern and eastern European descent could be found there than in any other part of Hamilton. Those who moved there may have enjoyed an environment temporarily better than what workers had in the more developed Wellington and Sherman neighborhoods, but they moved in at the very time when one property owner in the area was suing the city for damage to her property caused by the city's sewage.⁴³

Map 3. Brightside Development at Base of Lottridge and Stipes Inlets, 1912.

Library and Archives Canada / Bibliotheque et Archives Canada, NMC 15354. Call Number: H1/440/Hamilton/1912 (4 sections). J.B. Nicholson, Map of the City of Hamilton, Hamilton: Canadian Records Company, 1912, 1:3,600 ft.

Those wealthier Hamilton residents who lived away from the harbor front and toward the escarpment distanced themselves from the environmental degradation accompanying the extension of the sewer system, and the industrial progress of a city that proudly advertised itself as the "Birmingham of Canada."⁴⁴ They mainly viewed the harbor as an environmental amenity—something pretty to look at from a distance—not as an environmental hazard. Between 1875 and 1900, many members of Hamilton's elite had grand summer homes built on the narrow beach strip separating the harbor from Lake Ontario.⁴⁵ By 1900, half the households listed in the city elite's blue book social directory spent their summers there.⁴⁶ Many more of them belonged to the socially restricted Royal Hamilton Yacht Club, which placed its magnificent clubhouse alongside the beach strip canal.⁴⁷

The city of Hamilton actively supported the development of the beach strip as an exclusive resort area for its wealthiest citizens by protecting it from development and by preventing the construction of boathouses and other facilities that would "interfere materially with the enjoyment of the Beach promenading."⁴⁸ After 1900, the construction of an electric street railway between the beach strip and the city began to alter the character of the area, as Hamiltonians who were less well-heeled found an occasional weekend visit to its amusement park and swimming beach within their financial grasp. As late as the 1920s, however, middle-class social reformers voiced concerns that working-class children and their families—especially people from the industrial north end of town—rarely visited the beach strip, apparently because they were unwilling or unable to spend the money needed to get there by streetcar.⁴⁹

In 1924, Hamilton's reform-minded newspaper, the Herald, voiced concerns because people from these same working-class families continued to swim in the bay near their north-end homes. Just the year before, city engineers and the local medical officer of health deemed the water in the area to be too polluted for safe swimming.⁵⁰ Yet despite such concerns about water quality, political leaders who sought to represent working-class constituencies pushed for more accessible recreational areas for workers and their families along the harbor. Eastwood Park remained a significant achievement for them, although its revetment wall meant that the area was not meant as beachfront land. Those who dove off this wall, like the competitors in the first British Empire Games held by Hamilton in 1930, did so right next to a sewer outlet. Many children from the north end spent their days swimming amid the busy wharves and alongside sewer outlets with no sense of the dangers involved.⁵¹ A grandson of one of Hamilton's most prominent boat builders and livery owners recalled fondly swimming there in the days of his youth: "I know people from other parts of the city were warning kids within an inch of your life, don't go near the water. Don't go near the water. In fact somebody said to me once, the north end kids hardly ever drown. It was the visitors from other parts of the area who [did] . . .We just grew up with it. You grow up in your environment."⁵² A small beach located where the Wellington inlet once had run inland offered a place for small children to play, although the conditions of the water in this area probably were not healthy, and it soon was condemned by the medical health officer in the early 1920s.

Better swimming could be had at Wabasso (later LaSalle) Park, a beach area on the bay's north shore that Hamilton had annexed from a neighbouring municipality for a nominal fee. City planners hoped that this area always would be less polluted than the industrially developed southern shore of the harbor, but, like the beach strip, Hamilton's working-class families had a hard time getting there. Renting a rowboat to make it across the bay was out of the financial reach of many people, as one north end resident recalls: "The north enders [didn't have boats,] these were all rented out to what we'd call 'rich people.' Like the people who lived up the hill on Bay Street. They were 'rich people.'"⁵³ The high cost of ferryboat rides also ensured that such a trip was a special occasion for working-class families from the north end: "[I]f we could have a big day on Sunday morning, the family would go down ... and they'd take you across to LaSalle Park and boy could we have a picnic. And the ferry would pick you up and bring you back. Five cents a piece. Man, that was big money in those days ... it was a special treat if we went."⁵⁴ At the southern shore at the other end of the bay, however, those who worked in the waterfront's easternmost factories could spend their leisure time at Stewart Park, east of the industrial districts. At least until World War I city sewage outlets had not touched this area's inlets.⁵⁵ But Hamilton's working-class families found it hard to get there too.

Map 4. Location of Brightside, Hamilton Waterfront Parks, and Stelco Steel Factory.

Based upon Canada. Department of National Defense. Topographic Map. Hamilton Sheet, Ontario, 1:63, 360. (Sheet number 33 1909; Reprinted with Corrections, 1923).

While swimmers found the harbor's waters to be increasingly dirty, working-class communities still enjoyed access to large undeveloped parts of the shoreline for other recreational pursuits. Those willing to take a hike along the water's edge could enjoy muskrat hunting or angling for the many types of fish that still could be found in and around the most easterly inlets that remained unfilled, and in the western marshlands of the bay known as Cootes Paradise. Working-class residents also ice fished with spears on the bay during the winter months, in spite of city efforts to ban the activity.⁵⁶ One north ender born in 1907 remembered the fishing hut where his uncle spent the winter months during the building-trades off-season; "there was all kinds of fish huts. And I've gone in there with him lots of times, fishing for fish. And you'd just look down there and it'd be clear as a bell. You'd swear that it wasn't any more than two feet deep. Instead of that it was about 12 feet deep. You'd see the fish swimming down there. And you'd put a decoy down and attract the fish. Catch them."⁵⁷ Sometime during World War I, a boathouse community (known as the "shack town") sprang up along the narrow shores along the western end of the bay and into the Cootes Paradise marsh. Although doubtless prompted by housing shortages in the city, these makeshift homes gave their dwellers ready access to fishing, hunting, and swimming, along with escape from the the crowded living conditions of some of Hamilton's older industrial neighborhoods.⁵⁸

By World War I, then, a number of key developments shaped the city that Hamilton's earliest generation of planners were to build upon. Urban planners exaggerated the chaotic nature of the unplanned development; a certain logic or rationality did govern the development of the city. Changes in industrial structure and a number of key public policy decisions had encouraged the development of a large industrial district east of the old port and north of the original railway lines. There new industrial and working-class residential districts formed. In response to industrial and residential pollution, factories had reclaimed several northeastern inlets. Industrial location and pollution were just beginning to take their toll on working-class recreational access to Hamilton's harbor, making the provision of beaches and swimming facilities for north-end families a social planning problem for municipal officials. Without any formal town planning, the social and environmental design of the industrial city already had begun to take shape.

Figure 4. Boathouses along the Bay at Hamilton, 1930.

John Boyd Collection, National Archives of Canada, PA-89484; Credit: John Boyd, 30 January 1930.

Legitimating Environmental Inequality

IN 1917 AND 1919, two planners reflected on the future of Hamilton, seeking to rationalize its development while beautifying it. By that time the city's population had risen to 100,000, and, with the annexation of eastern areas, Hamilton's size had doubled. A new wave of immigration, while not diminishing the predominantly Anglo-Celtic origins of most of its people, brought in the first significant numbers of immigrants from other ethnic backgrounds. Public-health officials and social reformers warned of the dangers of juvenile delinquency and crowded and filthy housing conditions in the new industrial city. They used data from the 1913 Report of a Preliminary and General Social Survey of Hamilton to support their case.⁵⁹ This sense of rapid change encouraged local politicians to sponsor town planning experts to turn their professional gaze upon Hamilton and think about solutions to the problems plaguing the city.

In 1917, Canada's preeminent town planner, Noulan Cauchon, a man influenced heavily by the City Beautiful movement, produced a grandiose urban design for Hamilton. It featured garden suburbs, a high-speed electric commuter railway, and a boulevard from the bay to the escarpment, ending at a Greek theater built where a gravel pit had disfigured the escarpment.⁶⁰ His elaborate parks system would provide "the lungs of the city," and would include a "wilder and freer" parkland around the western end of the harbor and the Cootes Paradise marsh. This would be an area that, in the words of historian Nicholas Terpstra, "allowed access to the unsullied realm of nature for citizens bound up in the urban realm of culture."⁶¹

Unsullied nature, however, was to be carefully constructed and framed by the arches, colonnades, and balustrades of a proposed new northwestern highway entrance to the city. What did such a plan mean for the rest of the city? In a subsequent report, Cauchon proposed enhancing the industrial district that had developed in the city's northeast end.⁶² He contended that the city should reclaim all of the eastern inlets, filling them to make room for even more industrial development. Much of Hamilton's waterfront, beginning in the old north-end port and extending almost to the beach strip, thus would be transformed. In the process it would become inaccessible to local people. Cauchon proposed that a narrow scenic lagoon separate the industrial district from recreational areas on the beach strip. He intended that only three areas—the very westernmost end of the harbor, the north shore, and the beach strip—should be kept for residential and recreational purposes. Even then, he argued that nature had to be carefully constructed to produce the "appropriate" aesthetic and recreational response. The rest of the waterfront would be left to development by the city's growing industries.

In 1919, the chief engineer for Toronto's Harbour Commission, E. L. Cousins, produced a second planning report on the bay, this time for the Hamilton Harbour Commission, the special federal agency created in 1912 to govern the harbor.⁶³ Surprisingly, given the commission's mandate to develop Hamilton's port capacity, Cousins emphasized the importance of balancing the harbor's recreational, residential, and economic uses. He maintained that a large industrial city's citizenry needed plenty of areas set aside for their healthy outdoor recreation. He declared that the beach and the north shore of the harbor were areas that, "by their physiography lend themselves admirably to aesthetic treatment;" they were areas to be saved for parks and outdoor amusement.⁶⁴ Like his predecessor Cauchon, Cousins supported other waterfront development for port and industrial purposes, such as reclaiming the southeastern inlets and creating more shoreline through infilling. Cousins, too, sought a "clear cut line between the industrial area and beach development." But instead of creating a scenic lagoon between the two, the more practical engineer favored separating the areas with a narrow ship canal and turning basin. Even more enthusiastic about reclamation than Cauchon, Cousins wanted to make room for public recreation and more housing on the beach strip. He planned to fill 172 acres of its bay side and reclaim enough land from all sides of the harbor—even at the foot of the bluffs of the north shore—for a scenic parkway for automobiles along the waterfront.

The town planning reports of both Cauchon and Cousins reflected a faith that, through the careful and precise designation of the harbor's various functions, industry, homes, and recreation could continue to coexist there. Neither planner saw any difficulty, for example, in having only a narrow lagoon and ship canal separating heavy industry on the southeastern shore from a recreational resort area on the beach strip. Neither thought that the massive industrial site proposed for the southern shore would endanger people's recreational enjoyment along the other shores. They were not alone in their belief. Hamilton's city council, which had acquired LaSalle Park on the north shore for public swimming, felt the same way. So too did groups like a new local angling club, which suggested stocking the area with fish for its sport. How could pollution possibly spread from the south shore across the water? The goal of preserving an "unsullied realm of nature" meant reconstructing natural areas to make them aesthetically pleasing and suitable spots for passive or organized public recreation. In the western end of the harbor, Cauchon and Cousins worked to create places of refuge from the city, with carefully tended gardens that would encourage contemplative recreation. These designs limited the creation of places for active recreation—amusement parks, boating facilities, and carefully supervised swimming areas—to the waters of Lake Ontario at the beach strip.

Although the two town planners worried about some social issues, especially the need for housing for the city's ever-growing population, their overall visions focused little on the future of existing working-class communities. Their plans for the industrial development of the northeast sanctioned the existing processes of reclamation and advocated even more extensive infilling of the harbor. They cut both traditional and newer working-class neighborhoods off from their access to the water, leaving them in the shadow of industries situated on the acres of reclaimed land. In spite of their lip service to varied kinds of recreational areas, the large waterfront parklands that already existed—like Eastwood and Stewart parks—disappeared from their planning. So, too, did a smaller beach in the north end. The inlets farthest east, which had not yet been damaged by development, would also eventually disappear. The residential communities and parkland Cauchon and Cousins envisioned on the bay's north shore likely would not attract—nor were they designed for—the working-class families of Hamilton's waterfront neighborhoods. The neglect of working-class interests was lamented in a letter to the editor of the Hamilton Spectator: "To the plutocracy of the third manufacturing city of the Dominion," the author wrote, "it possibly does not appear that their poorer neighbours suffer a hardship having to gravitate to Wabasso park, by paying a boat fare or traverse the road about nine miles, for a day's outing. The former have their autos, the latter ... more often than not a sadly depleted pocket book to meet the expenses of such an outing."⁶⁵

Both the audacity and expense of Cauchon's and Cousin's designs for the harbor ensured that the city never would adopt either plan fully. Nevertheless, their views of industry, nature, and recreation proved influential for generations to come. They helped transform much of the city's north end into an industrial district and sanctioned the reclamation and infilling of the harbor. In effect, the vision of town planners legitimated designs of many industries, including the Steel Company of Canada's. By building porous retaining walls and dumping slag into the harbor to create land for its steel plant, the infilling program permitted it to expand southward gradually toward the railway lines, and northward into the bay. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, members of the city's parks board championed at least part of the planners' vision: They sought to create what they envisioned as a carefully regulated, aesthetically pleasing, and morally clean park along the western shoreline of the harbor.⁶⁶ They engineered land deals ensuring that the Cootes Paradise marsh adjoining the western harbor and much of the northwestern shoreline would become public land, beyond the reach of industrial or real estate developers.⁶⁷ They hoped to create a much more extensive development in the western end of the harbor. It would include a picnic area, a restaurant, a bandstand, a model yacht pond, botanical gardens, a zoo, and an automobile park.⁶⁸ Depression-era finance, however, precluded the creation of all but a sedate rock garden constructed by relief workers out of an abandoned gravel pit. It would form the basis of Hamilton's world-famous Royal Botanical Gardens, which had both cultivated gardens and a nature preserve. There Hamilton residents could birdwatch, but could not hunt or fish.⁶⁹ Although the prohibition on hunting in the area applied equally to all, it most negatively affected working-class families that relied upon area game for their dinner tables. They could not afford—either because of time or money—to travel long distances from the city to hunt.⁷⁰ This restricted their access to a principal resource offered by the harbor environment. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the city ended up demolishing the boathouse homes in the working-class shack town neighborhood that had developed along the western edge of the bay to make way for the extensive park complex that never quite materialized. The city compensated some boathouse dwellers—those who had a legitimate claim to reside on the land and were not squatters—for the loss of their homes. But residents received no compensation for their loss of ready access to hunting, fishing, and swimming which had made living there so appealing.⁷¹

The town plans of Cauchon and Cousins also sacrificed north-end waterfront recreational areas to industry, something that north-end families fought against to preserve the limited access to the waterfront that they still possessed. People in working class neighborhoods lobbied their aldermen to resist the planners' visions. The aldermen, in turn, persuaded a reluctant city council to create a new swimming beach at Bay Street in the city's old north end waterfront. Although the board of health had condemned another beach in the area because of its dirty water in the early 1920s, the city council eventually conceded defeat when local residents persisted in swimming there. Without officially recognizing the area as a beach, the council gave way to public demand in the 1930s, agreeing to provide life guard and concession services there. Farther to the eastern end of the harbor, the parks board sold Stewart Park to the city council in exchange for park space elsewhere. Stewart Park remained open space for only a few more years before being transformed into industrial land.⁷²

By World War II, the pollution from of the city's growing waterfront industrial district defied the careful functional mapping of the harbor envisioned by planners, a vision that put everything—shipping, industry, and recreation—into orderly, self-contained places. The environmental effects of wartime industrial growth could not be contained. As Table 3 suggests, between 1912 and 1957 the expansion of Hamilton's industrial giant, Stelco, alone increased the number of tons of industrial waste entering the harbor enormously.

Figure 5. Children Swimming at Bay St. Beach.

Hamilton Harbour Commission, Hamilton Ontario.

This increase in industrial wastes happened while an aggressive program of infilling decreased the bay's area by roughly one-quarter. The tonnage of phenols, cyanide, ammonia, sulphuric acid, and oils emitted from the plant increased dramatically. Stelco, however, cannot be singled out as the sole culprit. During the interwar years, newspaper reports highlighted the bad situation by pointing to acid and oil wastes, sometimes diluted with water, which also flowed from the Hamilton By-Product Coke Ovens and two smaller metal fabricating companies on the waterfront.⁷³ City engineers also recorded that dyes, fats and grease—presumably from textile mills and meat packing companies in the area—flowed from private sewers directly into the harbor.⁷⁴ Small oil slicks made this pollution quite visible. Particularly during the spring thaw, as an editorial in local paper put it sarcastically, "the ice of the bay melts to the amorous kiss of warm spring suns and the congealed oils and waste release their aromatic delights."⁷⁵ Yet public controversy over the polluting of the harbor typically ended with the conclusion that, until the city addressed the dumping of untreated residential sewage into the harbor, it could take no concerted action against industrial polluters.⁷⁶

For sure, the accumulation of residential and industrial wastes undermined recreational uses of the harbor. A provincial investigation in 1943 estimated 70 million gallons of industrial waste and 25 million gallons of residential sewage entered the bay every day, much of it untreated.⁷⁷ A few years later the local health officer reported that the coliform count in parts of the harbor had increased 700 percent since 1923.⁷⁸ Perhaps, as the town planners might have realized, beaches on the harbor's south shore were unsustainable; local health authorities had closed all of them by the end of World War II. Even bathers on the eastern beach strip complained that they could not swim in the bay without becoming coated in oil. This led them to take their plunges into the colder waters of Lake Ontario.⁷⁹ Combined with traffic congestion from the steady stream of cars and trucks crossing the beach strip en route between Buffalo and Toronto, pollution led wealthier Hamiltonians to give up on summering there. As for the north shore, local health authorities outlawed swimming at LaSalle park in 1946. The city's medical officer of health warned that this meant pollution was "getting beyond the current which travels down the middle of the bay to the canal" which, at one time, he argued, "acted as a barrier, keeping the polluted water confined to the Hamilton side of the current."⁸⁰ An editorial writer in the Hamilton Spectator noted with some resignation that from a distance the bay's waters looked attractive and inviting, yet "nearby it is seen to be dirty and flecked with foulness, the pollution of its waters being the price we pay for modern urban life."⁸¹ While noting that doing more to control the city's waste products would necessarily increase municipal and manufacturing costs substantially, the writer argued that the effort was important for civic pride: "We pay for things in other ways besides money ... A little but essential sacrifice will prevent Hamilton's appearance from growing as shabby as a European refugee's."⁸²

To some extent, all Hamiltonians suffered from the public's loss of access to the waterfront and the polluting of the bay's waters. Nevertheless, those who lived closest to the harbor, or who now lived next to the industries that cut off access to the harbor, were the most clearly affected. In their colorful rendition of the days of their youth entitled, Tales from the North End, raconteurs Lawrence and Philip Murphy write in some depth about how the rise of heavy industry, infilling, and the fencing off of the waterfront affected both the lives of area residents and the cohesiveness of their working class community.⁸³ For many north enders, the harbor had ceased to be much of an environmental amenity. Increasingly, it became an environmental hazard. As indicated in Table 4 the neighborhoods created on or near inlets that had been filled in by the end of World War II with slag, coal ash and other potentially toxic materials became even more distinctly working class in comparison to the rest of the city than had been the case at the turn of the century.

Table 3. Estimate of Waste from Stelco Steel Plant Produced in Hamilton Harbour (in Tons).
	Phenols	Cyanide	Ammonia	Oils	Sulphuric Acid

1912	3	1	4	139	136
1917	12	5	14	518	509
1922	7	3	8	303	298
1927	13	5	15	568	559
1932	5	2	6	220	287
1937	16	7	21	715	931
1942	34	15	42	1,455	1,894
1947	35	15	43	1,483	1,930
1952	44	21	54	1,626	2,333
1957	70	34	85	2,581	3,703

Based on multipliers in Department of Interior, Cost of Clean Water, v. 3, Blast Furnaces and Steel Mills pp. 9, 56. Steel production statistics from William Kilbourn, The Elements Combined (Toronto, 1960); Technology multiplier, 1912–27 inclusive, "old," 1932–47, "mixed," 1952–57 "new," after Craig E. Colten, "Industrial Wastes in Southeast Chicago: Production and Disposal," Environmental History Review (1986), 97, 104, fn. 15.

Table 5 shows that from the Sherman Inlet area eastward, these neighborhoods, especially the industrial suburb of Brightside and another housing project in the vicinity of Gage's Inlet, had more semi-skilled factory workers and more Italian and eastern European residents than most other parts of the city. Although these neighborhoods grew up "on the other side of the tracks," squeezed between filled inlets and not far from a waste disposal site, they provided tightly knit communities for working class families in the city's industrial northeastern end. For those Hamiltonians who found it necessary to live close to their workplaces, their homes were not in an orderly and inspiring setting, but in some of the city's most environmentally hazardous areas.

Powerful and tax-adverse interests undermined the grandiose features of the visions offered by town planners. The full development of their plans, however, would have offered even less to Hamilton's working-class neighborhoods than their partial implementation. The planners had envisioned even more infilling of the kind that generated environmental hazards and attracted heavy industry. Planners had given little consideration to local access to waterfront resources: Their view, partially implemented, still ensured that some working-class residents lost access to their hunting and fishing resources, while others even lost their homes. Even imperfectly realized, the abstract vision of the planners had real social consequences: They legitimated and deepened environmental inequality in the city.

Table 4. Occupational Profiles of Selected Waterfront Residential Areas, 1945.
	Proprietors, White Collar	Semi-skilled, Skilled Workers	Unskilled Laborers

Total City	40%	42%	16%
North End	15%	67%	18%
Waterfront	16%	67%	17%
Wellington	19%	61%	21%
Oliver	21%	65%	15%
Sherman	18%	66%	17%
Brightside	13%	75%	11%
Gage	12%	63%	25%
All Areas	16%	66%	17%

Total n.=1759; note - neighborhoods surrounding existing or filled in inlets noted in bold letters. Sources: Sources: Vernon's City of Hamilton annual street, alphabetical, general, miscellaneous and classified business directory. (Hamilton: H. Vernon, 1945); Canada. Census of Canada, 1941, vol.2. (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1941).

Table 5. Ethnic Profiles of Selected Waterfront Residential Areas, 1945.
	British or Western European	Other	Italian	Eastern European

Total City	88%	12%	4%	8%
North End	74%	26%	15%	6%
Waterfront	90%	10%	2%	5%
Wellington	86%	14%	4%	8%
Oliver	61%	39%	23%	14%
Sherman	74%	26%	8%	15%
Brightside	27%	73%	28%	40%
Gage	48%	52%	4%	44%
All Areas	71%	29%	12%	13%

Total n.=2157; note - neighborhoods surrounding existing or filled in inlets noted in bold; over-representation by more than 5% above the city total in italics; under-representation by more than 5% below the city total underlined. Sources: Sources: Vernon's City of Hamilton annual street, alphabetical, general, miscellaneous and classified business directory. (Hamilton: H. Vernon, 1945); Canada. Census of Canada, 1941, vol.2. (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1941).

Hamilton's 'Master Plan'

DURING WORLD WAR II, a second wave of enthusiasm for town planning swept through Hamilton. Like other places throughout Ontario, Hamilton's political leaders hired town planning consultants to draw up a master plan to ensure their city's future growth in a new era of city zoning.⁸⁴ Hamilton's city council, which by this time had a committee on bay pollution, already had engaged in some limited, piecemeal zoning: For example, it prevented some industries from locating in specific neighborhoods. The new comprehensive zoning regulations authorized by the provincial government, however, aimed to support an overall vision of the city, something that the local press claimed was "far from being a mere blueprint of utopia. It deals realistically with those problems which hinder the development of Hamilton and offers practical solutions."⁸⁵ While intended to be more precise and practical than the grand urban visions of earlier planners, master plans and zoning regulations continued an important tradition. They carefully designated spaces for industry, homes and recreational areas. By doing so, planners aimed to bring order and rationality to what they viewed as chaotic development. The master plan thus aimed to provide "a complete picture" of the city, with the zoning bylaw to be "its tool" for the managing and directing of Hamilton's growth and development.⁸⁶

Figure 6. View of Hamilton's Industrial Waterfront from Across the Bay, 1946.

Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections. View from Carroll's Point, 1946.

Beginning in 1944, E. G. Faludi, planning director of the firm Town Planning Consultants, worked with the City's Planning Committee to prepare a master plan for Hamilton.⁸⁷ He began by organizing interviews with various representatives from the city's business, labor, professional, and social welfare organizations. He also gathered statistical information to assess the condition of the city's neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, this process reinforced existing divisions within the city. Faludi identified sixteen residential districts composed of some thirty-two neighborhoods. He used ten criteria to determine their condition—including features such as the physical condition of buildings, the number of derelict properties, the acreage covered by buildings, the number of buildings used for nonresidential purposes, the quality of sanitation services, the availability of recreational facilities, the amount of heavy traffic moving through the area, and the population density. Faludi concluded that 26 percent of Hamilton's neighborhoods were sound, 49 percent were declining, and 26 percent were blighted.⁸⁸

Of the north-end areas, Faludi considered all but two blighted. He did not deem the remaining two—Brightside and the Gage Inlet area—to be "recognizable neighborhood communities" at all. But he was wrong. In the case of Brightside, hundreds of eastern European and Italian factory workers took great pride in their homes and neighborhood. In 1977, some three decades after their homes had been demolished to make way for more industrial development, some nine hundred people returned to their old neighborhood for a reunion. There they saw old friends and had the chance to reminisce about their once-vibrant community, fondly remembering their fruit and vegetable gardens, local grocery, and local tavern, the Brightside House.⁸⁹ Ironically, property owners from the north side of Brightside's Birmingham Street had inadvertently helped industry encroach into their neighborhood when they petitioned the city's board of control to fix the Lottridge Inlet nuisance by getting Stelco to fill it in.⁹⁰ In Faludi's view, neighborhoods like Brightside, so close to industrial factories, ought never to have existed in the first place.

How would the master plan deal with the blighted communities in the new age of urban zoning? Faludi suggested an "industrial" designation for the land between the shoreline and the railway tracks from the area of the old Coal Oil Inlet (where the city first began its reclamation work), eastward.⁹¹ In all, 352 acres of blighted residential areas and more than 1,000 acres of nearby vacant land would become zoned for industrial use. In the areas of Wellington and Oliver streets, light industry would replace residential homes. The new zoning would permit heavy industry east of Sherman Street.⁹² The 1,000 acres of vacant land identified included inlets and harbor shoreline to be reclaimed for industrial purposes. Therefore the master plan sanctioned reclamation and the infilling of the harbor by industry and the Harbour Commission, and the complete transformation of Hamilton's northeastern end into an industrial district. Faludi also considered the question of "obnoxious industries," and offered a traditional spatial solution to the problems they posed. These industries, he argued, should exist beyond the city limits, still farther to the east. Hamilton's final zoning regulations reflected the town planner's proposals and designated the entire area east of the Wellington area as "light" or "heavy industrial."

In the town planner's view, only the old north-end port area could be kept as a residential area. Faludi proposed a substantial redevelopment of this area, largely through clearing old buildings and constructing new homes. He wanted to leave the Bay Street beach as a recreational area, but public health officials closed it for swimming just as the planner was developing his report. Faludi also wanted Eastwood Park to remain as a waterfront recreational area. In suggesting this, however, he ignored the fact that the docks and naval barracks built during the war already had cut the park off completely from the water. In its final zoning regulations, Hamilton's city council designated the entire blighted north end as a maximum-density residential district. This opened the way for the construction of apartment buildings and multiple unit housing, as well as single homes on small lots.

The idea that the waterfront might also serve as a recreational site for Hamilton's citizens seems to have been lost in the 1947 master plan and its accompanying zoning regulations. Although Faludi argued that the city needed a waterfront park with a bathing beach, swimming pool, and restaurant, he planned these for the shores of Lake Ontario—not the bay—in an area at the southern end of the beach strip. Hamilton's Harbour Commissioners concurred with the master plan's suggestion that the harbor and its waterfront no longer be considered suitable for residential or recreational uses. A 1957 Harbour Commission plan, proposed on the eve of the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, reveals the extent to which recreational uses of the harbor had taken a back seat to industry and shipping. It proposed the continued infilling of the southeastern shore for industrial land and wharfage. In contrast to most earlier planning documents, the Harbour Commission also proposed the extensive development of the western part of the bay. It aimed to fill in much of the southwestern shore and construct a high level bridge straight across the harbor to the north shore. This would serve as a trucking route for Toronto-bound vehicles.⁹³ The plan also called for filling in the bay side of the beach strip at the other end of the harbor to provide even more wharfages. Finally, it called for fifty acres of reclaimed waterfront property just north of the canal to house a thermonuclear power plant. While many aspects of this 1957 plan never took form, it suggested the extreme nature of planners' visions for Hamilton's waterfront in the years just following the war.⁹⁴

In the years immediately following World War II, therefore, planners and their allies saw little room for natural areas in the city. Previous efforts to allocate separate spaces in the city for different kinds of human relationships with nature had been undermined; using one part of the harbor as an industrial and residential septic tank had serious implications elsewhere. Nevertheless, postwar planners retained the belief that the different functions of the city and the waterfront could be compartmentalized, creating separate spaces for industrial, residential, and recreational uses of nature. The problem, in their view, was that previous planning efforts had been incomplete, resulting in multiple and conflicting uses in different parts of the city. They saw effective zoning as the means to achieve a carefully ordered city.

What did planning and zoning mean for the working-class residents living in the north end of Hamilton? On the one hand, the plans did not seem to change very much since the tensions between industrial development and residential neighborhoods predated their existence. On the other hand, the official zoning of many neighborhoods as industrial had important repercussions for the lives of people living there. As Yale Rabin and others argue, zoning decisions legitimated industrial encroachments on neighborhoods. They reduced the value of homes that remained in the area, and they made it unlikely that banks would provide loans to area residents for home improvements or maintenance.⁹⁵ Whether they had been designated as blighted before the zoning was inconsequential; neighborhoods were bound to become so after being designated as industrial. Such a designation reduced the values of homes in Hamilton's Brightside, making it easy for the Steel Company of Canada to snap them up from anxious homeowners who wanted to cut their property losses. This enabled Stelco to expand its massive complex both southward into the community and northwards. Its aggressive program of infilling provided new land for a 1,000-foot dock, 83 new coke ovens, a new blast furnace, and four 250-ton open hearth furnaces. This infilling and zoning also helped transform a once relatively small harbor front foundry into Hamilton's second integrated iron and steel maker.⁹⁶

Zoning at least forced some working-class families to move away from environmentally degraded areas, although those who had to move did not necessarily see the move as positive. Many people felt strongly about where they lived, as one steelworker who, in 1978, was told that the area where he had grown up and recently purchased his own home was "appalling" and slated to be demolished. "But I've lived around tracks all my life and so has my wife," he complained, "It doesn't bother me ... My house looks good inside and out. It's well kept and so are my neighbours'."⁹⁷ For still other working-class families, industrial zoning further reduced the quality of their neighborhoods. While zoning was intended to eliminate the mixing of land uses, the effect of the policy was to sanction further industrial development in some neighborhoods, and to reduce the likelihood that those areas would acquire the same recreational facilities or other forms of community improvement offered in formally recognized residential areas.

While a vision of the harbor as an industrial port meant that all Hamilton residents lost an environmental amenity, working-class residents of the areas closest to the harbor felt the effects of this loss most sharply. Their children were more likely to swim in the seriously degraded water of the harbor, or to play in yards and vacant lots that once were polluted inlets, filled in with potentially toxic or dangerous materials. Further, their families were the least likely of Hamilton's population to be able to afford to escape the city to cleaner spaces in nature, or to pay for indoor recreational facilities. The master plan and the designation of urban space through zoning—advocated and supported by urban planners—legitimated and even deepened environmental inequalities in the city.

Formal urban planning did not create environmental inequality in Hamilton; as the city developed in the nineteenth century, those holding social, political, and economic power had the resources to acquire what they viewed as the most healthy places in the city for their homes, offices, and recreational spaces. By the time planners surveyed the city, key public and private decisions had ensured that the waterfront would develop as an industrial zone, particularly in the northeast of the city. Planners supported and legitimated policies consistent with the urban form the city already had acquired. They called for the creation of an industrial zone in the northeast, the reclaiming of the inlets and the filling in of the harbor with residential and industrial waste, the location of obnoxious industries to the east beyond city limits, and the identification of the north shore and beach strip as potential recreational sites. The eastern limits of the city changed over time, as did the recreational potential of the northern and western waterfronts. In sanctioning existing and emerging divisions within the city, planners did nothing to counter existing and emerging environmental inequalities.

At least into the 1960s, urban planners believed they could divide the city into tidy spatial compartments, so that Hamilton residents could establish a different relationship with nature in the city's different parts. This truly was abstract thinking, which worked better on paper maps than on real social and natural landscapes. Industrial areas were never just separate places for industry, they also were neighborhoods of working-class families. Industrial and residential areas produced wastes, and containing those wastes to any one part of the city proved difficult. Planners gave little if any thought to the impact of extensive infilling of the harbor and its inlets on the overall waterfront environment. All Hamilton residents now suffer from the limits of the planners' visions, which legitimated the development of their city as a particular kind of industrial port, but the working-class citizens who live, work, and play near the water's edge suffer the most.

Ken Cruikshank is associate professor, Department of History, McMaster University, and author of Close Ties: Railways, Government and the Board of Railway Commissioners, 1851–1933. Nancy B. Bouchier is associate professor, Departments of Kinesiology and History, McMaster University, and author of For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small Town Ontario, 1838–1895. They currently are working collaboratively on a book manuscript that explores the interaction of social and environmental change in Hamilton Harbour from 1820 to 1960.

Notes

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, and we acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and McMaster University's Arts Research Board for their financial support of this research. This paper represents part of a larger study of the interaction of environmental change, regulation, and popular use of Hamilton Harbour.

^1. E. G. Faludi, A Master Plan for the Development of the City of Hamilton (Hamilton: City Planning Committee, 1947); "Now That Was a Plan!" Hamilton Spectator, 5 January 1980.

^2. Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 7.

^3. For an excellent study of the changing ideas of urban planners, see M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).

^4. Greg Hise and William Deverell, "Private Power, Public Space," in Eden By Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region, ed. Greg Hise, William F. Deverell, and Laurie Olin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1–63; R. Bruce Stephenson, Visions of Eden: Environmentalism, Urban Planning, and City Building in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900–1995 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997).

^5. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 135.

^6. Ibid., 67–68.

^7. Ibid., 282.

^8. See, for example, Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Vicki Been with Francis Gupta, "Coming to the Nuisance or Going to the Barrios? A Longitudinal Analysis of Environmental Justice Claims," Ecology Law Quarterly 24 (1997): 1–56; Thomas Lambert and Christopher Boerner, "Environmental Inequity: Economic Causes, Economic Solutions," Yale Journal of Regulation 14 (1997): 195–234; Paul Mohai, "The Demographics of Dumping Revisited: Examining the Impact of Alternative Methodologies in Environmental Justice Research," Virginia Environmental Law Journal 14 (1995): 616–53.

^9. Craig Colten, "Industrial Wastes in Southeast Chicago: Production and Disposal 1870–1970," Environmental Review 10 (1986): 94; Craig Colten, "Environmental Development in the East St. Louis Region, 1890–1970," Environmental History Review 14 (1990): 93–114, Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner, The Road to Love Canal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). Several historians have done much to illuminate changing conceptions of the urban environment, particularly Martin V. Melosi, Effluent America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1996).

^10. Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Institutional Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

^11. These issues are highlighted in contemporary medical geography analyses of environmental health in Hamilton. See, for example, Isaac Luginaah, et al., "Health Profiles of Hamilton: Spatial Characterisation of Neighbourhoods for Health Investigations," GeoJournal 53 (2001), 135–47; Murray M. Finkelstein, et al., "Relation Between Income, Air Pollution and Mortality: A Cohort Study," Canadian Medical Association Journal 169 (2 September 2003), 397–402. See also, Eric McGuinness, "Pollution Hits Poor Most: Study. McMaster Researcher Finds Unfair Distribution of Pollution's Health Risks," Hamilton Spectator, 3 September 2003; "Where You Live in Hamilton Can Affect Your Health: Survey," Hamilton Spectator, 27 September 2003.

^12. John Weaver, Hamilton: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Lorimer, 1982), 103; for a more detailed analysis, see, John Weaver, "From Land Assembly to Social Mobility. The Suburban Life of Westdale (Hamilton) Ontario, 1911–1951," in A History of Ontario: Selected Readings, ed. Michael J. Piva (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1989), 214–41.

^13. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 88–89. On Hamilton's ethnic communities and their institutions, see, for example, Wolodymyr Ewhen Krywulak, "The Organized Ukranian Community in Hamilton: A Case Study of Future Corporate Viability," (M.A. thesis, McMaster University, 1986); and William Shaffir, "The Hamilton Jewish Community: Social History and Acculturation," (Hamilton Ethnicity Project Working Paper No. 4, 1987).

^14. Boyer paraphrases Nolen in Dreaming the Rational City, 74. For an overview of Canadian literature on urban planning, see, "Town Planning," in Harold Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, vol. 2 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994), 643–76; Alan Artibise and Gilbert Stelter eds., The Usable Urban Past: Planning and Politics in the Modern Canadian City (Toronto: Macmillan, 1979); Gerald Hodge, Planning Canadian Communities. An Introduction to the Principles, Practice, and Participants (Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1991); Thomas I. Gunton, "The Evolution of Urban and Regional Planning in Canada: 1900–1960," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1981); Walter Van Nus, "The Fate of the City Beautiful Thought in Canada, 1893–1930," in The Canadian City: Essays in Urban History, eds., Gilbert A. Stelter and Alan F. J. Artibise (Toronto: Macmillan, 1979), 162–85.

^15. S. B. McCann, "Physical Landscape of the Hamilton Region," in Steel City: Hamilton and Region, ed., M. J. Dear, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 30–33; L. J. Chapman and D. F. Putnam, The Physiography of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). On Hamilton's growth and development, see Weaver, Hamilton; Nicholas Terpstra, "Local Politics and Local Planning: A Case Study of Hamilton, Ontario, 1915–1930," Urban History Review/Revue d'Histoire Urbaine 19 (October, 1985), 114–28; Michael Doucet and John Weaver, Housing the North American City (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991). For an overview of environmental changes in the harbor related to development, see Mark Sproule-Jones, Governments at Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 135–42.

^16. Doucet and Weaver, Housing the North American City, 446–66; Weaver, Hamilton, 31–32, 60.

^17. Weaver, Hamilton, 59–68, 96–99; R. Louis Gentilcore, "The Beginnings: Hamilton in the Nineteenth Century," in Dear, Steel City, 108–18.

^18. William and Evelyn M. James, "A Sufficient Quantity of Pure and Wholesome Water": The Story of Hamilton's Old Pumphouse (London: Phelps, 1978).

^19. Hamilton Public Library [hereafter HPL], Special Collections, John William Kerr Diaries, v. 5, p.5, 14 June 1871, April 1866, vol. 2, pp. 4, 8. The Kerr Diaries provide much evidence of early industry and industrial development on and along inlets which tends to be ignored in other analyses. See, for example, incidents in the larger watershed area, v. 7, p. 2–26, 29 September, 1 October 1876.

^20. Kerr Diaries, v. 4, p.8, 14 May 1870; v.6, p.3, 17 April, 21 May 1873; v.7, p.3, 26 October 1876.

^21. Ibid., v.6, p.3, 30 May 1873. Kerr often found himself between a rock and a hard place in his prosecution of fishing violations as well. In June 1870, for example, he confided that he "never felt smaller in his life" after Judge Logie refused to hear his evidence against a local fisherman (v.4, p.9 20, June 1870).

^22. Ibid., v.6, pp.4–7, 18 July 1873; v.7, p.2, 29 September 1876.