Comment 78861

By Plateau (anonymous) | Posted June 22, 2012 at 23:27:00 in reply to Comment 78845

Downtown has a wealth of enthic restaurants, far more than anywhere else in the GHA. You'll find them in areas like the International Village and James North. Downtown has four blocks of pubs in Hess Village and another two in Augusta Street.

Downtown had a number of jazz clubs until people stopped giving a toss about anything but Smooth Jazz. Hamilton's best jazz talents rarely play here because the city likes the idea of live music but is generally not great at supporting it. Especially a premium product like jazz. Piano techs don't grow on trees.

Hess Village used to have a handful of street festivals every year. They were hugely unpopular with the neighbours, who basically made it impossible to have events like the Hess Jazz Festival, Hess Blues Festival, what have you. Bourbon Street, as you say. And this was before the street narrowing and the club-ification of Hess. The City is shit-scared of the possibility that the Village would take on a life of its own. And $100 million-plus in new residential and hotel development one block east won't improve the situation.

Destination identity is already a problem for downtown. People have good-paying career jobs there, and then take those earnings to the south Mountain, Ancaster, Dundas, Stoney Creek, Carlisle, Burlington... Anywhere but downtown. They could live downtown and help lead change, but they don't and so to some extent they can share responsibility for the status quo.

And as has been said before, the failure of our city's post-secondary institutions to establish meaningful footholds downtown is a huge disservice to the health of the core. (Maybe you know someone you could talk to on that count.)

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