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rfmcdonaldA Burgh Diaspora post pointed me in the direction of this CBC news story noting the migration of artists from Toronto to the city of Hamilton, an industrial--now post-industrial--city of a half-million people, anchoring the western edge of the Greater Toronto Area on the shores of Lake Ontario.
Overall, news about Hamilton is negative, stories of economic decline and urban decline predominating in the media, but the low cost of living and a slow economic revival has also been attracting some "creative class" migrants--I blogged about this juxtaposition briefly in this 2009 post, and my own visit to Hamilton last year was positive.
Is this migration indicative of an eventual revival of the city? That hope doesn't seem implausible to me, for whatever it's worth.
Overall, news about Hamilton is negative, stories of economic decline and urban decline predominating in the media, but the low cost of living and a slow economic revival has also been attracting some "creative class" migrants--I blogged about this juxtaposition briefly in this 2009 post, and my own visit to Hamilton last year was positive.
Is this migration indicative of an eventual revival of the city? That hope doesn't seem implausible to me, for whatever it's worth.
When Ron Weihs and Judith Sandiford opened the doors of their Artword Artbar on Colbourne Street to the Hamilton Fringe Festival crowd last week, there was no shortage of former Torontonians like themselves who have migrated south to Hamilton.
There are playwrights and musicians. There are writers and visual artists. Often, the couple run into other former Toronto residents who came to Hamilton for the same reason they did — it's more spacious, more livable, and for many in the artistic community, more inspiring.
It's not exactly an artistic brain drain. It's more of a slow, steady migration of Toronto artists to Hamilton to join the local scene, said Weihs, a playwright who moved from Toronto in 2007 and opened the Artword Artbar two years later.
“They're slowly, tentatively finding their way here,” he said. “I'm just as happy about that because Hamilton has a very strong scene of its own. The healthiest thing is for that scene to assimilate new people rather than artists coming in from outside guns blazing.”
