[URBAN NOTE] Four notes about urban change: Hamilton, Victoria, the Legion, St. James Park

[rfmcdonald]

• A Hamilton church is digging up hundreds of dead for an old cemetery turned parking lot to make room for condos.


• A RV fire that left an elderly couple in Victoria homeless highlights the affordable housing crisis there.


• MacLean's notes how the Royal Canadian Legion is starting to make a new fortune, in eateries and real estate even.


• Why is the St. Lawrence BIA using security guards to kick homeless people out of a park? (Rhetorical, I know.) NOW Toronto looks.

Comments

[ffutures]

The cemetery move is far from unusual. Graveyards tend to be built in areas that are under big pressure from other uses, and as the graves get older and less connected to the local residents it's fairly common for them to be repurposed.

Before I retired I worked in a church school where the playground was built over a long-disused cemetery, more or less forgotten, in the 19th century. In the early 21st they needed space urgently for a new gym, and the only place for it was underground. They had to move more than a thousand bodies, mostly unidentified, to another cemetery well outside central London, and just excavating them (with associated archaeology etc.) took more than a year.