West Harbour Hamilton-now as popular as bedbugs.

This is a photo of Hess North where the City of Hamilton once wanted to build a Pan Am stadium. I have driven by this land thousands of times on my way home. Matt Jelly blew the whistle on the barrels of unidentified liquid abandoned on the site, I have been emailing people who should have been concerned about it for years. Jelly got the job done. After the lid came off the story, there was much furrowing of the brow by the city and the Ministry of the Environment. Now, not so much. The switch hitting city is now fretting about enhancing the Ivor Wynne neighborhood since a rebuilt Ivor Wynne will decrease their parkland. That's fine. But after sitting through the five hour stadium debate at council yesterday (and writing about it for OpenFile Hamilton) I heard two references to selling the West Harbour land the city bought for the stadium to developers in order to recover some costs. Is this a whim, a notion, a trend, a threat? Whatever it is, it should be watched. Developers can do good things, but we can't forget that the early developer ideas for what became Bayfront Park, was for light industrial use. Great things could happen on that West Harbour land, and they should, but they should happen with imput and imagination. Citizens be vigilant.

This is the stadium in Cardiff Wales. It's on the water, in the city and attractive. We just can't do that in Hamilton Ontario.

Too bad the Pan Am stadium has become a wretched curse in Hamilton. This is the rugby stadium in Cardiff Wales. It's attractive, you can get there by transit, there are markets outside when it's not is use. Other people can do it.