Stoney Creek's Downtown: Part Ten, The Postamble

No matter how well-planned, a community's growth is usually fraught with missteps and stumbles, sometimes calamity, and occasionally, due to an economic downturn or something otherwise externally impactful, catastrophe. Downtown Stoney Creek seems to have weathered the past forty-five years well, in the sense that it hasn't been victim to developmental encroachment or government folly, and it didn't have all of its eggs in one basket, a local economy based on one sector, and that sector took a nose-dive. In fact, it's easy to imagine that the area has been almost entirely unaffected by what transpired over what amounts to pretty well a half-century.

I guess it's possible that this 'bubble-state' could continue for another half-century. That so long as it remains a relatively sleepy enclave, 'hidden' while the surrounding areas continue to morph into something bigger, into something more densely packed, or in the case of Downtown Hamilton, resurrected and revitalized, then there's always a chance that the status quo will remain...the status quo. Maybe.

I appreciate how stalwart residents feel about their 'Old Towne Village', how quick they might be to defend what they know, what they love. But I suppose that where they may take comfort in the fact that so little has changed (as long as you interpret this as 'nothing awful has happened', that you can still recognize the place), I rather wince.

Stoney Creek-proper has so many wonderful things going for it. The Escarpment. The Devil's Punch Bowl and its Cross. Battlefield Park and Museum and the annual re-enactment. Canada Flag Day and its parade. Peacefully quiet neighbourhoods that will, in all likelihood, remain peacefully quiet for generations. The fact that it's not Hamilton. (And I say this as someone born at St. Joeseph's, and who loves his birthplace mightily.)

And the fact that it's not, as I've suggested, some gross deformation of what it used to be, 'back in the day'.

But I believe that this 'sleepy hollow' aspect isn't something to wear as a badge, even though we should be grateful for it. Because I don't believe that we've seen the best days of Downtown Stoney Creek. Not by a long-shot. And I believe that the fact that we've been able to not make the profound mistakes that other small communities with small downtowns, short main street strips may have made, should be see as a gift: the gift of time.

Here in Downtown Stoney Creek, we've been given the gift of time, of impact from the outside having been delayed, held firmly in abeyance. And this gift might end up being the most precious one we could ever imagine. Because of it, in order to move forward as we choose, we don't have to reverse anything. There's nothing that's happened that could be considered travesty or ruin that we now have to work to bring the downtown back from, to some semblance of what it 'should' be. We've never gotten to that 'ill-conceived' state. And we owe it to ourselves to realize this, and begin fomenting a vision for Downtown Stoney Creek that goes beyond deeply-embedded inertia.

To borrow from the mindset I rail against, we 'ought to' take the future in hand and begin fashioning it consciously, instead of being content to wander in a sustaining stupor.

We may not get this chance again.