Paul Wilson: Hamilton 100 years ago — we've never looked so pretty
Gorgeous panoramic picture from 1913 shows the city celebrating, even though they picked the wrong year to party
The picture you see here is my favourite of old Hamilton. It was taken 100 years ago this month, corner of King and James, in the midst of a most curious event.
I have this picture hanging in the hallway at home. It’s more than three feet long. Your computer screen is not quite that size, but you can click-and-drag on this image and walk around in it.
Try that right now. You will feel underdressed. I do believe that every man, woman and child in that photo is wearing a hat. Straw boater, fancy feather, peak cap.
Watch out for the streetcars. They are everywhere. I see just one automobile in this picture, out front of the Stanley Mills store. With all those HSR conveyances, who’d need a car?
Downtown is having a party. Check all those Union Jacks. Queen Victoria would approve, and you’ll note that she and her lion have already taken up residence in Gore Park.
The photographer was a young man named Rudolph Birk. He set up a panoramic camera at the southwest corner of King and James, where the CIBC glass tower is today.
That kind of camera had become all the rage. It had a clockwork motor. The film was fed in one way, the camera panned the other. There was a set of gears to control the speed of the pan, so you could adjust for light conditions. This marvelous contraption was eventually done in by the wide-angle lens.
They got the date wrong
Birk took his 360-degree photo in the midst of Hamilton’s centennial-week celebrations, which began Aug. 11, 1913.
Except the city wasn’t yet a hundred years old. Hamilton became a police village in 1833, and a city in 1846.
The centennial organizers declared George Hamilton laid out his farm in village lots in 1813 and gave the settlement a name. But Margaret Houghton of the library’s Local History and Archives department points out that George hadn’t even arrived in these parts by then.
"I think they just wanted to throw a party," she says.
And that they did. The "home built in a day" was part of Hamilton’s 1913 centennial celebrations. They put it up on Barton East and the feat got attention around North America in Robert Ripley’s "Believe It or Not."
(The home didn’t last long. They had moved it to Sanford North, but the school board tore it down in 1932 to build Sanford school – a big beauty that just got torn down itself.)
Famous flea on the loose
There was great excitement at the 1913 centennial with the escape of Dondidier, star of a visiting flea circus. He was valued at $500, and the hunt began, complete with detectives and dogs. The flea turned up and resumed his tango stunts.
Nearly 10,000 showed up on the closing evening for a men-only Pajama Parade. The city controller, a man named Bird, took first prize with some silk pj’s from Honolulu.
Charade or not, the centennial was an excuse for the city to have a good summer bash. And out of it came that precious long photo that lets us look into those times. Hundreds of prints of that image have been sold in Hamilton.
We are trying hard now to bring back the energy and confidence and human scale that’s so evident in the picture. That’s why, for instance, many have fought this summer to save five 1800s buildings on the south side of Gore Park. They’re in that picture, behind the trees.
What would those smartly-dressed citizens of a hundred years ago think if they were dropped at King and James today?
We could tell them about high-rises and shopping malls and how the car became king. But how, on a hot August day, do we make them understand short-shorts, tube tops and all those tattoos?