In this context, Hamilton is not the 177 acres called the City of Hamilton, but an amorphous space loosely based on it: a pressure-cooker of activity surrounded by a lost way of life.
To some, that space is the pulse and pacemaker of the Island; to others, its rush, clogged streets and lack of parking make Hamilton a heart attack in progress. Like so many of its tenants, Hamilton is a corporation. Commerce has always defined it, as it has Bermuda. Over the years, however, the city has developed a life of its own, separate from the rest of the Island, for better and for worse.
The majority of what goes on in Hamilton - business, government, the retail sector - has gone on there for 200 years. The priorities that are Hamilton’s traditional stock in trade have kept a surprisingly level course. The city’s role in the Bermudian context, however, has been transformed in a much shorter time span. The Island today is one gigantic suburb, with Hamilton the chief centre of activity. For every Bermudian who sees gold in them thar Burnaby Hills, there is another who holds the view that Hamilton would be a better place if it could become tomorrow what it used to be in a yesteryear of the mind: halcyon, communal, open.
The tightrope walk between the qualitative and quantitative is evident in the dual vision Bermudians have of their capital’s progress in its latest round of development. But whatever Hamilton may or may not be, it is first and foremost a consequence of decisions no one made overtly: the decision that the business of Bermuda would be international business; the decision to integrate that business with life in Hamilton; and the decision that we should live and work in two different worlds.
Because no committee ever sat down and made these decisions, there is no one to blame. How outraged would people be that the Corporation of Hamilton continues to hold its town meetings in secret - in the 21st century! - if anyone felt that the results of those secret meetings made any difference.
And because there is no one to blame, Hamilton has drifted into whatever it has become, and will, presumably, drift into whatever it will become, as a consequence of indecision. Whither the Fates Lead Us.
At a glance, it might seem that the worst mistake of this laissez-faire approach was not isolating international business at Dockyard. Imagine it now: Hamilton an ideal destination for tourists with romance in their eyes, a fantasy city of upscale retail markets, broad streets on which to meander and nary a delivery truck in sight. The business community would have gained at Dockyard an architecturally fabulous site and an even greater concentration of activity than is possible in Hamilton. The West End of the Island would have developed along a different trajectory.
Recent developments in the international business sector suggest that Dockyard might by now have proved insufficiently large to house the business community - which would then have had to grow upwards in ever-taller office blocks that would by now have dwarfed the existing Dockyard infrastructure.
What’s done is done. A simpler strategy to redistribute some of Hamilton’s burden must begin by tackling and defeating the city’s traffic problem: effective mass transit such as water-taxis or a network of high-speed ferries would reduce the logjam. The long-delayed satellite parking and shuttle bus proposals deserve fast-tracking.
Simultaneously, we must change our motives for getting into and out of town, since there is only so much office space and work that the world’s smallest city can accommodate. Modern technology will aid and abet us in this goal; in a wired world, fewer of us will need to visit Hamilton to earn our daily crusts. The decentralisation of business life will work in favour of a less congested Hamilton. Thank goodness for that.
If we persist in the view that Hamilton is full, despite the empty spaces in the northern half of the city, Southside and Dockyard may come into their own. Perhaps the likeliest future will be a Bermuda of multiple nuclei, in which more even growth is ensured and the transition between Hamilton and away is less abrupt.
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In a television programme entitled “Next: The Future Just Happened”, the following statistics were presented:
If you stop trying new foods by the age of 35, there is a 95 percent chance you will never again try new food. If you stop listening to new music by the time you are 39, there is a 95 percent chance you will never listen to new music again. If you have not had a tattoo or a piercing by the time you are 23, there is a 95 percent chance that you never will. Laboratory rats exhibit the same pattern of behaviour. Animals grow conservative once their adolescence ends.
Any discussion of the future must acknowledge our preconceptions in this area. Probably 95 percent of adults in Bermuda believe that Hamilton has changed for the worse in the past, say, 15 years. Is that true, or has their DNA taken charge of their thinking?
Although Hamilton is a hurried place, it has always been another world within another world. When Front Street bustled with docks and trains, it was far busier than it is now. When the great city hotels were open, Hamilton was a toddling town. The hotels, with their moonlit gardens and jazz bands, were more active places in the evenings than they are now that they belong to the grand insurance companies. Hamilton in the ‘50s, despite segregation, must have been a jumping joint, compared with the torpor that now settles over the town once the clock strikes six.
Of course, in those far-off, never-never days to which nostalgists and those who do not enjoy change (such as the over-30s, conservationists and Bermudians) would like us to return, some things were less frantic. There were about as many people in all of Bermuda at the start of the 20th century as now pass through Hamilton every weekday.
Hamilton was indisputably an outdoors place back in those rose-tinted days. Now, it is an office world, or at least the front half is. Aside from arriving and departing, the Dilbert crowd is generally only on the streets once or twice during the average working day, and rarely, if ever, on weekends. If developments such as the Bull’s Head car park and repeated price hikes for Hamilton parking are any indication, the future of the city will be more pedestrian-friendly than the present.
A city with more relaxed streets would afford a more Continental lifestyle: sidewalk cafés, greater social contact and much better window-shopping. Hamilton might then prove easier to market to holidaymakers overseas.
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If no one lives in Hamilton, no one will much care what happens to it while they are at home in the outlying parishes, watching television.
The population of Hamilton has been shrinking. In 1980, 1,617 people lived in the city. Eleven years later, the census counted just 1,100, one-third fewer. The 2000 census, if it is ever released, will probably continue the trend.
This process must be reversed.
Existing pockets of habitation must be augmented. Living in Hamilton is by no means impossible. North Hamilton has most of the city’s residential population plus, as an unwelcome neighbour, the Pembroke Dump. North by northwest, Mayflower Court houses some of Bermuda’s sprightlier senior citizens. The American International Group has a single apartment, albeit a fabulous single apartment, atop its Richmond Road headquarters. Beyond that, not much of Hamilton is used for living space.
Sir John Swan has articulated a vision of Atlantis rising from the ashes of the Victoria Diner, on the corner of Victoria and Court Streets. His company sold most of the one- and two-bedroom apartments in the proposed gated community before ground was broken. The complex is designed and priced to attract corporate owners, who will house temporary and visiting staff in Atlantis. The next phase of the Waterfront development includes residential units.
If these residential projects beget others, Hamilton’s future will be the livelier for it. More residential life within the city walls equals more reasons for a night on the town, more leisurely social contact, a friendlier ambience, lower levels of alienation and a more invigorating pulse beating in the heart of old Hamilton town.
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Even before the events of September 11, the world was changing fast. Like it or not, Hamilton and Bermuda surf the currents of change. The Island has, in its previous incarnations, marketed its convenience to others and traded on its strategic location at the crossroads of continents and its relative openness to capital and ideas.
Those are the very attributes most in demand in the Information Age, with its profound shift in perspective. Life happens faster now. It took generations for us to break the speed of sound, but only months for us to be comfortable moving our minds at 56,000 bps. The new economy invests its expectations in the future and the young; it lacks respect for the past and the old. From the moment Bermudians developed the exempted company in Hamilton in 1936, Bermuda has moved inexorably towards becoming a client state of corporate interests.
Survival will require dovetailing our economic interests with the traditional pace and quality of life Bermudians once regarded as sacred. Given the condition in which we find ourselves, we dare not consider the two as mutually exclusive.
The old Hamilton is gone. The Hamilton a-borning must celebrate its past while accommodating the needs of its future. The city we have inherited owes much to the mid-20th century model in which few live in the concrete and glass structures they inhabit by day, but the suburbs are where we dream and mow the lawn. Bermudians have bought the Hollywood version of the American dream, in which you work in a busy, frantic place and then drive out to the Coast when the day is over.
In this sense, Hamilton does not lack direction – but upward will soon be the only one available within the city itself, if it confines its focus to the few streets south of the Cathedral and abandons the city north of Victoria Street. To realise its full potential, Hamilton must look to its own motto: Sparsa Collegit, bringing together the scattered. Right now, Hamilton’s residential population is indeed scattered. The city fathers should more carefully consider the needs of all of Hamilton.
To modernise Hamilton without destroying its character, to make it more accommodating for those who are already there and to attract thousands more to live and play within its environs: these are the challenges the City of Hamilton faces. It is time take the city by the scruff of its neck, acknowledge the diverse cultures it encompasses and make it the city we want it to be. BB |
Future Perfect
