This is the first post in a short series of reflections from participants of the 2025 Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium on Contamination and Rebirth in Hamilton, Ontario, organized by Jessica van Horssen at McMaster University.
The morning of Saturday, May 31, 2025 brought with it grey overcast skies and cold westerly winds that felt like sharp needles piercing through whatever parka or Patagonia you were wearing. Despite the polarity of the weather, we stood at the edge of Hamilton’s harbour with fervid enthusiasm for day 2 of the Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium 2025. It was my first CHESS, and my first conference ever for that matter, but I had never felt such community as I felt that weekend. The still waters of the western tip of Lake Ontario invited me to reconsider the ways in which artificial land affects more than just flora and fauna; it also impacts the lives of those living in and around it, both socially and economically. We were not just there for the view, but to listen to what the history of the land had to tell us.
Being an exercise on personal reflection and the interactionism that comes along with learning by foot, much of the tour was genuinely fascinating; walking the waterfront with a group of engaged experts and being led by a connoisseur of the city’s history, I found myself authentically energized and captivated by what was being explained. There was something so intimate about being on the ground, literally standing on our history, that made these facts feel more real and more immersive. Seeing the aging mills, the rehabilitated shoreline, and the revamped community hubs gave the tour more texture and feeling, ultimately demonstrating how land and people tend to evolve together.

Moments Before We Jumped into Our Chilly Expedition. Photo by the author.
Instead of glamorous sailboats and a replica of the Amalfi Coast, steel mills, cranes, and the continually evolving silhouettes of smokestacks were our main attractions. They spanned the seaboard for as far as the eye could see. It was on this day that I came to understand how this land had become a cornerstone for Canadian industry, and how pollution from that very trade scarred the terra firma and water that it helped spell out. When I think back to the tour that was kindly led by Andrea Smith, the Manager of the City of Hamilton’s Department of Municipal Land Development, I think about how industry was born there, and how Steeltown became an attraction to major industrial maestros, like Stelco and Dofasco, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The factories along this coast had quickly become magnets for workers, and inevitably brought in an influx of immigrants from Europe. Alongside them, rural Canadians were also drawn to the prospect of earnest work to support themselves while Southern Ontario tried to define itself as an industrial hub. The waterfront became an unforgettable symbol for economic opportunity, but also a physical barrier that stopped many of its residents from engaging with the shoreline. Factories provided jobs, but they also fenced up the city as an industrial zone that locked out lakeside living. We had learned that, for countless individuals, this tradeoff seemed worth it as steel boomed, railroads were built, and families settled into working-class lives. What they failed to consider were the environmental costs that would become clearly distinguishable in recent decades.

Standing purely on artificial land, but feeling more real than ever. Photo by the author.
For years, industrial prosperity near the bay meant that heavy metals like mercury, cadmium, and lead had all flowed together to form one big evil cocktail, causing fish populations to crash, beaches to be bolted, and foul chemical smells to be emitted all due to contamination as a result of industrial discharge. Hamilton Harbour had even been named a designated area of concern by the United States-Canada International Joint Commission. Randle Reef was another site that Smith described as one of the most contaminated plats in all of Canada due to decades of toxic sediment formation. The environmental damage we explored was not just ecological, it was also personal to the respiratory health of Hamilton’s lower city residents. Working-class families settled close to these mills. However, they were at the forefront of exposure, and Steeltown’s socioeconomic divide reeked of inequality.
Throughout our walk, the contrast of the northern and southern ends of the city became evident; the lower city housed many of the poorest neighbourhoods, while the ‘mountains’ with better air and more greenspace housed middle-class refugees that aimed to avoid the fouling effects of industrialization and rapid urbanization. Steel jobs dried up at the turn of the twenty-first century, and for this reason property values near the waterfront fell as the promises of prosperity were no longer at the forefront of Hamilton’s identity.
During the latter half of our tour led by Dr. Jessica van Horssen at Bayfront Park, kids were playing, dogs were being walked, and cyclists were all trudging the shoreline together on a plain that seemed utterly discardable just a few decades ago. Toxic sediment, industrial runoff, and piles of waste by all means deemed this environment a disaster zone. Now the park provided proof that change and revitalization was possible. The transition from smog factories to a post-industrial future was buried deep below the paved playground path. I started thinking about other cities, neighbourhoods, and waterfronts that had been similarly transformed. What stories did they bury? What came before? How did generational decisions affect one another? The land remembers and this tour was proof of that.
Thus, I left for my home in Etobicoke after the daytime events on May 31 with more than just facts, I left with a deepening desire to learn more about our own footprints and that the history of the land is very alive and urgent! If I could describe CHESS 2025 in one word, it would be motivating. It was one that made me, a non-Hamiltonian, understand that no place is ever finished being shaped, and no community action or clean-up project is the same. Every piece of land tells us a different story and reveals so much more than what meets the eye, or what meets the foot for that matter.
Further Readings:
Cronsberry, Desirae Elizabeth. “SteelCity Living: Hamilton, Stelco and the Post-Industrial City.” PhD diss., Carleton University, 2015.
Cruikshank, Ken, and Nancy B. Bouchier. “Blighted areas and obnoxious industries: constructing environmental inequality on an industrial waterfront, Hamilton, Ontario, 1890–1960.” Environmental History 9, no. 3 (2004): 464-496.
Hannah, Julie. “Economic Change and the Inner City Landscape: A Case Study of Hamilton, Ontario.” Master’s thesis, University of Waterloo, 2012. Wakefield, Sarah. “Great expectations: waterfront redevelopment and the Hamilton Harbour Waterfront Trail.” Cities 24, no. 4 (2007): 298-310.
Feature image: CHESS participants learning about Hamilton Harbour’s contamination and rebirth. Photo courtesy of Andrew Watson.
