Alina got up at the crack of dawn to ride to Bramalea GO to catch the bus that arrived at Hamilton Centre GO Station at 8:55. She then rode the short distance over to where we are staying. After a bathroom and snack break we left about 9:30.

We are riding a loop that I have taken many friends on over the years since I first created the route in 2016. I wrote about it in September 2023 when I was cat sitting for my daughter, and Patti stayed with me for a few days of riding.

We took a starting picture in front of a Hamilton mural on Ferguson Avenue. There is a bigger picture of it in the blog post linked above and a description of my encounter with the artist who is touching it up.

Shortly thereafter, we started ascending the escapement rail trail, developed on a former CN railway line in 1993. It starts in Corktown and runs about 8 km to Albion Falls. It offers good views of the Hamilton Brick Works. The company that currently owns it has proposed a public redevelopment of the site. The Don Valley brickworks in Toronto might be used as inspiration.

Hamilton has seven staircases ascending the escarpment. Six built by the city, and one built by a private citizen named Uli. When he built his staircase, the city hadn’t built staircases in the east end of the city. Uli was a retired builder and took matters into his own hands. I wrote about it when I met him doing some repairs in 2016 when I was riding the same route that I did today.

This is Albion Falls. In 2016 when I first visited here, people would hike down to the base of the fall the paddle in the pool, and many foolhardy people would climb the waterfall. After a firefighter was seriously injured, trying to rescue someone here, the city prohibited, hiking around the waterfall, and post the by law officer overlooking it to ensure people comply.

Hamilton has quite a few of these water fountains with water bottle filling station, and pet bowl along their trails. We encountered for today. Alina is looking down the stairs.

It was a bit hazy today, but the views are still impressive.

I was able to experience some high-quality new infrastructure which I had only read about before. The intersection showing in the picture had a significant number of collisions and was very difficult for pedestrians and cyclists to navigate. The city has reconfigured it with traffic, lights and a protected multi use path. The Muse path which was installed along mountain brow Boulevard several years ago has now been extended by 1.2 km and includes this new protected infrastructure. It felt very safe. Every time I come to Hamilton, I find new infrastructure.

According to the project drawings, the multi-use path should have extended along the road at this point, but perhaps until the issue of soil remediation in this park, which has caused this part to be fenced off, is handled, it won’t be built. However, multi-use path did connect with a pathway on the escarpment side of the park, so it’s not really a problem that it wasn’t also built along the roadway.

We stopped at Incline Coffee on Concession Street for a snack. They make great chocolate chip cookies.

Here’s another great view of the lower city. Sam Lawrence Park provides an excellent vantage point.

The City has built a wonderful protected bidirectional multiuse path on the Claremont access named for kindergarten teacher, Jay Keddy, who was killed biking on the access in 2015. It’s super fun to ride down, and I have cycled up it three times, and while it is more challenging than the trail we used this morning in terms of the steepness, it’s about a quarter of the distance. This is the top end.

At this point at the top of the Jay Keddy trail, it used to turn into a sidewalk, but the multi-use path is being continued along West 5th Street.

The St Joseph’s healthcare site on West fifth is dedicated to treating mental health and addiction. This building on the same site was the Hamilton insane asylum, which operated from 1884 until the 1980s.

This trail was built in the last few years to allow cyclist and pedestrians to stay closer to the edge of the escarpment.

It comes out onto Sanatorium Road by the Long & Bisby Building, part of the former Chedoke Sanatorium (also known as the Mountain Sanatorium). It was originally built in 1920 as a nurses’ residence and later became a daycare center before closing in 2013.

This area is slated for a large housing development, but there has been a sign up advertising it, as far back as when I first rode by here in 2016.

This two barred cross was erected in 1953 as a symbol for the fight against lung disease, and reminder of the threat of tuberculosis. It’s just down the street from the former site of Hamilton Sanatorium.

Scenic Drive has homes on one side, and the escarpment on the other. There were still quite a few nice, modest older homes, but they are slowly being replaced by larger modern ones.

This is McMaster University from an opening in the trees just before we started to descend Chedoke Radial Trail.

It is an unpaved, but quite smooth multi-use path that is a popular section of the Bruce Trail and follows the former route of the Brantford and Hamilton Electric Railway.

Here is Alina crossing the 403.

This is another floating bus stop on Emerson Street, which connects the Hamilton Brantford Rail Trail and McMaster with a bidirectional cycle track.

This is the McMaster Children’s Hospital up close, which could be seen from the top of the escarpment.

We rode through the McMaster campus, and then down to Princess Point. This little train runs between Pier 7 and Princess Point.

The trail goes under the 403 and the GO train line. The stairs lead up to Dundurn Avenue, but are currently closed due to needing repairs.

The land on Pier 7 and eight is slated for redevelopment. The city built a new park there ahead of the development. These 40 foot high panels of glass beads created by a local indigenous artist, and Hamilton’s largest public art piece, were unveiled at the West Harbour for the National Truth and Reconciliation Day in 2023. There are more pictures in this blog post from 2023.

When I was last there, it wasn’t completely open, so I didn’t get to experience this combination stairs, and ramps. It was interesting, but I think it might be easy to ride off the edge of the ramp. There are handrails for those who need them.

We had lunch at Williams’s fresh Café, and then continued along. Pier 8 past the newly developed park. One can still see Hamilton’s industrial past on Pier 10.

I always stop at the collective arts brewery for pictures of the amazing street art.

After that, it was only a couple kilometres back to the house for gin and tonic, before Cindy went to her granddaughter’s house to accompany her by bike to her baseball game, and Alina caught the bus back to Brampton.

We decided to do a short ride on the Hamilton Brantford Rail Trail, leaving it to ride through a neighbourhood to pick up some level 17 tiles, or Squadrathinos as they are called on Squadrats.com, before descending into Dundas, for lunch, then returning through McMaster.

We stopped early in the ride at the John Rebecca Park, named after the cross streets where it’s located, which was built by the city in 2019 on a former parking lot. In 2021, I went on a bike ride with Hamilton’s then chief planner, Jason Thorne, who stopped at this park, and explained that the city was trying to put parks in areas that were lacking amenities, and were planned to become denser with high-rise housing, so the parks would exist before the housing needed to be sold or rented, thus making the area more appealing.

The park has a splash pad, ice rink, shade, structure, trees, and walkways, benches, and tables for mingling, and stormwater management features that include rain, gardens and tree groves.

Hamilton has a number of bidirectional cycle tracks which provide a generous space for cyclists, who can ride side-by-side if no one’s in the opposing lane, and feel very comfortable with the concrete barrier and flexible post separation from motor vehicle traffic. This one is on Hunter Street and passes the Hamilton Centre GO Station.

The Hamilton Centre GO Station is a bus and commuter rail station. The station building is Streamline Moderne, a type of Art Deco architecture that emerged in the 1930s. It opened in 1933 as the head office of the Toronto, Hamilton, and Buffalo Railway (TH&B).  The inside is beautifully preserved, and there is a small museum upstairs.

The cycle track continues past Hamilton City Hall, which was opened in 1960, built in the international architectural style, designed by Stanley Roscoe, and replacing an older Romanesque building from 1888, designed by James Balfour, who also designed Alma College in St. Thomas. That beautiful building burned down in 2008, but I was fortunate to be able to photograph it before it burned down. Balfour’s city hall was deemed antiquated and inadequate for the growing city. It was demolished to make way for the Jackson Square shopping mall, which has suffered the fate of many downtown malls in Ontario cities, and become rundown and lacking for tenants.

Hamilton uses quite a few different configurations for it bike lanes depending on the local needs. There seems to be much more flexibility than there is in Brampton for planning different types of bike lanes.

Here are a few examples. Sometimes there is a bidirectional cycle track on a street that is one way for cars. Sometimes the cycle track is uni-directional and protected by parking, with only one-way travel for motor vehicles. Other times parking is maintained on both sides of the street, but the street is one way and has a cycle track. There are also quite a few contra lanes in Hamilton where cyclists can travel with motor vehicles in one direction, and in a bike lane in the other, but cars can only travel in one direction.

The Hamilton Brantford Rail Trail is discontinuous through the city, but has cycling infrastructure connecting the two parts. In the section from the Chedoke golf course that passes near, McMaster it is paved. From rifle range Road through to Brentford. It is crushed limestone, but is relatively smooth, almost as good as Caledon Trailway. 

This trestle bridge across a valley has nice views, and bump out, so one can look over the valley without obstructing through cyclist and pedestrians.

In Dundas we rode around the Dundas Driving Park, which dates back to the mid 1860s. At that time, it was one of Canada’s earliest racecourses for harness racing. It was purchased by the town of Dundas in 1886. The oval track is one mile long. The park now features lawn bowling, tennis courts, public washrooms, playground, wading pool, and skating rink.

The road in this image is Sydenham Road, and climbs the escarpment. It replaced Horse Kill Road which got its name from the steep and difficult terrain that often led to horses being killed or injured while attempting to traverse it. Clara Hughes, who competed in speed skating, and cycling at the Olympics, is the only person ever to have won multiple medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Clara trained extensively on Sydenham Hill. It has been renamed Clara’s climb in her honour.  

In 2019, after attending Greg’s ride, a fundraiser for Share the Road, we were riding back to Brampton City Hall to witness Brampton council approving its first Active Transportation Master Plan. There was much discussion the previous evening about how we would ride back to Brampton. We chose what seemed to be a less challenging route, Brock Road, but was nevertheless still very challenging. If I recall correctly I had to stop to catch my breath 2–3 times, and averaged only 6kph or so. 

We had lunch at Domestique, a bike themed coffee shop in Dundas. In cycling terms, a domestique is a rider who sacrifices their own ambitions to support their team leader, rather than trying to win the race themselves. They are crucial for a team’s success, often performing tasks like protecting the leader from wind, pacing them, providing food and drinks, and even giving up their own bike in case of a mechanical issue.  The food was good, but the salad I ordered was very small for the price.

I wasn’t sure which bathroom I was meant to use based on the symbols.

This is the Dundas post office, which was built in 1915. It was built in the Romanesque revival style and was the regional post office until the 1990s. It is now occupied by retail establishments.

We tried to ride from Dundas to McMaster via neighbourhoods and trails. We walked our bikes down this hill, and ended up at McMaster’s parking lots on the west side of Cootes Drive. I thought there was going to be a trail to get out, but we had to ride up Westaway Road which the cars use, but has a bridge over Cootes Road directly connection to campus, which was useful.

We did discover the McMaster University Medical Centre helipad.

Here are a few buildings we passed on campus. The first one, houses The Phoenix Craft House and Grill, in one of the original five buildings when McMaster opened in 1930, and was originally a refectory. 

We also passed the Altitude Tower, part of the facilities for The Altitude program at McMaster University, offered through the Department of Athletics & Recreation, which uses an Alpine Tower for team-building activities and adventure-based challenges. There appeared to be a summer camp there today.  Looks like fun.

We then rode around a small lovely street, Mayfair, adjacent to campus. Here are a few of the houses.

Sterling Street has recently been repaved with much wider, buffered bike lanes painted. It was comfortable to ride side-by-side, and there was almost no car traffic.

This lead us through Westdale , a residential neighbourhood, centred on a shopping district on King Street, laid out in concentric ovals. It was an early Canadian implementation of the concepts of the Garden City Movement, and is recognized as one of Canada’s first planned communities, focusing on integrating residential, commercial, and recreational spaces. 

Construction began in the early 1920s, and it was envisioned as an exclusive white Protestant neighbourhood. Specific groups such as blacks, Asians, Slavs, and Jews were unable to purchase homes; near the end of the Second World War restrictions upon Jewish home ownership were lifted whereupon many relocated from the central part of the city. However, legal loopholes allowed for discrimination to persist into the 1950s.

Its streets are lovely to ride on a hot summer day with the mature trees shading the streets.

The bidirectional cycle track on King Street is protected by Jersey walls as it crosses the 403.

Dinner was BLTs, bean salad, and chips and salsa.

Tomorrow, our friend, and fellow cycling advocate, Alina, will be joining us for a 42 km route I created to explore Hamilton when my daughter moved here to attend McMaster in 2016, that I like to share with people new to cycling in Hamilton.

I woke with a headache and backache this morning, so we changed our plans from, biking to Brantford, to a lazy morning, and a ride to Hamilton Beach in the afternoon.

I’ve written about Statshunters.com before, which I use to create a personal heat map of all the places I have ridden my bike since 2013, when I started recording my rides, and also to see what tiles I have ridden my bike through. The tiles divide the world into a grid of 16,384 by 16,384 squares, each one is about 2 km wide. It’s a fun pursuit to try to visit as many tiles as you can using only human power. 

One has to go farther and farther afield to continue collecting level 14 tiles, so I started collecting level 17 tiles. There are 64 level 17 tiles, called Squadrathinos, in each level 14 tile. You can track them on a site called squadrats.com.

Because I have the level 14 tiles around here, I planned some routes to collect some of the level 17 micro tiles that I don’t have. Normally, I ride down Cannon Street, which has a bidirectional cycle track, but chose to ride down Barton Avenue today to collect the micro tiles along there. The asphalt was terrible and really shook us up, and the neighbourhood is very rundown, and ripe for redevelopment.  The province is pressuring Hamilton to expand urban boundaries, but streets like Barton can be redeveloped more densely, to provide a huge number of new homes and commercial facilities without touching the Greenbelt. Fortunately, as of last month, Hamilton council continues to resist expanding the urban boundary, with plans to grow up, rather than grow out.

This supportive housing, McQuesten Lofts, was built to look like shipping containers as an homage to Hamilton’s industrial north end. It contains 51 bedroom apartments, and has a public library branch on the main level.

The Hamilton Museum of Steam & Technology, also known as the “Steam Museum”, is a national historic site and is located on the site of the 1859 Hamilton waterworks complex. The museum preserves two steam powered beam engines which pumped water in Hamilton from 1859 to 1910, in addition to artifacts relating to Hamilton’s industrial past. There are guided tours of the facility, and I can recommend them based on visiting in the past.

The Golden Horseshoe Live Streamers, collaborate with the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology, to provide railway experiences with its miniature ride on/ride behind locomotives at the museum site.

Whenever I’ve been at Hamilton Beach I have wondered about this platform in the distance. I looked it up today, and discovered that it is the Canada Centre for Inland Waters Research Tower. Built in 1976, it is positioned in 12 m of water, 1.1 km off the beach at the west end of Lake Ontario near Hamilton, Ontario and is used for wave and air-water interaction research. This picture is significantly cropped, after taking it with the 5x lens on my phone. 

Once we got to the Beach Park, we rode south as far as the path went. It’s a very wide path with lots of room for people to walk, bike, push strollers, rollerblade, etc.

After riding back to Hutch’s on the Beach, we ate ice cream, and dipped our feet in the lake.

It was very clear today and we could see Burlington, and Toronto’s skyline.

We re-crossed the QEW on the Red Bridge, a pedestrian and cycling bridge, which led us to Brampton Street.

This is the location of the first Tim Horton’s at Ottawa Street North and Dunsmuir. Apparently, there is a mini museum of Tim’s history on the second floor.

We then stopped briefly at New Hope Bikes, a Community Bike hub like Different Spokes in Brampton, but they are closed Mondays. We will visit again later in the week.

Victoria Street has a bidirectional cycle track with raised bus loading platforms, so the bus doesn’t have to pull into the bike lane.

On the bidirectional cycle track on Cannon Street, they had some beautiful planters.

They also have separate signals for cars and bikes,  to avoid left turn conflict,  between bikes and motor vehicles.

Cindy barbecued us cheddar smokies, and prepared a bean salad, for our dinner. It was delicious. The dining room like rotates through the colours of the rainbow.

Cindy, and her husband, Mark, and I have come to Mark’s daughter’s house to look after her cat, Joanie, in Hamilton for the week. 

Michael, and my oldest son, drove me my bike, and my stuff to Hamilton. My daughter Megan, and her fiancé John, walked over from their place in Hamilton, to join us for takeout fish and chips dinner from Hutch’s Harbour Front, a family run restaurant of long-standing in Hamilton. John’s family used to eat there when he was a child.

After dinner, Cindy and I went for a walk, through Beasley Park, which has a skateboard park, splash pad, and playground, and a large, but tidy and quiet encampment.

The Fringe Festival is playing Hamilton this week, so we might look for something to see later in the week. Beside one of the locations where it is playing, we saw this sculpture. There is a rainbow crosswalk near the theatre.

King Williams Street is closed to motor vehicle traffic until September as part of the King William summer initiative, with many independent restaurants sharing space on the road in front of their establishments. The closure is part of an art project that includes a retractable gate feature, designed to allow for temporary street closures during events. The “WoodGate” art installation, which includes the gate, is a permanent public art piece meant to celebrate the area and support local businesses by encouraging on-street dining and events. 

King William Street ends at Jackson Square, a downtown shopping mall which has seen better days. One can walk up onto the rooftop and survey King Williams Street, and the surrounding buildings downtown.

The evening light on the wood was beautiful.

There were some interesting sun reflections of glass buildings on this brick building, and of a condo on the Royal Bank building.

Tomorrow and Tuesday look like they will be nice days to explore Hamilton and beyond by bike.