The stones of Christ's Church Cathedral in Hamilton are stained black, or a kind of mottled grey-black. The effect is to make the building look even older than its 141 years.
But the discoloration of the limestone pile on James Street North is not a product of age, per se. Instead, it's left over from air pollution spewed by the nearby Stelco and Dofasco steel plants.
Soot is the most obvious residue of Hamilton to have rubbed off on the cathedral, but not the only one; the building can feel like an almost organic embodiment of its hometown's history, tracing the Hammer's progress from rough-and-ready colonial settlement to industrial powerhouse to Rust Belt casualty to yuppie hotbed.
Rarely have the city and the church been more in sync than they are now. With the neighbourhood around James Street experiencing a hipster revival, Christ's Church is moving to develop its parking lot and an adjacent municipal lot into a mid-rise condominium, shops and community space. Local clergy hope the move will earn money to help support other ministries and cover the cathedral's own capital costs. They're aiming to bring the church into the 21st century, as Hamilton, like other parts of the North American Rust Belt, tacks in the same direction.
"Church is a different game than it used to be," said the Very Rev. Peter Wall, rector of the cathedral.
Hamilton likewise is a different city. When Christ's Church was originally established, in 1835, Hamilton was still a small town. (It wouldn't become a city for another 11 years.) What is now Ontario was so sparsely populated that the church was originally part of the diocese of Quebec. Later, as the country got filled in with settlers, the eastern boundary of the diocese shifted west to Toronto, until finally the area got a diocese of its own.
Christ’s Church Anglican Cathedral wants to develop and excavate an adjacent parking lot but has to exhume hundreds of buried bodies and try to identify their next of kin first.
The original wooden structure of Christ's Church was part of a community that was still precarious. Cholera periodically scythed down Hamilton residents in chilling swoops. During an epidemic in 1849, the minister at the time, Rev. John Geddes, buried fully a dozen parishioners in a single day, church archivist Ven. John Rathbone said.
Rev. Geddes set a tone of earnest, frontier piety in those days. The church, not yet a cathedral, got its unusual name from the popular conflation of Rev. Geddes and his parish. It wasn't Rev. Geddes's church, he was said to have insisted; it was Christ's Church. There are plenty of Christ Churches in the Anglican communion but far fewer with that possessive apostrophe.
By the end of Geddes's ministry, which came in 1891 with his death, Hamilton had boomed. In a city thrumming with industry, many of Hamilton's leading industrialists worshipped at Christ's Church. Jamesville, the surrounding neighbourhood, was flush with wealth.
"In the late 19th century, this was the place to be," Dean Wall said. "Big houses, big churches … This was where some of Hamilton's strongest citizens lived."
It was in this period that the church grew ornate. Much of the new finery came courtesy of the city's most illustrious families. A Caen stone carving at the back of the cathedral is a memorial to the Southam family, proprietors of a string of newspapers including The Hamilton Spectator. A carved wooden altar came from the Glasscos. One stained glass window bearing a Masonic motif was installed in memory of senator Harcourt Bull.
The postindustrial downturn of Hamilton's past few decades changed the face of James Street and changed Christ's Church role in the neighbourhood. Now, homeless locals congregate around Bishopsgate, the shaded square in front of the cathedral. About fifteen years ago when the church was renovating the space, they opted for a water feature of red granite shards rather than a conventional fountain. "We didn't want something that people would climb into," Dean Wall said. Back then, he said, the neighbourhood was "pretty rough."
James Street North could no longer be called rough. A vegan café, a vintage clothing store and several art galleries are now among the church's neighbours. The area has become ground zero for Hamilton's rising tide of gentrification. For a decade, the church has held a monthly market that sells local crafts and food (it takes a winter hiatus), an emblem of the neighbourhood's new spirit. "We've just come up in the world," Dean Wall said.
In relative terms, as churches across Canada suffer declining attendance, the Christ's Church congregation is thriving. Because it is a cathedral, worshippers come from all over the diocese, and they come in their dozens every Sunday, about 130 on average, according to Rev. Bill Mous, communications co-ordinator for the diocese. Sunday attendance is actually up slightly, year over year, the church says.
A handful of grave stones mark a small United Empire Loyalist parking spot beside the parking lot behind the church.
Even so, the diocese wants to shore up the future of Christ's Church, as maintenance costs mount and society's growing godlessness looms. Their plan for a condo-retail-community-centre complex in the church's backyard parking lot "is kind of a proactive project," Rev. Mous said.
Local city councillor Jason Farr supports the project in principle and has backed the church's request to buy an adjacent municipal parking lot at a reduced rate. Mr. Farr sees the swaths of overground parking that still blanket downtown Hamilton as a bit of an embarrassment, a relic of the urban decay that areas such as Jamesville are starting to reverse. "It's a no-brainer," he said of the church's request.
With the issue before the city, another possible impediment to the project lies under the church's own parking lot. The space was paved over some time in the 1960s, Dean Wall believes, but more than a century earlier it was used as a cemetery. Hundreds of parishioners were buried there but ground-penetrating radar trained on the asphalt by an archeology firm has been unable to determine whether any human remains still lie beneath.
"We [aren't] really going to know until we peel back the asphalt and look," said Paul Racher, principal at Archaeological Research Associates Ltd.
There is no vocal opposition to the proposal, but the neighbourhood that the church has done so much to embody isn't uniformly behind the development, either. Christal Pshyk, co-owner of the trendy James Street North knick-knack store Len, says she's for it, "unless it's ugly." She recently moved to Hamilton from Toronto and hopes the condo will bring some big-city bustle with it. "As a business owner, I'm all about density," she said.
James Howard doesn't think the development is a good idea. He lives in a nearby men's shelter and likes to read on the church steps because he finds it peaceful. "This is one of my favourite places to sit," he said. He worries that a condo and a row of shops will make Cathedral Place "too commercial." Now, "it's kind of nice and quiet here," he said.
As development whirs ahead in a fast-changing Hamilton, losing a little peace and quiet may be the required price for a church that has long moved in lockstep with its turbulent city.