Too many doors are closed to urban explorers
There’s value in seeing the inner workings of mills and bakeries, and sitting in a truck cab
I’d love to see how the suits are made at Copleys, sit at the organ at First-Ontario during a hockey game, climb to the cab of an overhead crane …
Cresting the hill before descending Highway 6 into Hamilton recently, I gazed once again at the majestic Niagara Escarpment over which I was driving, balanced by the impressive Burlington Bridge and the smoking steel mills. While I can hike along, below, and through the escarpment’s many trails and passageways, the steel mills, industrial sector and many other tremendously interesting parts of the city are closed to citizens. I deeply lament that. Growing up in Northern Alberta, it was common to go on school trips or even family trips to all kinds of interesting places like pulp and paper mills, bottling facilities, chicken hatcheries, cattle ranches, saw mills, hydroelectric dams, airports, machine shops, seniors homes, ice-creameries, grain handling, and heavy manufacturing facilities.
What did this do? A good many things. While still in a young and impressionable state, we had a chance to enlarge our imaginations about what was possible for work and life, to be intrigued by processes and settings that were nothing short of magical. Not everyone loved all the adventures equally, but being in among the inner workings of things shaped us all. Even if unrecognized at the time, early inklings of what some of us ended gravitating toward in our vocations arose in such settings.
We also learned that many of the things we take for granted require great effort by a lot of people we’ll never meet.
You can still do some touring such as the Rouge Plant in Detroit, but Ford only lets you see the assembly stage — there’s no dust, heat or elemental transformation going on. Despite many attempts, I have not succeeded in securing a tour of a working steel mill here in Hamilton or any other of a number of interesting places. That makes me sad.
Cities are places made richer when we can not only see possibilities near us but also have a chance to experience personally something new — to feed our curiosity. The allure of cities arises from the possibilities they provide.
Legal compliance and safety have locked many of the doors that used to be open to the curious. We all suffer for it. I like a good YouTube video of a massive forge as much as the next person, but I know it is nothing compared to standing near a massively powerful machine that can form a beastly piece of steel into something useful.
Other less industrial doors are also closed. Many of the buildings we drive by every day while we go about our business are total mysteries to us. Groups like Doors Open Hamilton do great work and manage to pry a few of those doors open, but there are so many active working spaces left for the intrepid to see.
Despite truck driving being one of the single largest occupational sectors in this country, when I asked my Transportation Planning class at the University of Waterloo who had actually been in a highway tractor, there were only one or two out of a class of over 100 (that’s likely higher than the average). We see trucks, delivery vans and mail trucks every day but nearly always as outside observers, stuck behind them with no comprehension of the challenges of threading these essential machines through the complex network of roads and streets of our communities.
There is so much to experience. I’d love to see how the suits are made at Copleys, sit at the organ at First-Ontario during a hockey game, climb to the cab of an overhead crane at the docks, crawl into the deep hold of a working ship, see scrap steel shredded, or witness a train engine being overhauled. Or how about a tour of our city’s electrical, water, sewage, or busing systems? We interact with the effects of these things every day but most of it is invisible to us. How about the post office, freight facilities at the Hamilton airport, or the food delivery system that keeps us all alive? Maybe an inside look at a wind turbine?
As a parent, I’d be highly supportive of our schools giving our kids greater opportunities to become more well-formed urban explorers. As an adult, though, I want more field trips, too. I don’t know how to make this happen but maybe you do. While flying elsewhere for vacations can be great, we have a host of unexplored spaces right in front of us. Maybe if more intrepid urbanites ask more often, we can fan into flame a greater desire to see more of our great city.