‘No cars, no people, no nothing’: Hot spots remain eerily quiet
The Spectator visited nearly a dozen places that otherwise would’ve been bustling this time last year. Most, if not all, were empty
Maria Amaral hasn’t felt this busy in over a month.
She’s shuffling in and out of her wholesale seafood and produce shop on James Street North like clockwork, first carrying a crate of oranges, then a pot of baby ferns, then a basket of flowers.
“Before, I had hours and hours of not seeing anybody, everybody was staying home,” she says, pausing to tend to a customer who waits inside with their fern.
It’s a cloudy and grey Saturday morning, but there’s people — finally, there’s people — outside of Amaral’s 30-year-old International Fish Market. About a half dozen of them stand spaced apart, some looking at the fruits and others at the plants and the flowers.
“It gives this place life,” she says, “to have people here. It’s been so sad recently. No cars, no people, nothing.”
In around a half-hour, the customers would be gone and Amaral, clad in a mask and gloves, would be left waiting for another spurt of traffic and business.
Despite stay-at-home orders being in effect since mid-March — and signs indicating the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada is flattening — many places in Hamilton remained quiet and lifeless, eerie even, over the weekend.
On James Street North, the only noticeable activity besides Amaral’s shop were the two adjacent grocers who offer much of the same prod
ucts. At one point, two Canadian soldiers walked out of the John Weir Foote Armoury, heading north of Mulberry Street amid a handful of intermittent dog-walkers.
Locke Street, the otherwise hot spot for warm-weather revellers, was practically empty Saturday, save for the folks who popped up to quickly retrieve food from a nearby eatery. More people could be seen Sunday — two lines snaked out of Donut Monster and Democracy, and dozens rode their bikes — but that might be a product of sunny weather more than anything else.
A small line waited outside the Hamilton Farmers’ Market on Saturday, but down the block at Gore Park, there were more pigeons than people.
The same was true for much of the downtown core. Besides the groups of people taking shelter outside the Salvation Army or in Jackson Square, the area was sparse people-wise.
Meanwhile, two bylaw officers in patrol vehicles sat at the entrance of Albion Falls, the popular spring attraction which has now been closed for weeks. There were people on benches and kids on bikes at the HAAA grounds, but none could be seen on the shuttered playground structures.
At Gage Park, which has remained open to the public, the Spectator counted about 15 people roaming around a fully blossomed Kwanzan cherry tree near the greenhouse.
The cascading fountain in the park’s centre was empty and dry; so, too, was the watercourses, which were strewn with leaves and muddy grass.
But that didn’t stop Jordana Riis’ kids from taking the empty fountain for a human merrygo-round. “We try to still come every weekend, but it’s been incredibly difficult,” says Riis, her kids, aged two and five, running in circles inside the fountain. “We have a backyard, so we’re lucky. But there’s nothing like a park.”
Dee Osborne, a friend of Riis’s, says outings with her children have largely been restricted to backyard play and neighbourhood walks.
“We would come close to the park and the kids would see the playground with caution tape and get sad,” she says. It’s her first Saturday back at Gage, and the kids are making do with or without a swing set. “We’re in an open space and we don’t have to worry about cars, which is nice.”
“We’re just trying to do what we can while keeping safe,” Osborne says. “At home, we have a coronavirus bucket list of things to do after the pandemic, like visit the aquarium or zoo or (grandparents). Hopefully, we can do them soon.”