The sad decline of my grandparents’ house
Notorious lodging home once was a beautiful house
Today, newly retired Spectator reporter Mark McNeil starts Flashbacks, a new regular column that looks at Hamilton history, about how events and people of the past have shaped the city of today.
It’s a house with a checkered past and neighbours are hoping that history doesn’t repeat itself.
Twice in the past five years the city evacuated tenants from problem-plagued residential care facility operations at 28 Burris St. after owners fell into financial difficulties.
Neighbours say the address has been a frequent stop for police dealing with fights and residents suffering from mental health breakdowns and drugaddled outbursts. There were health and other city department violations.
Eventually, different owners — in 2019, 2016 and 2013 — found themselves denied licenses to operate and, since last fall, the lodging home has been vacant after a mortgage company seized control.
The property at the corner of Avalon Place — that neighbours say has been besieged by squatters in recent months — is listed for sale for $649,000 and an “investment opportunity with a significant upside.” But I can tell you a different story about 28 Burris from a long time ago.
You see, my mother, as a young woman, used to live there with her parents and two brothers in the 1940s when the house was a prosperous, oak-trimmed and oak-beamed, single-family dwelling with striking stained and leaded glass and classic pillars on the front veranda. That was long before someone came along and bastardized the home into a nine-bedroom, five bathroom rooming house.
As a reporter for The Spectator in April 2017, I found myself sitting in the living room of the rundown house interviewing new owners, who pledged to make things better. I found myself staring off wondering what the walls had seen all those years ago when members of my family lived there.
I had never been in the home prior to that. My grandparents died before I was born in the late 1950s.
My uncle, Sgt.-Gen. John (Jack) Gilbertson, was killed at the age of 19 in a Second World War Halifax bomber crash in Yorkshire England during a mission on March 24, 1944.
It was this house where the Canadian National Telegram arrived with stark capital letters: “DEEPLY REGRET TO
ADVISE THAT YOUR SON ... SERGEANT JOHN HAROLD GILBERTSON WAS KILLED ON ACTIVE SERVICE OVERSEAS ... PLEASE ACCEPT MY PROFOUND SYMPATHY …”
It was this house where Jack proudly posed for photos on the front lawn in his air force uniform before he went off to war.
It was this house where my grandmother Edna died of cancer on Feb. 27, 1942.
It was this house where my mom, Hazel, and dad, Les, who were dating at the time, would practise roller skating routines on the second-floor balcony at the back before my dad also shipped out with the RCAF.
During the 1980s and ’90s, my mother would sometimes ask me to drive by 28 Burris when we were in the area.
“I can’t believe what they did. It was such a beautiful house,” she would say with a tear in her eye.
It’s been nearly 15 years since my mother died. But I have family photos of her Burris Street home in a green bin in the back of a closet, flashbacks to when the house and street were part of an eastward expansion in the city.
The fading pictures I have from the Second World War years tell a much different story than what can be seen today.
Instead of a stately front porch in the photos, there is a utilitarian brick extension. And that roller skating practise area in the back is long gone to make way for a slapped-together addition to squeeze more tenants in.
Neighbours such as former GTA residents Katie Tsuji, next door, and Michelle Troberg, across the street, watch in fear about what might come next. They are part of an affordable housing migration to Hamilton that sometimes finds unfortunate surprises in their new neighbourhoods.
Troberg said her real estate agent warned her about the rooming house and tried to dissuade her from buying six years ago. But everything else about the house was perfect — a century home with character and charm at less than $300,000 was irresistible.
Tsuji says she feels Burris Street is a microcosm for a city that is at a turning point. There is new vibrancy and investment to restore rundown and tired houses in Hamilton. But there are stubborn holdouts.
She is watching developments closely. If the house slips back into old ways, she says she and her husband, Jason Wilford, will sell to try to find something better.
That would be a shame for Wilford, who has taken great interest in the history of the neighbourhood and the streetscape.
One thing that has caught his eye is a giant beech tree in the side yard of 28 Burris that looms over the street. Out of curiosity, he asked a tree expert to have a look. Based on the diameter of the trunk, he figured it was more than 200 years old.
That would mean the tree was there for a century before the street and the first houses were built.
Imagine the stories it could tell.