Studio Kiku Hamilton

Photo: Rick Cordeiro, Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Tattoo removal in Hamilton

Hamilton has changed more in the last twenty years than almost any city in Ontario. Manufacturing fell from 22% of employment to 12% between 2003 and 2013, Stelco stopped making primary steel in the city in 2011, and what filled the gap was health care, education and a genuine arts scene. Hamilton Health Sciences now runs six hospitals with about 15,000 staff, serving 2.2 million people across central-south Ontario.

The arts side of that shift is the part you can see. James Street North runs a monthly Art Crawl from May to October and Supercrawl every September, and a steady flow of people priced out of the GTA has built a creative population that did not exist here a generation ago. McMaster and Mohawk add roughly 67,000 students on top of it.

The city is also split in half by the Niagara Escarpment, which locals call the Mountain, and that split shapes how people move around. A studio in the lower city sits within a short drive of Dundas, Ancaster, Stoney Creek and Waterdown, all of which are legally part of Hamilton since the 2001 amalgamation but still feel like separate towns.