Today we hike the James South corridor and visit two sites. At the first, the wreckers have won. At the second, a victory for Hamilton's comeback core.

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A dozen years before Canada was born, a banker named Henry Titus had a fine stone home built at the corner of James South and Charlton.

It was a good address, as by the neighbouring grand homes from the 1800s that still stand.

For a generation, the Titus home was used and owned by some eye doctors. They kept the place looking nice.

In 1999, St. Joseph's Healthcare bought the home and started using some of it for offices. Though the house had stood strong for a century and a half, St. Joe's declared last fall that the building had become decayed and unusable. And it did not want to spend the money required to restore it.

The house had no heritage designation and was torn down.

The corner is bleak now. And it's made worse by St. Joe's decision to erect its tank farm right out there on the opposite corner.

Yes, we all want that oxygen and nitrous oxide to be available if we end up in hospital. But surely those tanks could have been installed in a way that was kinder to the streetscape.

When the Titus house came down, St. Joe's paved the lot and up until this week has been using it for parking.

The next step won't leave the corner looking any better. They want to roll a prefab box structure -- modular facility, they call it -- into the spot where the old house stood.

It will be used for temporary office space. One day a new building will be constructed for physician offices. And when? St. Joe's can only say that it won't happen before 2011.

Bob Bratina is the councillor for this ward. Wonder what he thinks of the way that important St. Joe's corner looks now.

"It's horrible," he says. "They don't seem to care. It's too bad."

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Bratina has had a slew of calls lately from citizens who want to know why the Hamilton Motor Products property at Main and Bay -- site of a demolition five months ago -- is now a parking lot.

Those callers know there's a bylaw that prohibits knocking down a building in the core for a parking lot. You have to either put something new on the site or leave it empty.

But that unpaved parking lot on the HMP site is temporary only, Bratina says, because developer Darko Vranich is going to move smartly on the Hilton Homewood Suites he announced for that property last spring.

"Why would we harass a guy who's going to build a $40-million hotel?" Bratina asks.

If for some reason the hotel didn't get under way, he says, the parking lot would go. "We'd shut it down. Nobody makes fools of us."

That no-parking-lots restriction came into effect after developer David Blanchard knocked down a four-storey office across from the Pigott building in 1999. He knows some people even call that parking lot rule the Blanchard law.

But he doesn't deserve that tag. He and his partners are responsible for saving some of the city's best landmarks, including the Landed Banking building and the Bank of Montreal, both at Main and James.

And now, on the northeast corner of James and Hunter, they're doing it again.

It's the city's public health building, an International Style structure from architect Stanley Roscoe, who also designed city hall.

It was built in 1953, long, low and streamlined. But it's been empty for nine years. The city wanted to sell the property and let the building be demolished. Staff said it was too small to be easily reused and required major renovations.

But Blanchard and company have gone where others feared to tread. They've now added a fourth floor and a glass elevator shaft out front.

This $5-million project will be done by summer and is 85 per cent leased. Law firm Simpson Wigle, with a staff of about 60, is moving over from one of the twin mirrored towers at King and James. It will occupy half the space and may acquire some ownership in the building.

Tim Bullock, partner with the firm, said he and his colleagues sat down and talked over whether downtown was still where they wanted to be. "And we said, 'Absolutely. We're not going to the highway.'"

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

pwilson@thespec.com

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