A place for everything

Active and welcomed member of the community

I spent most of my early childhood playing in the stream around Hamilton. When I wasn’t there, I was playing at the RBG Rock Garden. My mother was working there as a volunteer. I very reluctantly went to school because I had such a rich childhood growing up in the woods of the Hamilton area. That’s the kind of upbringing that I wouldn’t trade for any other. And it made a deep impression on me.

The Cootes to Escarpment EcoPark is much like Algonquin Park. It just happens to be located right here in the middle of Hamilton, Dundas & Burlington. The EcoPark, which goes beyond governmental boundaries, is all of the water and streams which are flowing down into both Cootes Paradise & Hamilton Harbour. You have the confluence of the Carolinian Forest & the Canadian Forest mixing together to provide an incredibly diverse range of both plants & animal wildlife living in a small local area.

The people of Hamilton, led by T.B. McQuesten, saw the value of it many, many years ago, at the time when Hamilton was just beginning to develop. It’s remarkable that we have it still intact. It’s the antidote to the congestion of the city and it really makes this city a great city.

When I was first approached by the Hamilton Conservation Authority I couldn’t believe there were still large tracts of land that could be purchased and saved, and added to the conservation of the whole network.

I’ve always thought that the view from the High Level Bridge is the prettiest view of Hamilton, both looking over the city and looking over Cootes Paradise. So, I had the idea to host a fundraiser on the bridge.

We had thousands of people spend the day on the bridge on June 11, 2017. When the High Level Bridge was built, it was closed to traffic, and they had a dinner dance on the bridge. A woman came to our Day on the Bridge who danced there as a child. She’s in her ‘80s now and she wanted to once again dance on the bridge like she did when she was young.

I sometimes used the analogy when we were fundraising, when there were issues about whether a piece of land that was going to be purchased belonged to Hamilton Conservation or Halton Conservation, I said, if you look at it from the point of view of an animal, a bird, or a drop of water, it doesn’t matter. All of it is important and valuable to nature.

I think Hamilton only recently realized the value of its industrial land. It’s incredibly valuable for creating clean, green, sustainable jobs, and it’s not something that we want to erase or remove. Neither do we want to erase or remove an EcoPark right in the middle of the city. Everything has its value and its place.

Patrick Bermingham

Patrick Bermingham Philanthropist