Waterfront Pub Brings 'Harbour Chic' To The City

If you stand still and listen, you can hear -- nothing. Glorious nothing, nothing but the gentle lap of the harbour chop against the pier. Every so often clouds in the big sky break, light dances off the water and it seems to turn a shade of midnight blue.

It has always been like this at Hamilton Harbour, but for many years there were few people there to see and feel it. The waterfront was mostly fenced off from the public and too unkempt to be an attraction in any case.

That has all changed, dramatically so. The most recent attraction at Harbour West, Williams Coffee Pub, is daily drawing people and even lineups for food, coffee, wine and beer. Following attractions such as Pier 4 and Bayfront parks, historic HMCS Haida and the Marine Discovery Centre, the growing popularity of Williams is an important symbol that the harbour is officially a Place To Be.

Jacket-and-tie city councillors meet for working lunches, uniformed police officers grab a coffee. You might catch a local broadcasting personality there. Teachers come for lunch. McMaster students flee the campus to study, salespeople are e-mailing clients.

Inside the pub, under the cedar shake roof, take in the view of the water, marina, boats with names like For What Ales and Restless Lady and L'Attitude. Sip on a latte in a fishbowl-sized mug, hear the chatter, the clicking of laptop keys.

"It doesn't feel like Hamilton. It feels like Seattle or something," says Trevor Poole, a McMaster medical student who sips a coffee and studies for a test in a booth along with Shawn Benninger. A friend told them about the spot, with instructions to keep it a secret. It is perhaps a Hamiltonian tendency to reach for distant reference points when applauding local excellence. If it's unique, picturesque and peaceful, then it's surely not Hamilton, but rather more like the Pacific Northwest.

Or, God help us, Toronto.

"It's not typical Hamilton, you feel kind of bad saying that," says Jan Wynne, who lunches with friends Monica and Trish. "But coming here has become a trendy thing to do, chic. It could be compared to Queen's Quay, the ambience of it." Harbour chic? Some old-stock residents might recoil at such talk. As if to pay homage to more traditional Steeltown themes there is an information plaque near the pub. Entitled, "Bootlegging Bosses and Rumrunning Rebels," it invokes the waterfront's considerably less left coast-flavoured past.

You could try to argue that Williams is just a coffee shop, but the fact it exists at all on the water and is popular is a significant point in the long, often troubled history of the harbour.

Gil Simmons has witnessed a lot of that history. After moving to Hamilton from England, she moved into a house overlooking the bay in 1959 and never left. A few years back, at a public forum on the harbour, she stood and suggested that the day when you could enjoy a beer or glass of wine down on the water was the day the harbour would finally be a people place. Her comment got a big ovation from the crowd.

And here we are, on a fall afternoon with a nip in the air, and you can spot someone out on Williams' ample patio nursing a Lakeport. Simmons visited the pub for the first time a few Sundays ago. "I was astonished," she said. "It was packed. It was absolutely wonderful." She thinks that with the pace of life, people are looking for easily accessible places to get away. The waterfront is a natural escape.

"A lot of it just has to do with being able to sit with friends and contemplate and enjoy the view. It's as simple as that, really." The city owns the pub through the Hamilton Waterfront Trust, along with an ice cream booth next door, the Hamilton Harbour Queen tour boat and a trolley that tours along the expanded six-kilometre trail between Princess Point in Westdale and the Haida on Pier 9. The harbour's checkered history starts to get smaller in the rear-view mirror, but it wasn't too long ago when hanging at the waterfront for any reason, much less lunch, wasn't even a notion.

After the multimillion-dollar harbour parks were developed, but before Williams appeared, locals had shown a thirst for spending time at the water. But back then, if you wanted a coffee or a bite to eat, it meant brown bagging it and fighting off the geese or eating in your car in a parking lot.

The question now is how much further the harbour can go to keep the quaint marine feel of the place, but also add more meeting spots -- perhaps another pub or a market? A smaller version of the existing Williams pub was built last year. It closed to make way for the expanded version which opened May 27, but the liquor licence didn't come into effect until summer. The neon red and purple Williams sign on the building is the only exterior concession to modernity, with its grey-green board and batten siding and nautical design feel.

That's just the right tone for John Boasman, who holds down a booth one afternoon, sipping on a Coke and checking his e-mail. The original building on that site was a boating school and that's where Boasman learned to sail. He lives right around the shoreline from the pub, year round on his sailboat docked in the harbour.

Boasman, who is in industrial sales, often uses the pub as his office.

Like a true sailor, though, he wants to keep his discovery more or less to himself.

"I'm actually looking forward to winter when there's not so many people here."

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