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Home » How to lose weight safely » Our old, rugged cross

I hope Hamilton is here forever. But if, for any reason (climate change, asteroid collision, the leachate from Adam Sandler movies), humankind must move to a new home in the stars, let there be at least one thing left of our city.

One thing remaining to greet the aliens when they happen upon our ghost planet, many eons hence, from which they can deduce what kind of creatures we were who once inhabited this particular niche of the Earth.

Our Cross of Lorraine.

You may not be aware of it. It doesn’t shine through the night sky from the escarpment anymore. But it did.

To a young Erica Read, who grew up on the Mountain, the lit cross was the beacon that pulled her safely home after car trips with the family. She’d see it from the 403 — “a little girl half asleep in the family station wagon, a woody, no less” — and feel the comforting, protective nearness of the familiar.

She didn’t know then what she knows now, what she shares with the Grade 5/6 class she teaches at Holbrook School. The Cross of Lorraine is a symbol of our once desperate fight against tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis may seem a distant cause. But Hamilton’s record of care, sacrifice and asylum for the very weakest, embodied in the vast Sanatorium lands on the Mountain brow, is one of the noblest chapters in this city’s history. And, perhaps, it prefigures our ongoing evolution from steel city to health care/social services city.

Thousands came to the Sanatorium. Many never left. Tubercular patients from the Far North, places such as Cape Dorset, were brought here for care and gave us their great Inuit tradition of soapstone carvings.

The Cross of Lorraine went up in 1953 at the end of Sanatorium Road. It’s at the edge of the now hotly debated brow condominium development lands.

“The land holds special meaning for my class, as we attend school at Holbrook,” says Erica. “The school is named after (Sanatorium head) Dr. J. Howard Holbrook, a wonderful doctor who ushered in many innovative practices to make the lives of patients more bearable. Two portraits of him grace our building, and the Grade 1 students are convinced his eyes follow them through the halls.”

I visited Erica’s class last week, and we met again at the cross. It’s beautiful in a melancholy way, rising high into the air, its sturdy heraldic double bars still equal to the symbolic weight they carry, but rusted, obscured by foliage and the neon dried in its veins. It’s like a great proud bell but with no tongue to sound its knell.

On this day, Erica’s students were the lights of the cross. They’ve been there several times, thanks to Erica, and it means things to them.

They long to see it shine again.

Several of the students — Kevin Macleod, Michael Ding and Mohan Kennedy — note how it overlooks McMaster Hospital, how patients there would see it through their windows if it were lit. They’re very perceptive.

“They’d look out and know something’s over them. It’s a beacon, from Hamilton to the world,” says Mohan.

“It’s a landmark, something special just to Hamilton,” says Miranda Dalgetty.

“If it was ever torn down, we’d lose part of our history,” says Kyle Mesaglia.

Our cross tells the world that once we cared enough to take in the oft-shunned, at the cost of putting ourselves at risk of infection. Is that a metaphor for what Hamilton is today? Are we still the kind of people who can light up the Cross of Lorraine?

Share your memories of the cross and the Sanatorium. If you know when the light went out, tell me. Should we urge city hall to light it up again? Be heard. Thanks, Holbrook Grade 5/6, for sharing your passion, and our history.

jmahoney@thespec.com

905-526-3306

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Our old, rugged cross

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Home » How to lose weight safely » Our old, rugged cross