Brought to you by Forge & Foster Investment Management.

While Pier 8, the Hamilton airport, and the proposed film district have each received much-deserved attention when it comes to major redevelopment projects in Hamilton, another key area in the city’s future is quietly being assembled under the name West Hamilton Innovation District.

The scale of this district is massive and with its ambition comes the potential of becoming Hamilton’s next economic powerhouse.

Located right off the Highway 403 ramps, the West Hamilton Innovation District is split into two main components: McMaster Innovation Park & the Annex.

As the name would suggest, the McMaster Innovation Park side primarily consists of buildings from McMaster University including the McMaster Innovation Park Atrium, McMaster Automotive Resource Centre (MARC), and the recently acquired Westinghouse Corporation factory.

Ty Shattuck, CEO of McMaster Innovation Park, referred to their portion of the West Hamilton Innovation District as a 2.8 million square foot Life Sciences ‘MegaHub’.

A long-awaited road connection of Frid Street to Longwood Road will unite McMaster Innovation Park with the rest of the innovative companies operating on the other side of Frid Street, aka the Annex, which is nearly entirely powered by investment management group Forge & Foster.

The result will be an innovation supercentre that will truly encourage collaboration between industry and academia.

With the enormous amount of activity anticipated for this district, we’ve highlighted the anchor buildings and businesses leading the charge in the West Hamilton Innovation District.

 The Atrium

The Atrium was MIP’s first multi-tenant building and is located in the only remaining office building that was part of Camco’s nearly century old manufacturing plant. The Atrium was the first structure in the master plan that showcased what this area could become.

This building now houses over 114 tenants, ranging from start-up companies and accelerators to research labs.

One of the tenants, Fusion Pharmaceuticals, recently made national headlines having received US $105 million from international investors for its cancer treatment clinical trials. That funding is on top of earlier investments of $46 million, making it the largest single investment ever in a Canadian startup.

 Hyatt House

A new six-storey Hyatt hotel located right off of Longwood has been highlighted as priority in order to offer visitors opportunities to stay on site while they are attending conferences or supporting the launch of a new business. The proposed hotel will contain 144 units.

 MARC

This existing building is known as the McMaster Automotive Resource Centre, or MARC for short, and it’s one of Canada’s leading research facilities based around electric and hybrid vehicles.

The 90,000 sqft, two-floor building allows for both collaborative and private spaces to develop, design, and test hybrid technology. Plans for the area call for greater expansion into the parking lot behind the building.

 New office buildings

Two 4-storey office buildings will be located south of Frid Street.

Gowlings law firm has publicly announced that they are anchoring one of the buildings in a move to “strengthen [Gowlings’] ability to enhance strategic partnerships by staying close to those who are driving progress – the researchers, the engineers, the designers.”

 CCRM Building

Late last year, CCRM announced that they had signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) to partner in the development of a biomanufacturing campus at MIP focused on regenerative medicine-based technologies and cell and gene therapies.

The new building is envisioned to be Canada’s largest and most advanced Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO).

 Building 606 and Glass Warehouse

One of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the city will see the former Westinghouse Corporation factory site turned into a creative and collaborative work space.

Currently called Building 606 and Glass Warehouse, this 350,000-square-foot project will be flooded with natural light and effectively act as the heart of the new McMaster Innovation Park campus.

 New parking garage

The influx of people to the area necessitates more than just surface parking. As such, a parking garage containing 550 spots will be constructed.

 44 Frid St

After purchasing the former Hamilton Spectator HQ for $25.75 million, McMaster announced last March that it plans to turn the building into a life sciences innovation megahub, having already landed their first tenant.

Laurentis Energy Partners, a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation, will be operating out of the building for at least two years as part of a research collaboration with MIP to advance nuclear energy innovations.

Expect lots of groundbreaking work to come out of this building over the coming decades.

 ANNEX70

Neighbouring the former Hamilton Spectator building, 70 Frid St contains a collection of buildings and businesses that have been servicing Hamilton for the past several years such as Gravity Climbing Gym.

With the growth of MIP, innovative businesses such as North Marketing Solutions and m-Health Solutions are beginning to call the ANNEX home.

ANNEX70 also possesses 5 acres of vacant land for future development.

 ANNEX150

Located at 150 Chatham St, ANNEX150 mostly consists of a single-storey 44,000 square foot flex building, along with a three-storey 35,000 square foot brick-and-beam building.

Similar to ANNEX70, 150 Chatham St is also witnessing a renaissance of knowledge economy people and businesses that are looking to participate in the exciting community growing from the WHID, including Mabel’s Labels.

Earlier in 2020, Hamilton’s own Lester Coloma produced an engaging mural celebrating the budding scientific change developing at the ANNEX.

 LRT Storage Facility

Metrolinx acquired this 14.5 acre property in 2019 as the future site of the Hamilton LRT Operations, Maintenance, and Storage Facility (OMSF).

While the LRT’s future is uncertain, the City of Hamilton’s website states that “Metrolinx and the City are working collaboratively with McMaster University to ensure the facility fits well into their vision and master plan for the area.”

In summary, West Hamilton Innovation District is poised for huge redevelopment over the coming decades and will become one of Hamilton’s strongest sources for job growth. The number of diverse companies, innovation, and research that will be concentrated into this district is staggering.

We are very confident that this new district will become a national player for Canada and we couldn’t be happier that it’s happening right here in Hamilton, Ontario.

Read the article on the Urbanicity website here.

If you’re looking to keep your finger on the pulse of all Hamilton residential and commercial real estate projects and trends, subscribe to Forge & Foster’s free weekly newsletter here!

Header image courtesy of McMaster Innovation Park.

The below article was originally written in Urbanicity, a Hamilton-based news outlet, by Michael Kras as part of a series of sponsored articles focused on the future of Hamilton and the ambitious city builders continuing its urban resurgence.

Crimson Peak. The Shape of Water. IT: Chapter Two. The Handmaid’s Tale. The Umbrella Academy. American Gods. The Good Witch. The Boys. Murdoch Mysteries. The list of film and television content shot right here in Hamilton keeps growing at a thrillingly rapid rate.

Our buildings have been visited by superheroes, malevolent ghosts, historical figures, and Chris freaking Evans. Our streets and neighbourhoods themselves have played parts from major metropolises to small, folksy townships. Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro has repeatedly sung our city’s praises. The movies and television series shot in Hamilton have won Oscars and Emmys, and penetrated pop culture on an international level.

Hamilton is now one of the country’s hottest hubs for the film & television industry.

The overwhelming commitment to cementing our city’s film & TV scene speaks for itself. As a city with plenty of diverse shooting locations and a whole lot of character, the Hammer has long been a spillover spot for film productions coming from the oversaturated film scene in Toronto, quickly turning Hamilton into a major industry hub in its own right. The influx has now made the city the second largest in Ontario and third largest in Canada.

In fact, Hamilton is home to 9,140 talented people who work in the film industry as well as home to 902 film-related businesses. In 2019, Hamilton received $60 million in ‘direct spend’ from productions on things like hotel stays, prop and equipment rentals, and services such as traffic control.

With a glut of heritage buildings, sprawling urban exteriors, and greenery spaces, Hamilton’s appeal for location scouts makes plenty of sense. Recognizable local landmarks regularly show up on large and small screens, like City Hall’s front-and-centre appearance in the Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water, Dundurn Castle’s key role in the gothic horror period piece Crimson Peak, and multiple downtown core locations featured in the Amazon Prime superhero series The Boys.

Hamilton isn’t just a prime spot for on-location film shoots, though. Not only are we also home to some small film studios and production companies, but we’ve recently been singled out by Aeon Studio Group for an over $100 million project to develop a 200,000 square-foot film studio and residential complex sitting on between 12 and 20 acres of the Barton-Tiffany lands.

Upon its eventual completion, the gigantically ambitious Aeon Studios is proposed to not only house multiple soundstages and studio spaces, but also post-production facilities for visual effects and animation, a crew training facility, retail space, residential towers, creative incubation workspaces, and office space for film, media, and tech companies.

Though the finished product is likely a long time coming due to the enormity of its scope, the Aeon Studios project promises resounding impact on our city’s cultural footprint and job market upon its completion.

Until then, the city still has smaller-scale hubs already making major waves in the city, including the Hamilton Film Studios — a newly-established film studio and production supply retailer with an already-sizeable footprint after only a year since they opened their doors.

Camera cases are among some of the many film-related gear you can pick up at Hamilton Film Studios

“As soon as we got the keys, the door was being knocked on,” says Zach Zohr, who co-owns the Hamilton Film Studios with partners Graham Purdy and Ken Woychesko.

All three owners are industry veterans with extensive backgrounds in film & television production, and they noticed an immediate need to fill in Hamilton. Not only that of studio space and location support, but also a local retail shop so production teams shooting in Hamilton would no longer need to make obnoxious trips into Toronto for necessary supplies and equipment.

The daily foot traffic at Hamilton Film Studios speaks to how essential they are to the city’s growing film scene. From shoots in need of space, to location scouting, to emergency shopping trips for supplies, there are “at least a half-dozen” productions that come through the HFS’ doors daily, according to Zohr.

One of Hamilton’s Film Studios television sets

Those productions have been everything from commercial shoots, to music videos, to television series shot for prominent streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Hamilton Film Studios was also home to the production of the independent feature film White Lie, which performed to critical acclaim at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and is notable for not only being filmed in Hamilton, but also directly set in our city too.

Hamilton Film Studios isn’t the city’s only production resource, however. Barely a five-minute drive from the HFS building sits Digital Canaries, which resides along Burlington Street East and currently holds the title of Hamilton’s largest shooting space.

A film studio that offers flexible space for productions, Digital Canaries sets itself apart from the neighbouring Hamilton Film Studios by having over 50 impressive standing sets available ranging from office replicas, to prison corridors, to courtrooms, to hospital operating rooms, and beyond. On top of that, Digital Canaries also features green screen facilities, as well as an extensive prop and wardrobe house that carries well over 100,000 items of all sizes and types for production use.

Between the rich offerings of the two current spaces, Hamilton Film Studios and Digital Canaries have jointly made Hamilton an even more attractive locale for local, national, and international film & TV production; even ahead of the construction of Aeon Studios. Growth continues at a rapid rate, and according to the folks at Hamilton Film Studios, it shows no signs of slowing.

“We’re never going to be Toronto; that’s the mecca,” says Zohr, while noting that, as vacancies at Toronto’s film facilities are getting scarcer by the day, Hamilton’s status as Ontario’s second busiest centre for film production will likely continue to hold steady. “Filming permits are up every year. As long as people are watching movies, the industry is going to grow.”

Those filming permits are indeed on the rise. In 2019, the city saw 14% more filming days than it did in 2018, which itself was a record-breaking year that saw a 50% increase over the year before in film permits issued.

Hamilton now gets to play a leading role in that growth, simultaneously attracting huge investment and talent to the city on its way to becoming the new Hollywood.

Click here for our tenant spotlight on Hamilton Film Studios.

Author: Michael Kras
Editor-in-chief: Robert Cekan
https://urbanicity.com/

What is Urbanicity?
We are Hamilton’s community hub, publishing news you can use and curating Hamilton’s best local activities. Use Urbanicity to discover everything the city has to offer and make Hamilton truly feel like home. 

Read the article on the Urbanicity website here.