Hamilton: Gateway to the East?

I have posted much on my eternal dispute with others in this part of the world regarding what should properly be considered the Midwest.  In my grand vision of defending the uniqueness of the Great Lakes region, I even went so far as to clearly mark borders for the true Midwest on a map.  Truth be told, regional transitions are a bit more blended than simple lines placed upon a globe slice; some parts of farm-country western Pennsylvania could pass for the Midwest if someone just woke up there one day without knowing where they were, just as parts of nearby Ohio could fool someone in reverse.

For that matter, looks can be deceiving, and they are not everything.  Western New York, especially the more level portions of land near Lake Ontario between Rochester and Buffalo, can look positively Indianan. Southern Ontario, especially the bits west of London, well, is grand farm country set on one of the flattest landscapes in the world.  The stretch between Chatham and Windsor might make one think they are on some farmed over portion of the great tallgrass prairies of Illinois or Iowa.  Only an hour or so of travel in any of these places, however, will make one think twice about such a presumption.  Great escarpments and foothills are often in view, previews of the often overlooked dramatic settings of New York, Washington, and other eastern cities.  Hamilton, Ontario, offers one such preview for the adventurer from western lands heading east:

No matter which angle you approach her from, Hamilton is descended into or framed by the dramatic cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment.  She is sandwiched between Lake Ontario and these ancient cliffs, and her electric blush over the night skies is the first point of departure from and otherwise open and rural skies of southwestern Ontario.  Toronto can easily be seen even on miserable days from her shores, and like the grand cosmopolitan city, she bears a diversity that can lay claim to nearly every nationality on the planet.  She was founded as a haven for loyalists escaping the American Revolution (albeit not really a going concern until after 1812), people who longed for a place of domestic settlement rather than interior expansion.  Hamilton's heritage is very much one of colonial foundations rather than a place of portage or transit to some imagined happiness deeper into the wilderness.

This was to be a great British North American city, one of the many cities founded for English Canadians to begin settling back down and regaining some feeling of what had been lost when they had to leave behind New York, Boston, etc.  London, Kitchener, even Brantford can feel a bit more like a Toledo, Saginaw, or an Ashtabula, but Hamilton tastes, both culturally and geographically, far more like a Syracuse or Albany.  It is in Hamilton that one can start to feel like the interior has been left behind, even as steel mills and freighters on the harbor are tell-tale signs that this is still a city of the Great Lakes rather than the "true east".