The signs of life show early Saturday morning on an icy St. Catharines Street, in Ontario's Niagara region. A couple of college students from nearby Brock University, still in sweats, are snapping selfies in front of the plain white sign of Beechwood Donuts—a reliable indication of its cachet. Further down the sidewalk, another: a line nearly 20 deep that has accumulated before the doors have even been unlocked. When they do, the mass dutifully shuffles in out of the cold to claim their birthday cake and maple-dipped donuts.

The Instagrammable bakery, sold out by lunchtime, is a fixture of neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Echo Park in Los Angeles. But it’s also a fixture in downtown St. Catharines, where Beechwood (a vegan bakery, by the way) is but one visible piece of a burgeoning downtown scene packed tightly into less than 10 blocks. With every turn of your head it seems like there’s something happening: the 1970s police station–turned–tech accelerator; the oddity of several bike shops all within a quarter mile from one another; the Craft Market, which looks like your favorite Etsy shops come to life (and makes a hell of a flat white). If you can list the hallmarks of a city on the rise in 2020, it’s here somewhere.

A lemon meringue donut at Beechwood Donuts Courtesy Beechwood Doughnuts

St. Catharines, the largest city in the Niagara region of Ontario, though only the 16th largest city in the province, occupies an unusual space—literally, its geography is a bit odd. It cleaves the wine country of the Niagara Peninsula in two, separating the lake region of the east with the steeper slopes of the bench region of the west. It’s a longtime industrial city, home to a General Motors propulsion plant, that’s been plopped down in the middle of thousands of bucolic acres of grapevines and century-old farmhouses that have been refurbished into tasting rooms.

For travelers, those wineries and tasting rooms have long been the big draw to the area, bringing in millions of visitors every year. But rarely is an area like this a monolith. Despite being founded in 1845, St. Catharines feels like a gritty upstart and counterpoint to the many charming small towns in the area, like Niagara-on-the-Lake and Jordan. On the main drag of St. Paul Street there are some empty storefronts, pawnshops and payday loaners, vape stores and an old shoe repair shop. But there is also an energy bubbling to the surface in a place that seems to be in the middle of jolting into a renaissance, the kind that has already come to other industrial cities like Pittsburgh or Detroit.