Sarah Sheehan discovered Hamilton is a city of history nearly 10 years ago. She was living in Toronto and she and partner, Naomi Bower, were getting married.

Sarah had recently earned her PhD in medieval Irish literature. So it was no surprise that she started looking for an historic wedding venue, a place with a story to tell.

Online she came across Hamilton's Auchmar, the Gothic mansion that some call the Mountain's Dundurn Castle.

Unfortunately, trying to arrange a wedding at Auchmar would have been complicated indeed. She and Naomi married in Toronto instead, at the 1848 Enoch Turner schoolhouse.

And they lived happily ever after. Well, until their Parkdale neighbourhood started getting gentrified. Rents were climbing, good places to live were harder to find.

So it was time to think Hamilton again. Not for a ceremony, but for a life.

They figured it was a real city, a place with a downtown, a place with a past. Neither drives, but an agent took them to many places. Some were pretty rough.

But then they found a house, late 1800s, brick, two-and-a-half storey, near Barton and Victoria. It was affordable, and they moved here in the spring of 2017.

Naomi works in UX (user experience) design and commutes to Toronto. Sarah writes about cities, culture, fashion. Her website (sarahsheehan.ca) explains that she's "interested in how things like fashion, nightlife and architecture intersect with history and our daily lives."

One of the first things she and Naomi did here was to go out on a Doors Open weekend. They finally saw Auchmar. There are many other buildings they love here too, and Sarah's been keeping close tabs on them.

That includes the building that was for generations known as Hanrahan's, corner of Barton and Catharine. For the past 20 years or so, dressed in signs of pink, it's been Hamilton Strip. It closed last month.

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Sarah read the news of that, and how the building is to be demolished. The Mississauga family that ran the strip club — and others around the province — says it's going to build a medical centre and housing on the site.

Sarah has admired the three-storey building on trips downtown on the Barton bus. "I have research skills from academic work, and I get curious. I wanted to know more."

In past stories in this paper, we've taken the history back to 1908. But Sarah believes it goes deeper. She found that at that very corner in the 1870s stood the Mechanic's Hotel, run by grocer-turned-hotelier John Fleming. Could this be, she wonders, Hamilton's oldest purpose-built hotel in continuous use?

And she enjoyed reading a long-ago account in Maclean's magazine about Art Hanrahan, son of the hotel owner:

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"The regional superintendent of the old Grand Trunk Railway used to put up regularly at Hanrahan's Hotel, and this glamorous character was always shadowed by a tall blond youth importantly lugging a typewriter. Clearly the way to become a regional superintendent was to first become his private secretary. So Arthur Hanrahan set out to learn shorthand and typing and before he knew what was happening, he was the Canadian speed typing champion of 1916."

Instead of the railroads, however, Hanrahan found great success in the courts, where he became a legendary crime-fighting magistrate.

There's the entertainment side of Hanrahan's, of course. Not just Chesty Morgan and Little Oral Annie, but Billie Holiday and the Tragically Hip, too.

A development here might give the area a boost. But so would adaptive reuse of a place with so much past.

The worst scenario is that the landmark — on the city's inventory of historical buildings, but not protected — gets knocked down, the development doesn't happen, and Hamilton gets another parking lot.

Sarah believes that before the wreckers arrive, Hanrahan's fate deserves careful contemplation.

"How many buildings does Hamilton have like that?" she asks. "Especially on Barton."

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This story was updated Sept. 26 to remove the price range of the home Sheehan purchased.

Paul Wilson's column appears Tuesdays.

PaulWilson.Hamilton@gmail.com