A few doors down, Nick Syperek stands behind the cluttered counter of L. Rossano and Sons Hardware Store, runs his hand through his hair and tries once more to explain that he doesn't have any hardware for sale, just used and vintage electronics. The lunch he bought from the Chinese food joint across the road grows cold on a table back in the dimmer recesses of the store.

Outside his recessed front door, a trio of shoppers take shelter from a sudden summer storm, chatting about the hard rain and what it will do to the snow that covers the sidewalk down the block.

Two boys, street urchins by the looks of them, dash through the pelting, pouring rain, barefoot and laughing, chased by a matron in a shapeless brown skirt and apron.

A tattered black Ford from the days of flappers and running boards sits out front. Just down the street, a well-kept Maxwell purrs at the curb, a Durand with wooden-spoked wheels sitting just behind it.

Diane Sears, a transplanted Hamiltonian who is among those sheltering between the shop windows, watches it all with bright eyes, drinking it in.

"I've been down here every day," she says. "I've taken tons of pictures. It's amazing. I live down along Queen; and one time I woke up to see them moving all their cars and stuff down the street in the middle of the night. And I thought, 'What the hey is going on?'"

The ghostly parade of vintage vehicles and men in hats that disturbed Diane's dreams is the stuff of dream-makers: Hollywood has come to town and transformed this stretch of Queen Street East into a depression-era strip of stores that were old and worn back when the Thirties were young.

People here are, to put it gently, of two minds about the thing.

For outsiders, like Diane, it's a marvel of the movie-making art: whole swaths of the city transformed virtually overnight.

"I think it's beautiful. I think they made it just as it's supposed to be. It's Chicago, I assume, and they've done a great job."

It's Newark, New Jersey, actually, the hometown of the storied American poor boy boxer, James J. Braddock, who came from nowhere to out-tough and outlast a German powerhouse, the legendary Max Baer. Cinderella Man is a big budget period piece, a Ron Howard movie starring Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger.

The production, while operating under very tight wraps (the budget and script are secret -- even a group of Hamilton dockworkers imported to act as extras in some harbour scenes were forced to sign confidentiality agreements), has nonetheless made a big splash in this town.

Crowe and Zellweger sightings are regular fodder in the daily gossip columns, and crowds of tourists have made their way to this eight-block long streetscape set.

Most, like Diane, marvel at the transformation: the plastic wrap that transforms concrete hydro poles into old wooden ones, the "concrete" mats that cover up the colourful interlocking brick boulevard, the cast iron street lights, the fake fronts, the aged signs and endless lines of old cars.

But for the merchants of this strip, who watched the crews spend two months "dressing" their street, preparing it for the week-long street closing and daily shoots that ended yesterday, well, for them it's been a tough go.

Peter Lazarou's family-run butcher shop has had to lay off three of its seven staff, send them home until the movie magic has washed away. Customers have stayed away in droves.

"Next time we'll look at the deal more carefully," he says of the compensation paid business owners by the film company. He's not dead set against it. He figures in the long run, it's probably good for the area. But in the short run, he's hurting.

So is Christina, her seven-month old designer clothing store, Bergstrom Originals, hidden behind the faux bakery front. Her bold and humorous window displays, facing Queen Street and the city's second busiest surface transit line, were her principle form of advertising -- and it's been covered over for two months.

"I try to be positive about it for the customers," she says, "but it's hard."

Ironically, Zellweger herself walked into the store months before they began dressing the street and bought herself a top, hemming and hawing over a patchwork mini-skirt that still hangs on the rack under Christina's restless fingertips. Zellweger hasn't been back, but Christina understands.

And she's already decided what she'll do with her front window when the movie crews wrap things up, a simple tribute to something they've all lost in the interim: "I think I'll just have the word 'Peace' in big block letters, filling the whole window," she says with a bit of a laugh.