Neighbourhoods in Regina, Saskatchewan

"[1] An eighth general residential category, therefore, is: The downtown business district, latterly and somewhat confusingly to the historically minded deemed "Market Square" by civic boosters (the historic Market Square was on the current site of the Regina City Police headquarters and was the site of the Regina Riot), is located between Saskatchewan Drive and the CPR line to the north, Albert Street to the west, Broad Street to the East and Victoria Avenue to the south.

Historic entertainment venues and churches have largely lapsed but the Globe Theatre has relocated from the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts to the Old Post Office on 11th Avenue; the conversion of the Union Station to a casino and the construction of several new hotels are bringing new night life vitality to the Central Business District, albeit with the urgent caveat that urban crime spilling over from the North Central remains a serious issue.

Immediately to the east of Holy Rosary on 13th Avenue is Westminster United (formerly Presbyterian) Church, also a construction of 1913, and the other major place of worship in the West End.

When Holy Rosary found itself without a meeting house after the catastrophic fire of 1976 Westminster gladly provided it with a worship space for the duration of the repairs.

Both Holy Rosary and Westminster (perhaps as well as St Mary's Anglican in the Crescents) draw parishioners — and make it a matter of urgency that they do so — not only from among the British élite but also from among the less advantaged persons in their geographical purview.

By the 1970s, inner-city problems had arisen to some extent — declining and aging population, decreasing quality of housing stock, increasing crime, heavier vehicular traffic and fewer parking places — although, unlike other older residential areas of town, the population base and indeed the number of young families remained sufficiently high that the now nearly century-old Connaught Public and Holy Rosary Separate Schools remained continuously in use while several other elementary schools were demolished and not replaced.

In addition, the spread on non-residential properties and high-density housing was controlled, and a large number of older homes in the area were renovated extensively.

[3] The Cathedral Area in recent years has become a desirable residential neighbourhood by reason of its latter-day atmosphere of rakishness: the old Sacred Heart Academy, formerly a private girls' high school operated by the Western Canada-based Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions, immediately adjacent to the Roman Catholic Cathedral on 13th Avenue at Garnet Street, has been redeveloped as tony townhouses; many formerly rundown houses have been expensively renovated.

In the early-predominant Anglo-Celtic mainstream non-francophone continental Europeans whatever their origin were generally referred to either as "Galicians"[13] (Galicia at the time actually being Austrian Poland) or as "Germans."

Regina's city fathers, all of course drawn from the Anglo-Saxon élite, grievously neglected Germantown in the early days and basic services of water and sewerage came scandalously late to the precinct.

Apart from German Lutheran and Roman Catholic establishments throughout Regina, however, European churches and cultural clubs remain concentrated in Germantown.

It contains the former Qu'Appelle Diocesan School (whose premises were originally a theological seminary for the training of clergy) and Anglican nunnery (with the historic St Chad's Chapel), diocesan administrative buildings, an old people's home and the bishop's palace and was the intended site for a never-built cathedral[25] whose intended site remains visible at the corner of Broad Street and College Avenue, outlined in caragana hedges.

Before the highways were upgraded to the extent that they permitted trans-Canada commercial shipping by road within Canada, and did not require trucking companies to dip below the 49th parallel to traverse the Great Lakes, and prior to the emergence of the airlines as a preferred mode of passenger travel and freight carriage, the railways were, as Prime Minister John A. Macdonald's National Policy had envisaged, at first the sole and for long the principal conduit linking Canada together.

Beginning in the 1970s and ‘80s imaginative property developers took their cue from the transformation of similarly outmoded warehouse districts in major eastern North American cities – television dramas and comedies set in New York, Chicago and Toronto and house-beautiful home decoration magazines played a considerable part – and began transforming the increasingly idle warehouses into tony restaurants and shopping precincts, live music clubs, condominiums and loft apartments which had the amenity of immediate proximity to professional employment venues in the central business district, just across the CPR tracks, and retail outlets in the new Cornwall Centre and elsewhere in the central business district.

[27] The neighbourhood has been the subject of controversy and concern in recent years due to the high concentration of poverty, prostitution, and rundown rental housing.

Positive efforts to engage the social problems in North-Central include the Inner City Family Foundation, community association programs and a rental property inspection team provided via a volunteer organization.

Several years ago, the City of Regina negotiated a servicing agreement with the Nekaneet First Nation to establish an urban reserve in the northeast Industrial Area.

Increasingly also this becomes necessary as to people from elsewhere in Canada and the world who may have rather greater expectations as to urban amenity than previously obtained when Reginans were drawn from the Saskatchewan hinterland and were perhaps somewhat forgiving.