Regina's historic buildings and precincts

Many historically significant buildings in Regina, Saskatchewan were lost during the period 1945 through approximately 1970 when the urge to "modernize" overtook developers' and city planners' sense of history and heritage.

The old warehouse district to the north of the old CPR tracks was Regina's original commercial raison d'être once Lieutenant-Governor Edgar Dewdney had established the site of his considerable landholdings as the Territorial Capital.

[1] 1899 to 1919 Washington Park and 3431 Dewdney Ave building as CPR commercial logistics building, expanded connected with significant conversion of shipping of commercial goods from train to truck and cancellation of passenger service on the railway, the Warehouse District immediately adjacent to the train line has ceased to be exclusively industrial in character.

The Assiniboia Club on Victoria Avenue—in the early days before the division of Saskatchewan and Alberta off from the North-West Territories in 1905 the names Assiniboia and Qu'Appelle were considered for what became the Province of Saskatchewan, and indeed the Anglican diocese was named and remains Qu'Appelle—has long since ceased to be an élite men's club and continues in use as a restaurant; the former Anglican Diocesan property is now being commercially developed with designated historic buildings protected against outright demolition.

The old Post Office (officially renamed the Prince Edward Building in 2003) has now been converted to commercial and cultural use in connection with the ongoing attempt now dating back three decades to revitalize downtown Scarth Street as a pedestrian mall.

Its purpose was to house, inter alia, Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA)[3] and Western Canadian Engineering Projects.

The mansard roofed Administration Building, a Provincial Heritage Property, remains standing; it was restored in 1979 and currently sits vacant.

[citation needed] The Supreme Court of the North-West Territories sat in a courthouse built in 1894 on the northwest corner of Hamilton Street and Victoria Avenue.

The design contemplates expansion of the building by the addition of wings extending south from the east and west ends and coming together to form a courtyard.

[citation needed] Across 11th Avenue from City Hall at the corner with Hamilton Street was the RH Williams and Sons Department Store.

[16] In an effort to re-vitalise the city centre the 1908 City Hall building was demolished in 1965 and replaced by a now long-failed shopping mall (which contained inter alia a Coles in the early days of the national company, the first substantial competition of the now long-gone bookstore which had operated in Regina since shortly after its beginning: see photo below) and office block, subsequently taken over by the federal government as office space.

[citation needed] Early photos of downtown demonstrate the substantial effort required of early civic authorities and residents to deal with the barren setting of Buffalo Bones—as the site was referred to before being renamed in 1882 after Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina, by her daughter Princess Louise, wife of the Marquess of Lorne, then the Governor General of Canada.

Historically the Academy was not only a private Roman Catholic girls' high school – Jacqueline Shumiatcher was once a classroom teacher there,[20] Sister Joan Millar a piano teacher before obtaining her PhD and joining the faculty as a music professor at Brandon University;[21] Erika Ritter, a Toronto "playwright, radio dramatist, novelist, humourist, short fiction writer and radio broadcasterand broadcaster,"[22] is from Regina and went to Sacred Heart for high school, as did a current a justice of the Saskatchewan Court of Queen's Bench both a music and school student there.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada's Luther College,[23] on the site of the original Government House next to the RCMP Academy, Depot Division, is the one remaining historic private school in Regina.

In the pre-television era Regina, like other comparably sized cities throughout North America, was served by legitimate theatre buildings where both touring professional productions and local amateur productions were staged as well as by numerous movie houses: such public entertainments were offered in an abundance that seems astonishing in the 21st century city which is several times larger.

)"[32] Victoria Park quickly became the location of surrounding facilities and attractions: the First Baptist Church; Metropolitan Methodist; the YWCA; Carnegie Library, built as in many cities of North America and the United Kingdom with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation; the McCallum Hill Building, an early office building of downtown Regina; the Capitol Theatre; the Hotel Saskatchewan.

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

Regina's Anglo-Saxon and Celtic élite grievously neglected Germantown in the early days and basic services of water and sewerage came scandalously late to the precinct.

[42] By the 1960s invidious past ethnic prejudice had long since passed and Ukrainian food had become pan-prairie cuisine, with sour cabbage and frozen perogies amply available in Regina supermarkets.

The property had been acquired by the Church of England (as it then was) when it became apparent that the original see "city" of Qu'Appelle had been passed over as the metropole for the new District of Assiniboia and Province of Saskatchewan.

[citation needed] The site of the once-mooted but never-begun Anglican cathedral is outlined in caragana hedges diagonally at the corner of Broad Street and College Avenue.

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, the railways knit the country together.

The old warehouses, however, have survived long enough that their destruction is not a foregone conclusion: they are, in Regina as in other North American cities, being turned into residential condominiums, tony restaurants and shopping precincts.

This continued until 1946, when Simpson's purchased the R.H. Williams and Sons Department Store on Hamilton Street and 11th Avenue and moved the retail end of the operation into that building.

(A third hospital, to the east of the Number 1 Highway bypass, was closed when it was discovered that building practises when it was erected included chemicals later found to pose a health threat.

It had a substantial Casavant Frères organ and fine chancel furniture which has now been resumed by the originally Methodist and then United Church-affiliated University of Regina for use in convocation ceremonies.

[63] They built a fine, determinedly traditional church structure—with chancel, transepts and nave, as distinct from the Akron plan of Knox, Metropolitan, Westminster and First Baptist with pews fanning out from a central pulpit backed by choir benches[64]—which is much prized by musical and cultural groups in the city as an auditorium.

[66] When it suffered its disastrous 1976 its congregation repaired next door to Westminster United, which gladly offered its worship space to Holy Rosary for the duration.

Westminster Presbyterian, now United Church, immediately to the east of Holy Rosary on 13th Avenue, was also completed in 1913 and designed by architect Neil R. Darrach.

Among the postcards on sale at the Mountie museum are photos of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the chapel during their 1939 tour of Canada and the USA when they visited virtually every town and city along the CPR and CNR lines garnering enthusiasm for the imperial connection in anticipation of the inevitable World War II with Germany.