page_title: Regina's historic buildings and precincts
section_title: Germantown proper
hierarchical_section_title: Regina's historic buildings and precincts / Germantown and the East End / Germantown proper
caption_attribution_description: English: Serbian Orthodox Church in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Originally built in 1916 at 1844 McAra Street, the building was moved in 1933 to 1775 Winnipeg Street in the heart of the neighbourhood known as "Germantown".
context_page_description: 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. With the 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. Some areas of the Warehouse District have been transformed into a shopping, entertainment and residential precinct.
context_section_description: The area known as Germantown (Broad Street east to Winnipeg Street and beyond, and 13th Avenue north to the CPR Yards) was settled by continental Europeans—Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs, Ukrainians, Poles, essentially anyone neither British Isles, French nor aboriginal in ancestry. 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."
  Europeans became established around the former Market Square (now the location of the Regina city police station on Osler Street between 10th and 11th Avenues) by 1892. German, Ukrainian, Romanian and Serbian religious, secular and educational institutions and services were early established in the neighbourhood—including St Nicholas's Romanian Orthodox Church (established in 1902), the oldest Romanian Orthodox parish in North America; St George's Cathedral (founded in 1914 though the present building dates from the early 1960s), the episcopal seat of the Romanian Orthodox Bishop of Regina; and the now long-demolished Holy Trinity Serbian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, both formerly on Winnipeg Street.
  Beth Jacob Synagogue, established in 1905 and now re-located to South Regina, was originally also in Germantown. "The Depression of the 1930s precluded plans to build a larger synagogue to accommodate the growing needs of the community, and the war years saw the community preoccupied along with the rest of Regina in the war effort. Finally, in April 1948, the decision was made to build a new synagogue, and on September 3, 1950, the building was officially opened" on Victoria Avenue at Osler Street, immediately to the east of Broad Street Park (since the 1960s occupied by a shopping mall and the Regina Inn). The building has long been closed and given other use by its purchasers. The synagogue relocated to the southwest end of town, the population of practising Jews as substantially declined and there is no longer a resident rabbi. This has been attributed to steadier and more reliable vitality elsewhere, which caused Regina’s entire population to remain the same for long periods and at times fall; it is also attributable both to substantial intermarriage between Regina Jews and gentiles and a decline in religious observance among most traditionally mainstream faiths among Canadians.
  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. Many residents of the Germantown quarter of Regina lived in squalid shacks without basic services till well into the 20th century, when issues of loyalty to the British Crown during the First World War were comprehensively resolved in the favour of the residents' complete Canadian-ness. 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. Apart from German Lutheran and Roman Catholic establishments throughout Regina, however, European churches and cultural clubs remain concentrated in Germantown.
  Trinity Lutheran Church—now occupying a large but undistinguished A-frame building on Ottawa Street in the heart of Germantown—remains the centre of Regina's Lutheran constituency, though Canadian Lutheranism, while maintaining the historic episcopacy and indeed being in full communion with the Anglican Church of Canada, does not designate metropolitan churches as cathedrals. Trinity for many years maintained a traditional German parish church in Germantown; in due course, when it had built its new modern building, it sold its impressive German pipe organ to an Anglican parish church.
  At the southern periphery of Germantown is an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic neighbourhood. St Matthew's Anglican Church remains on 14th Avenue and Winnipeg Street; Carmichael United Church on 13th Avenue immediately
caption: Holy Trinity Serbian Orthodox Church, Winnipeg Street in the heart of Germantown
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