page_title: Regina's historic buildings and precincts
section_title: Civic, government and business
hierarchical_section_title: Regina's historic buildings and precincts / Government / Civic, government and business
caption_attribution_description: English: Streetcar and pedestrians, 11th Avenue, 1911 - Regina, Saskatchewan
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 1908 "gingerbread" Romanesque Revival City Hall on 11th Avenue between Rose and Hamilton Streets provided publicly owned facilities for civic government but also contained a large audience chamber, used for public lectures, balls, theatricals and even boxing matches (see below). In Regina's early days after its 1908 opening—26 years after Regina's founding on the site of Buffalo Bones in 1882—this was an alternative public venue to the Regina Theatre and other privately owned venues.
  Across 11th Avenue from City Hall at the corner with Hamilton Street was the RH Williams and Sons Department Store.  
  It was famous for its elaborate window displays. R.H. Williams was also mayor of Regina from 1909 to 1910 ... [and] cast the deciding vote when City Council decided where the tracks should be laid for the street railway that was set to open in the city in 1911 ... [H]is vote ensured that the tracks ran down 11th Avenue, not South Railway Street, so that every streetcar stopped in front of his store."
   
  The Army and Navy discount department store was opened at the corner of 11th Avenue at Broad Street in 1920, only one year after Samuel Joseph Cohen opened the first Army & Navy location in Vancouver in 1919, and it would be across both streets from the Allen (later Metropolitan) and Broadway theatres. The Robert Simpson Company built a mail order house in 1915 at 1050 Broad Street. Considerably north of downtown and next to the original town cemetery, "[d]uring the 1930s the Robert Simpson Company operated a full-service department store on the first four floors of the building[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," when the Broad Street branch changed to wholesale operations; "[t]oday, after many mergers, the company has become Sears Canada, and the Broad Street building is still in use today as a call centre and warehouse." The downtown retail branch closed several years ago as retail trade increasingly moved to shopping malls in the outskirts of the city.
  It temporarily relocated for some years to the considerably smaller Beaux-Arts old Post Office building on Scarth and 11th Avenue which had been left standing and essentially without purpose after the construction of the new post office on South Railway Street (now renamed Saskatchewan Drive) after the demolition of the 1908 building, and this saved the old Post Office—now containing the stage of the professional Globe Theatre—from the wrecker’s ball.
  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. This left only Victoria Park as downtown greenery, the area also having previously having had it south of the train station and around the city hall. City Hall was ultimately moved in 1976 from the old Post Office building to a modern office block in the style of the original University of Regina buildings at the new campus, on the western periphery of the city centre on Victoria Avenue, opposite the Courthouse and across 12th Avenue from St Paul's Anglican Cathedral.
  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. Edgar Dewdney, Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Territories moved the territorial capital from North Battleford to this yet featureless and barren site rather than the anticipated Qu'Appelle or Fort Qu'Appelle, having acq
caption: Streetcar and pedestrians, 11th Avenue in the block west of City Hall, 1911.
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