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The Queen City where nothing is really old
Regina - Thursday, December 15, 2011

I became a temporary resident of Regina in 1962. I was seventeen and pretty excited about going to university which at the time was the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus, even that was a new thing which replaced Regina College and the Regina Teacher’s College. By then Regina had been settled by european settlers for eighty years and by June this coming summer, the place will have been continuously settled for only 130 years.

It was probably the little creek that made it place for the aboriginal people for thousands of years to camp in the area where Wascana Lake is now located. That is where they heaped up a pile of bison bones and the first settlement was called “Pile of Bones” by the new comers. It is geographically close to the centre of an old glacial pond and that is why it looks so flat, it is actually less than flat which adds to the illusion of an infinite horizon. That also explains why if you add just a little water to the fields surrounding the place the soil becomes a rather remarkable adhesive.

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n 1962 the view from the picture above was not available as at that time there were several banks and other financial institutions in the building which have disappeared and been replaced by the Cornwall Shopping Centre. The clock tower in the picture at the top of the building was the city hall and in the distance where the towering office building a block away now stands was the biggest building in downtown Regina, the McCallum Hill building. As you can see it was replaced by the two tall, by Regina standards, office buildings with the same name. Out of view to the east of these two is a third building owned by the same company and when this picture was taken, last Sunday morning, steel workers were at work working their way toward the top of the new building well into the construction process.

The very nature of a young city is that building, tearing down and rebuilding is almost a continuous process. In 1962 Regina had two modest hospitals. The General a few blocks away to the Southeast and up on Dewdney Ave., the Catholic Church run hospital called the Grey Nuns. In the picture below you can see the evolving Pasquia Hospital which still has some of the building that was operation back then. The nurse’s residence has long since disappeared and is the location for the always full parking lot between the street and the growing hospital. Since that time Regina had a very nice third hospital located on the eastern edge of the city to service the southern portion of the province but it was closed and a never ending building, expanding renovation process has been in progress at the General and the Pasquia.

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Several nice office buildings in Regina are the headquarters of Saskatchewan’s rather unique crown corporations. The shapely headquarters for SaskPower was build beside the Saskatchewan Hotel on Victoria Ave. in my first two years of college while Saskatchewan Government Insurance and the SaskTel building (right) came in the late seventies both clad in gold tinted glass.

Hotels have grown up in the downtown area and the CP/CN railway station which was at the foot of what was the city’s main street, Hamilton St. has been converted into a casino.

Since I was from the far eastern part of Saskatchewan, I was born in the first big town on the CPR mainline on the East side of the province, Moosomin. My wife was born in the first town on that same railway on the West side of the province, Maple Creek. We decided to hold our wedding in July of 1968 in Regina. Friday night, July 16, my brother and I stayed in a room in the Plains Hotel. A dandy but modest hotel situated at the centre of Regina at the corner of Albert and Victoria. Saturday, December 10, 2011. (below) is what the Plains Hotel looked like. The rubble from the building will soon be gone and a massive excavation some four stories or more deep will be dug in its place to provide the base for what is to be the tallest building in the province. A hotel and luxury condominium will take shape of the coming year.

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Meanwhile several other office buildings are under construction as well as several high rise condominiums. Regina has the lowest office space available in Canada and there is a considerable demand for housing. Like Saskatoon, the largest Saskatchewan city, there is considerable demand for all kinds of housing and when you drive through the older parts of both cities you will discover the old houses are also being removed and replaced at a steady pace. Saskatoon’s european settlers set up their village the following year after Pile of Bones was begun but both cities are expanding outward at a remarkable pace. Regina is filling in the area between the city and the airport on the West side and similar growth is stretching the city’s limits beyond the ring road on the East side.

Out on the prairie, West of the airport massive construction work continues as warehouses and freight handling facilities are being developed to handle rail container traffic as an inland port with rail yards, highway infrastructure all being developed to create a product handling hub.

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Both of the two expanding Saskatchewan cities are paying dearly for their intense expansion as today Maclean’s magazine rated Regina as Canada’s fifth most dangerous city, while Saskatoon was ranked as the country’s third most dangerous city. A combination of gangs and poverty seem to be the main contributing factors which is so ironic, as these two prairie cities have low unemployment, expanding business opportunities and solid growth. In only a few decades both cities will have about one quarter of their population who are First Nations People and at present they lag far behind the general population in both opportunity and level of education. However, the solution has been identified and it is up to the people of the province to take up the challenge and turn things around.

In 1962 I could and did travel all over Regina in its bus and tram system. Today, though there is a functional bus system, the vast majority of Regina’s population go to work every day by private car and in the morning and late afternoon Albert St., Winnipeg St. and Victoria Ave. are choked with bumper to bumper traffic inching its way at a snails pace. The large suburban development, neighbouring bedroom communities and a small city that is overgrowing its infrastructure tell us that serious development and changes are only about to begin.