BROAD STREET BLUES
Once a vibrant strip, Broad Street’s glory days are gone. Can they be reclaimed?
Broad Street has never been a classy place, but it was once the beating heart of Larry Schneider’s young life.
Schneider and his pals never had much money, growing up in Regina’s Germantown in the 1940s. But there was a lot you could do with a handful of pennies on Broad Street back then.
“Where we’re standing right now was Mr. Alexce and his portable popcorn cart,” said Schneider, just outside what’s now a parking lot next to a sex shop. “For two cents, you could buy a bag of what they call waste … that’s the residue after they screen the fully popped kernels.
“For us, waste wasn’t waste, because it was the only thing that we had for a treat.”
From there, the boys would cross the street and head to the Broadway Theatre for a double feature — a double-double feature, if they could manage it.
The theatre was owned by the Bercovich brothers. After the first two films, one brother would walk up to the screen with a megaphone and turn to address the crowd.
“Boys and girls, please, there’s hundreds of kids outside standing in the rain. If you’ve seen the film once, please leave now,” he’d say.
Schneider and his Germantown gang would cower under the seats and try to stick it out. Admission cost 10 cents, after all — and they wanted to get every penny’s worth. To heck with the rules.
“Those days, we could care less,” he said.
Schneider grew up. He became mayor of Regina in 1979. Two years later, the Broadway closed its doors. Now it’s a parking lot. So is the Metropolitan Theatre, another of his favourite haunts.
Parking lots, abandoned buildings, vacant lots — that’s Broad Street today. Where Schneider remembers a bustle of pedestrians and merchants, he now sees little sign of activity. He calls it “depressing.”
“It’s not a place where I’d take my grandchildren to say, ‘Isn’t this a nice part of the city,’” he explained. “But commerce had to start someplace, and this is about where it started.”
Schneider is hardly the only one to notice the deterioration of Broad Street. Coun. Andrew Stevens has submitted a notice of inquiry to city administration, in a bid to find out how to reverse the trend. He’s seen the same Broad Street that Schneider remembers.
“I’ve looked at pictures of Broad Street from back in the day, and it was beautiful,” he said. “It was really a hub, like much of downtown. And I think along with the hollowing out of the core, Broad Street went with it.
“I think there’s a series of unfortunate events that have sent it spiralling further and further.”
Stevens pointed to the recent fires that further scarred the area — Lang ’s Cafe, the Travellers Building before that. In the latter case, at least, there was a history of neglect, which has left nearby buildings peppered with broken windows.
He said the area now looks like “a bombed out hulk, rather than what was once a very lively part of Regina.”
It’s unclear who’s to blame. Shayna Stock, director of the Heritage Community Association, said there’s plenty of that to go around. In her view, responsibility falls on “a number of different players.”
“One is the building owners who are not being responsible with their properties not complying with city orders, not being responsible neighbours,” said Stock. City bylaw enforcement is also in her sights.
“I think the city has some responsibility as well, because they do have the capacity to enforce their policies more strictly.”
She called the slow decay of the street “despicable.”
Fire Chief Layne Jackson, who is also responsible for bylaw enforcement, acknowledged that taking action against recalcitrant property owners can sometimes be a long process.
“I’ve seen ones that have taken a long time,” he said. “There’s an appeals processes. Sometimes there’s unique circumstances with the property.”
As for vacant land, that’s simple economics. Diana Hawryluk, the city’s executive director of planning and development, said investors make careful business decisions before pouring money into new construction.
When they crunch the numbers, Broad Street might not seem a promising place to park their cash. That’s what the city’s own underutilized land study suggests. It looked at the site that once hosted Mcneill’s Drugs — now replaced by a vacant lot and a 7-Eleven.
The study found that anyone who tried to build there would lose significant sums of money and “automatically default” on any loans they took out to do it.
“It really does come down to business,” said Hawryluk.
KILLING CHICKENS ALONG SASKATCHEWAN DRIVE
It wasn’t always so bleak. Schneider remembers a time when Broad Street was home to almost every conceivable commercial activity.
When he was still in his teens, the seven blocks from the CP main line to 15th Avenue hosted five barbers, three furriers, two cleaners, a few grocers, restaurants like Ed’s Lunch and Vick’s Cafe, a fruit merchant, a tea room, a Bible institute, Strathcona School, a pharmacy, a cobbler, a jeweller, more than a dozen businesses catering to the automobile and — of course — the Broadway Theatre.
Years earlier, there was even room for agriculture.
“My great-grandfather used to kill chickens here,” Schneider said, standing on the corner of Broad and Saskatchewan Drive (then 10th Avenue). He pointed across to what was once a farm implement shop. It used to belong to “a big old German guy.”
“He gave the farmers a break,” said Schneider. “He was very highly regarded. Not very fancy, but the price was right.”
The business offerings only expanded. By the late ’50s, a meat market and a restaurant called Pagoda Gardens had moved in. Iannone’s Paint and Hardware was just a block to the south, next door to a radio and television store. Across the street, there was even an accordion studio.
Schneider figures he knew every merchant on the street, if not by name, at least by look. He said the area was never considered respectable by the upper-crust westenders. But it was buzzing with life all the same.
Then retail patterns began to change. Schneider ascribes the demise of his beloved theatres to changing tastes, especially the widespread adoption of television. There were more revolutions to come. The automobile — by then a common conveyance — opened up the suburbs and soon led to the advent of the shopping mall.
The trends accelerated around the time Schneider became mayor. John Hopkins, CEO of the Regina Chamber of Commerce, sees the 1981 opening of the Cornwall Centre as a major milestone in the retail shift.
“The Cornwall Centre changed retail shopping patterns in downtown,” said Hopkins. “Hamilton Street was still viable, Scarth Street was still viable to a certain degree. But, really, shopping in downtown centered around Cornwall Centre at the time, and still does.”
While the shopping mall was a magnet drawing customers away, another early-’80s development may have repelled respectable investors from Broad. The liquor store at 12th Avenue — built in 1982, now closed — had a “significant impact” on the attractiveness of the neighbourhood, according to Hopkins.
Schneider agrees the store probably had a negative effect, drawing in clientele that cemented its already down-market reputation. There were other reasons for that. By the time Schneider served on the police board, whole sections of the street were known prostitution hot spots. He remembers three separate “strolls” between 12th Street and 13th Street.
One was on the 1900 block, a stretch where, in the ’40s, Schneider and his pals used to careen down the snow hills left by city street clearing efforts, using sheets of cardboard for toboggans. But by the 1980s that area wasn’t fit for children. It had become the domain of a pimp from Edmonton.
“He controlled the walk here,” said Schneider. “If there were some girls that were seen in this area that weren’t of his gang, retribution needed to be paid.”
Schneider said council tried to slow the decay during his time as mayor. There was the first whiff of a push to prevent the loss of the street’s historic buildings through tax forgiveness and other measures.
“That was a time when the community started taking hold and saying, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa — enough is enough. We’ve got to keep some of our heritage buildings,’” Schneider said.
But some of the trends seemed irreversible. Many properties were already in such bad shape, a fact he ascribes to Regina’s notoriously porous clay soil. Builders were clear, they didn’t see an economic rationale for restoring them.
“It’s cheaper to build new,” said Schneider.
BROAD STREET’S SHINING FUTURE?
Rakesh Radadiya decided to open his smoke shop on Broad Street five years ago. Since then, a bad street has only gotten worse.
He’s wedged between two empty storefronts and that now-abandoned liquor store, his only neighbour a massage parlour where the blinds are always down.
“It’s not what it used to be,” Radadiya said.
Hopkins and Schneider might be down on the liquor store, but Radadiya considered it his lifeline. Since it closed, foot traffic has been cut in half. But he still sees potential here. “It’s almost downtown,” Radadiya said. “There should be some development. Stores should be coming here.”
Radadiya isn’t the only one to dream of a revitalized Broad Street. Stock thinks it could be a “gateway ” to the Heritage neighbourhood.
“There’s a lot of potential along Broad Street,” she said. “It’s a really busy corridor and could be a really interesting vibrant space — and it’s not.”
Stock imagines “interactive streetscapes,” with “patios and places that invite people in.” Right now, she thinks Broad is more of a barrier than an attraction.
“I think all of the empty lots and the empty buildings with no eyes on the ground can make people feel turned off,” she said, “... maybe not unsafe, but just not welcome.”
She thinks reversing the forces of decay will take more action from the city.
“They have the policies to be preserving heritage and to be forcing … upkeep of the buildings,” she said. “And my understanding is that they’re just not enforcing those policies.”
There’s some evidence to suggest that enforcement is — at the very least — a slow and laborious process. Take the Travellers Building, for instance. Before it burnt down last year, its owner was hit with numerous orders to comply with bylaws dating all the way back to 2013.
All told, a recent response to a Freedom of Information request posted to the city’s open data site revealed hundreds of pages of city documents and correspondence.
One email pointed to 5,000 pigeons found inside. The birds seemingly remained to the end, with bylaw enforcement finding no legislative tools to remove them.
The decay got so bad that, in December 2015, the Fire Marshal warned firefighters to never enter the building, citing an engineering report that deemed it “severely damaged structurally.”
“Under no circumstances should any personnel enter the structure. If the building is involved with fire, a defensive attack is the only consideration,” Randy Ryba wrote in an email.
But even that warning couldn’t prompt decisive action, and the building burned down a little more than a year later.
For Stevens, the case provides a simple lens for viewing the task ahead: “We need to see what did we do wrong as a city when it came to the Travellers Building,” he said.
He’s still unsure what the city should do to revitalize Broad Street — that’s the whole point of his notice of inquiry. But he’s got some ideas.
Stevens said heritage buildings are demolished too frequently. He said the city needs to review the bylaws intended to preserve them.
“There need to be incentives, which exist, but there also needs to be some enforcement mechanism, which would create a penalty for landlords and owners that just allowed for historical buildings to rot, essentially,” he said.
Jackson said enforcement around heritage properties also involves other departments — not just his. But he said his officers do have tools to force compliance on property maintenance.
That can go from doing the work themselves and billing the owner all the way to prosecution.
But that’s only the start, for Stevens. He also lamented the distinct preference property owners show for pavement, compared to housing and retail.
“When you can easily take a burnt-out building and turn it into a parking lot, that doesn’t help,” said Stevens. “I do think this tendency towards parking lots is something that we can control and should just say no to.”
Stevens said it’s naive to assume the area will be “magically lifted” through initiatives in other areas. He wants to see public investment right there, as a spark to invite the private sector to do likewise.
“I think we really have to look at that small stretch of Regina as something special,” he said.