‘Everyone looked out for everyone’
Empty corner in Regina conjures up images of past
For decades, the northeast corner of Albert Street and Victoria Avenue in Regina was a place of routine.
It was home to “a fairly large number of retired gentlemen,” said Larry Bird, the former Saskatchewan Roughrider who owned the Plains Hotel.
“They weren’t party guys,” he said. “They liked to come and sit in the beverage room and have a beer and read the newspaper until noon — one beer — then they’d go and have a nap and come back in the afternoon and do the same thing.
“But the nice thing about it was there was always someone around the building.”
They bore nicknames like “Johnny No Cash” and “The Bird Lady.” The hotel’s beverage room, known as Good Time Charlie’s, was the centre of their social life.
Others arrived after nightfall, adding their own lively routines to those slow daytime rhythms.
Karaoke night came every Wednesday, attracting what Bird called an “eclectic” crowd. Jam sessions were Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Donny and the Moondogs were on a regular rotation. The band’s bassist remembers cigarette smoke floating under the lights, adding its scent to the stale, somewhat mouldy background odour. The live-ins would stay seated off to one side, while younger patrons of wide and varied backgrounds took to the dance floor.
“The Plains was just unique,” said the bassist, Depen Pandya. “It was so many different types of people.”
The Plains Hotel still lives on in their memories, seven years after it was demolished. Tammy Wright remembers how staff used to climb up to the building ’s iconic sign and weather tower.
“We had to change it manually. You had to go all the way up,” said Wright, who worked behind the front desk from her teenage years. “If it was clear, you’d want it to be blue … It was controlled by how we felt the weather was.”
The sign and tower were supposed to adorn another hotel (and condo) project: Capital Pointe. This past week, Regina officials were pondering whether to renew a building permit for the repeatedly delayed tower. Originally billed as Saskatchewan’s tallest building, it has amounted to little more than an excavation pit and a long list of recriminations at city hall.
For those who loved the Plains, it seems like a waste.
“It’s awful,” said Wright. “There is a big hole there, when you could have been running it.”
A REFUGE
If it’s ever built, Capital Pointe would become at least the fourth building at that corner to offer hotel accommodations. When the Plains came down in 2011, hotels and boarding homes had stood there for more than 100 years.
The Central Boarding House, a slender wood-frame building sandwiched between a bike shop and a grocer, was already there in 1907. Arlington House followed around the beginning of the First World War. Bird said it was also made of wood — and burned down.
Then came the Plains, built around 1957. Part was designed by renowned local architect Joseph Pettick, who also worked on the SaskPower building and Regina City Hall.
Pettick didn’t consider it his best work. He was set to work on a total rebuild in the late ’70s that included an eight-storey atrium and an indoor waterfall. Long after that came to naught, he welcomed the Capital Pointe plan. The old building didn’t even make his obituary in the Regina Leader-Post. But it nonetheless became something of a landmark for the city: a sturdy, reinforced concrete building with a weather tower pointing toward the sky.
When the Plains first opened, it was a respectable spot. At $9 to $14 for a double room in 1964, rates were on the high side for Regina, though still well under the neighbouring Hotel Saskatchewan. Wright said her aunt and uncle spent their wedding night at the Plains. But tastes changed. Guests of means demanded their own bathroom, while the Plains only had a couple per floor. The clientele became decidedly down-market.
“We weren’t able to sell rooms after that,” said Bird, who took over in the ’80s.
But the hotel kept a steady base of monthly tenants. There were usually about a dozen, in Bird’s recollection. They brought in meagre revenues of about $250,000 per year. Bird said the tenants opted for the Plains over the available alternatives, like a lonely basement suite somewhere, for a simple reason: companionship.
“People, especially the older ones, chose to live there because they wanted human contact,” said Bird. “And that was readily available.”
The tenants found it in the beverage room. The Bird Lady and Johnny No Cash were there. So was Henry Kavanagh, a small but powerful man with “very swarthy skin” who joined the merchant marine when he was 15 years old.
“He was an Irish Newfie,” said Bird. “Absolutely fearless.”
Kavanagh would help Bird eject “miscreants of various sorts” who made trouble at Good Time Charlie’s. But he made trouble of his own, once provoking a police visit after making threatening calls to a notable lawyer from the hotel telephone.
The dispute was over a $5 debt for lawn work, according to Bird.
“He was generally more of a hindrance than a help,” he said. “But he was willing to step in and be there.”
It was appreciated. The Plains had a reputation. The property showed up in the crime pages of the Regina Leader-Post, sometimes as a starting point for a taxi robber, sometimes as the last destination of a fugitive.
Bird said he once got a pretty good shiner at Charlie’s, after Kavanagh started a fight with some unruly patrons. Wright remembers that she was robbed there one day. On the next, the tenants were trying to sell her knives.
“It was because they cared,” she said. “Everyone looked out for everyone.”
SOUNDS AND FLAVOURS
Fathers tried to keep their daughters away, young women like Amanda Don. Her dad knew about the reputation of the place, and so did she. But it didn’t keep her from checking it out. She was a university student when, along with two girlfriends, she first visited the Plains and its famous beverage room to see a live show.
“We were a little trepidatious,” she said.
She remembers a biker type asked them what the hell they were doing there. But soon the man started cracking jokes, and Don found out that the reputation was mostly just talk.
She kept coming back.
“It wasn’t at all the rougharound-the-edges place you thought it would be,” she said. “My dad would warn me all the time: ‘Honey don’t go in there!’ But every time I did, it was great. I had a lot of fun. I felt safe, comfortable and welcome.”
Even when you got home, she said, you could still taste the second-hand smoke.
Charlie’s was more like a house party than a bar, Don said, a place where “they treated you like a friend.” She said she went nearly every month, mostly to see the same band that first drew her to Charlie’s. But she stayed for other performers, like Donny and the Moondogs.
The music was the big draw, and the source of the building ’s other reputation. One Canada-wide travel guide called Charlie’s the “best blues club in Regina.”
Pandya said the Plains was a magnet for local and regional talent. Big Dave McLean played in the beverage room. So did acts from Toronto, Winnipeg and Saskatoon.
“It was a different time then. Live music was really happening in the city,” Pandya said. “I think the Plains was sort of one of the last places.
“There were still live venue places open after it, but (they) never had that flavour,” he continued. “That old-hotel, dingy kind of flavour, where you could get all kinds of different walks of life going in there.”
There were the bikers, of course, and the students, like Don, and older women like Pandya’s mother, who often came to see him play. On many nights, there were Indigenous people and non-Aboriginals in almost equal numbers.
He said other venues have tried to replicate the famous Saturday jam sessions, but without success.
For local performers, it was a place for beginnings.
“A lot of these guys got their start in the Plains,” he said. “It started there and then they went on to do other good things.”
THE END
Bird made a promise to some of his long-term tenants, the ones he knew were planning to live out their last years at the Plains Hotel.
“Their passing from this earth is something that’s on their mind,” he said. “They want to know that they’re going to be seen off in a good way.”
So he began to organize funerals. He remembers four he helped put on for tenants who died.
“The rest of them would all attend and they’d say: ‘that’s what I want when I die.’”
Kavanagh was one of them. The old man had served in the merchant marine, Bird thought to himself, and deserved a military funeral. “Henry, we’ll look after it,” he remembers telling him.
Kavanagh was still alive when Bird sold the place to Yosup Kim, one of the first developers involved in the Capital Pointe project. Within a year or so, Wright recalls, the long-term tenants were out of their rooms. No one came to replace them.
But Kavanagh didn’t make it that long. One day, Bird was called back. The old man was found dead in his bed. Bird saw to the arrangements. He tracked down Kavanagh’s commanding officer, who attended with another veteran in uniform and placed a memento on the coffin.
“We just did a simple service,” Bird said. “There were some regular hotel customers and staff that came. We put on an Irish wake, bought a round for everybody afterwards in the bar and said cheers to Henry.
“There are a lot worse places to die than being in the Plains Hotel.”
It wasn’t at all the rougharound-theedges place you thought it would be. My dad would warn me all the time: ‘Honey don’t go in there!’
But ... it was great. I felt safe, comfortable and welcome.