Best-laid PLANS
If high-profile projects don’t come to pass, they won’t be the first for Regina
Alittle knowledge is dangerous.
In my case, it comes from a little too much retained trivia about the history of Regina and the many might-have-been projects in its history.
People have big dreams for commercial and public buildings and projects. Some have been realized — the Saskatchewan Legislative Building and Wascana Centre, for example.
But others haven’t — for a myriad of reasons.
Such thoughts have meandered through my head as I’ve covered things like the off-again, on-again Capital Pointe project (which, if its new owners are lucky and smart, someday will yield the tallest occupied building in the province) and the very daring Wascana Village project (whose backers want to create an entire new community of 15,000 on farmland southeast of Regina). If they’re built, great. If not, that’s too bad — and they join the long list of buildings proposed for Regina, but never built.
How different would be this city if some, or all, of them, had been completed. Let’s start with Thomas Mawson. He was the high-profile British landscape architect who came here around 1912 to prepare a plan for the grounds around the then-new Legislative Building. While in town, he also picked up a contract to sketch some plans for how the booming young city of Regina, then with about 25,000 people, could develop.
His starting point was an idea. If European cities had cramped, winding roads, North America had erred in the opposite direction, assembling cities with rigidly planned checkerboards of streets and cross-streets that simply ended when they got to the edge of a city.
An adherent in the then-popular City Beautiful concept, Mawson wanted a lot of wide, diagonal boulevards. His vision of a striking civic centre (a city hall, municipal auditorium and major hotels) had several potential sites, including the area around Victoria Park, plus the site of the current Regina City Hall and the north side of Wascana Lake, all the way between Winnipeg and Albert streets along 16th Avenue (now College Avenue).
So famous was Mawson that his plan to rebuild Regina got not one, but two, favourable mentions in The New York Times.
One of the few examples of his plan that were put into effect is the Crescents area south and west of Albert and College, though other historical accounts say Arcola Avenue, running diagonally to the southeast away from Victoria Avenue, is another.
Otherwise, Mawson’s dream of criss-crossing central Regina with wide boulevards in place of square city blocks got nowhere. “This was probably because many of the city streets were already set by 1921”, a 1986 Leader-Post article said, “And the cost of expropriating land to follow his pattern was too high.”
Also stillborn was the plan in the early 1920s to build a military museum saluting the feats of Saskatchewan soldiers (particularly the 28th Battalion, forerunner of today’s Royal Regina Rifles reserve unit) in the First World War.
It even had a site: More or less where the province’s Walter Scott Building now sits on the 3200 block of Albert Street.
An article in the Morning Leader on Aug. 20, 1919, said this large limestone building was to have been constructed in the same style as the nearby Legislative Building, with the names of famous battles and the crests of Saskatchewan military units adorning its exterior. The main entrance would face Albert Street. A secondary one would face the Legislative Building with a fountain entitled Brittania At War between them.
On entering, you’d see a large Hall of Honour containing the names of those Saskatchewanians who fell in battle. Around it would be military relics brought back by Saskatchewan soldiers. Farther out in the building would be staff offices and a provincial museum of ethnology (which looks at relations between different ethnic groups) and history. The price tag in 1919 was put at $400,000.
But even that was too much as the province fell into a postwar slump. Over and over, construction was deferred. An article in the Morning Leader in 1926 said the mayor had taken a deputation to remind the provincial government of its pledge to build the war memorial. The next year, the Conservative opposition did the same thing. Nothing happened.
The last references to the war memorial museum came in 1942 when Regina City Council authorized the sale of many of those military artifacts to local metal salvage firms — to be melted down for another world war. Two German field guns at the entrance to the Veterans Plot in the Regina Cemetery on Broad Street are the only items left. A little farther north on Albert Street was what’s arguably Regina’s best-known never-built project.
The Chateau Qu’Appelle hotel was planned by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which had been built across Canada to rival the CPR and the new Canadian Northern Railway.
The GTP had a temporary station at Angus Street and College Avenue, more or less where the Regina Unitarian Church now sits. The rail line approached it from the west, running down the alley behind College.
The railway planned a permanent station on the northwest corner of Albert and College where the provincial government’s Cooper Place office building now stands.
And to accommodate passengers brought into the city, the GTP also planned a 14-storey $1-million hotel called the Chateau Qu’Appelle. Work started in 1912. But it halted in 1914, when tense international politics — which led to the First World War — dried up investment money. Soon, the supply of workmen and building materials dried up, too.
By 1919, the GTP had merged with the Canadian Northern to form the Canadian National Railroad. The hotel project was officially abandoned.
For decades, local history buffs have wondered exactly how many floors of it were built. In 2007, Syd Tremaine, then 95, contacted the Leader-Post to say that he’d played in the area as a child and remembered about five storeys of structural steel standing.
The site is now occupied by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, built at an unusual 45-degree angle to Albert Street and College Avenue in 1953-55. That’s because the hotel’s concrete footings were too expensive to dig out or blast out, former RSM director Dave Baron said in the 1990s.
Local folklore holds that steel from the Chateau Qu’Appelle was recycled into the Hotel Saskatchewan, opened in 1927. Another rumour claims a tunnel running from the hotel site to the planned GTP railway station deep under the intersection of College and Albert was built, then bricked up and forgotten. It’s a neat story, but nobody has ever found any traces of it. Fast forward through the Great Depression and the Second World War — when almost nothing was built — to the boom years of the 1950s, and another constellation of ambitious projects.
One was actually started around 1956: The Tower Gardens apartment building at Winnipeg Street and Broadway Avenue. Developer Graybar Holdings from Winnipeg had plans for four more 10-storey buildings lining the 2500 and 2400 blocks of Winnipeg Street over the next decade on land it planned to buy from the province. But only one building was completed. With no work on the others (Graybar offered no explanation to reporters) the province cancelled the land options in 1958. Within eight years, the site was the home of Miller Comprehensive High School.
Articles talking about the Tower Gardens project also mention another ambitious plan: A firm called Victoria Construction planned to build 100 or so small apartment buildings in the Douglas Park area. An article in the Feb. 18, 1958, Leader-Post cited problems with enlarging city sewer lines in the area and the fact the city had already dedicated 400 acres in the area to sports. The project died and no more was heard of it.
The idea of building huge clusters of apartments was remarkably durable. McCallum Hill Ltd., for example, had plans for a cluster of apartment buildings in the triangle bounded by 23rd Avenue, Hillsdale Street and Wascana Parkway, anchored by a small mall. Hillsdale Village was to cost $40 million in 1969 dollars and have 2,300 suites and 5,300 people in buildings ranging from 10 to 22 storeys, an article in the May 27, 1969, Leader-Post said.
Not so fast. The City of Regina, worried about the pull of development out of the downtown, dragged its feet on rezoning the land. The Wascana Centre Authority fretted about more highrise towers (q.v., Roberts Plaza) on its border and after the Quincy Greene condos were built nearby on 23rd Avenue, owners rallied against towers or against using the land for offices.
The mall was built and, with excruciating slowness, a mix of lowrise offices and condos. The last of them, The Bellagio, is only now under construction. Another project that came to fruition, partly, was the Regina Union Centre. It was announced in 1965 as five storeys (with a restaurant and pub) and designed to take three additional storeys. A string of stories in the Leader-Post through the late 1960s concerned the attempts of advocates to find the workmen who’d built the original Regina Labour Temple in 1912 and accepted shares in it in lieu of payment during a slow time in the construction business. Without their OK, the old building’s land could not be sold, with the proceeds applied to the new project.
Also needed, one 1969 LP article said, were traces of what happened to obscure stakeholder-organizations like the Women’s Labour League, the Sons and Daughters of Erin and the Canadian Electrical Union. Not until the legal issues around them were sorted out could the older building be sold, contemporary newspaper articles say. In time, this and other financial pressures scaled the new Union Centre down to single storey and a usable basement. But at least it was built.
That’s more than can be said of the three-tower complex (two 22-storey apartment towers and a 23-storey office tower) at Scarth Street and 13th Avenue, announced in December 1969 and attributed (by the city’s director of planning) to an unnamed eastern Canadian firm. It disappeared from sight and was never again mentioned, much less built.
There was a pause, then another flurry of big announcements in the late 1970s.
It started with what then-mayor Henry Baker called Regina’s “first baby of the year.” The day before New Year’s Eve in 1979, the Hinkson family announced plans to tear down its Plains Hotel and replace it with a new one, 14 floors high, costing $17 million and designed by local architect Joe Pettick to blend in with the Chestemere Plaza office tower next door
Alas, the New Plains Hotel project went no further. A 1982 LeaderPost article quoted family patriarch Frank Hinkson as saying it had been killed by higher-thanexpected construction bids and very high interest rates. It took more than 30 years for the Plains to come down — and for work to start on Capital Pointe.
A mere block away, something else was developing 30 years ago or so. There were plans for a new Law Courts building on the east side of the 20 block Smith Street. There’s even a drawing of it in noted local architect Clifford Wiens’s recently published portfolio of his work. It would have risen several floors and been connected to the existing courthouse on Victoria Avenue by a tunnel under Smith Street. Alas, the government changed in 1982 and the new Progressive Conservative government cancelled the project on what Wiens recalls was 24 hours’ notice, with no explanation.
“I even voted for the buggers,” he said. And the provincial court instead moved into leased quarters two blocks north.
The same change of government also cost the city a badly needed new home for the Saskatchewan Archives Board, at that point in gloomy leased space atop the main library of the University of Regina. The winning architectural firm was Regina’s IKOY Partnership, which produced a striking pyramid-shaped design three storeys high.
The notes that accompany the site plan drawing filed in — what else? — the Saskatchewan Archives note the fine view of Wascana Park and the Legislative Building from this site, directly across Broad Street from the CBC Broadcast Centre. They also talk about plans for offices, special areas for conservation staff and for storage of photos, manuscripts, film and video, plus meeting rooms and even an exhibition space and an art gallery. The overhang of the pyramid’s roof would protect the collection from direct sunlight. Having the building semi-built into the ground facilitated the temperature and humidity control needed to preserve valuable materials.
The project was announced at a high-powered news conference that filled the large senate chamber at the university. Alas, the government changed within weeks, and the archives board instead went into several facilities across the city.
Around the same time, a guaranteed source of controversy at city council was the Orion Health Centre. A group of local doctors got investors for a 14-floor medical office building on the east side of the 2200 block of Halifax Street. Its proximity to the Regina General Hospital was no accident — proponents talked about linking it to the hospital with a skywalk.
Cool — but not everybody liked it. Area residents didn’t want a tall building and even more traffic. The city worried about development leaving the downtown core and the hospital’s board of directors fretted that physicians’ offices across the city would close as MDs relocated.
In the face of this opposition, the plan was scaled down to seven floors, then to four, and quietly died around 1983. If you think parking about the General is bad now …
Around the same time, there was percolating away what architect Wiens figures to have been the biggest unbuilt project of them all: Renaissance Regina, which was the city’s formal name for what the rest of us called rail relocation.
The idea of relocating the CPR’s century-old rail yards from downtown Regina was first seriously raised after the city hired Eugene Faludi, a Toronto urban planning expert, to sketch its future in 1946.
An online check of news articles shows relocation began gathering steam around 1969, when the federal government had lots of money to help and had even created an urban affairs department. The City of Regina set up a full-time Rail Relocation Office.
There was ambitious talk about building housing on northwest Regina’s CNR rail yards, ripping out the old rail lines and using their right-of-ways for high-speed buses connecting parts of the city.
The CPR rail yard north of downtown Regina was to be covered with a glamorous mix of offices, apartments and green space. Summing it up, alderman Clive Rodham (a veteran architect, and therefore a guy who understood the importance of design) asked, a little wistfully, “How many cities ever got the opportunity to correct the planning mistakes of the past?”
Wiens said there was even a plan to build ponds on the site, then canals going toward Taylor Field. Dramatic, yes. But there was considerable opposition.
It ranged from concerns about the cost to the impact of freed-up land on the value of existing real estate in downtown Regina to the potential hazards of having newbuild rail yards near the city’s northern suburbs — and also over the aquifer that supplies some of our drinking water.
Also, by 1976, Leader-Post articles showed the federal government worrying loudly about tight money. The financially hardpressed provincial government pulled out in March 1990 and Ottawa soon after. In 1994, the city pronounced rail relocation officially dead.
Still, Regina didn’t come away empty-handed. Two rail lines in the east end were removed, making possible construction of the Ring Road. Another line was yanked out, leading to Lewvan Drive. You can see traces of Renaissance Regina in the new Regina Revitalization Initiative, which proposes building housing on the site of Mosaic Stadium. The land under the old CPR freight terminal, now relocated to the Global Transportation Hub, is free for whatever the city wants and can afford: offices, residential, you name it.
But Renaissance Regina, like so many other big projects, was dead.
Said Wiens, a little sadly: “I feel so bad that it never went any further.”