Regina's Historic Buildings and Precincts - The Warehouse District

The Warehouse District

Immediately to the north and east of the downtown central business district, beyond the CPR rail line, is the warehouse district. Before the highways were upgraded to the extent that they permitted trans-Canada commercial shipping by road within Canada, and did not require trucking companies to dip below the 49th parallel to traverse the Great Lakes, the railways knit the country together. In particular the mail-order companies of Eaton's and Robert Simpson enabled inhabitants of now-defunct rural communities to shop by post.

Nowadays, as in other western Canadian cities, the old warehouses have long since outlived their utility as the railways have given way to the trucking on the highways as the preferred mode of commercial transport: in western Canada, as elsewhere, shipping by rail was supplanted by highway trucking once the Trans-Canada highway was extended from Ontario to the West and transport from eastern to western Canada no longer needed to dip into the United States below the Great Lakes. The old warehouses, however, have survived long enough that their destruction is not a foregone conclusion: they are, in Regina as in other North American cities, being turned into residential condominiums, tony restaurants and shopping precincts. However, at one time the warehouse district (together with the grain elevators adjacent to the CPR line) was Regina’s tenuous commercial raison d’être.

Somewhat to the north of the warehouse district, at 4th Avenue and Broad Street across the street from the cemetery, was and is the still-functioning Robert Thompson Co. Western Mail Order, "built in 1915. During the 1930s the Robert Simpson Company operated a full-service department store on the first four floors of the building. This continued 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. The Broad Street location became the wholesale wing of the Robert Simpson Company. Today, after many mergers, the company has become Sears Canada, and the Broad Street building is still in use...as a call centre and warehouse."

It may seem a vast depletion of the downtown shopping area, it now having only one department store, the Hudson's Bay Company. But the fact is that for many years, until the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company there were only two department stores downtown, Simpson's and the discount department store on Broad Street — the wholesale wing of Simpson's and Sherwood Department Store being outside city centre. Reaching a balance between convenience for residents of Regina and the desire to make the city appealing and impressive is not a novelty.