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Posted Oct 8, 2013, 11:29 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Posts: 8,000
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan0myte
Here's a before and after shot of 1601 Broad Street. You may recognize it as the ugly-ass apartment building next to the casino. It's been significantly renovated and it's no longer the eye sore it once was. I snapped this picture of it this morning.
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That building is 110 years old! From Regina.ca:
25. ARMOUR/NORMAN BLOCK
1601 BROAD STREET This 1904 building was built for pioneer rancher,
butcher and real estate developer Hugh Armour.
Renamed the Old Armour Block after the opening
of a second commercial building in 1912, it became
the Norman Block in 1949. The Canada Mortgage
& Housing Corporation acquired the building in the
late 1980s and renovated it. It is the oldest
commercial and apartment block remaining in
Regina. The property overlooks the Broad Street
Subway, which was built in 1910 and extended in 1914.
By the 1940's it was already a dump:
When we left the Pasqua Street house, in a very nice residential neighbourhood of Regina, we moved right downtown and into an apartment. The apartment, The Old Armour Block, was on Broad Street, overlooking the Broad Street subway, which ran below the CNR and CPR tracks, just beside the train depot. The train depot, across the street from our apartment, although we couldn't see it because our apartment overlooked the back alley, was an imposing stone building. It's lawns were always beautifully coiffed, and like most Canadian cities, the train depot was one of the finest buildings in the city. It was the only fine building in the neighbourhood. The corner of Broad Street and Railway Avenue was the heart of Regina's skid road. The bottom floor of our apartment building boasted the office of Canadian Wire and Cable Company, a seedy looking radio repair shop, and a tire repair and retreading shop. The tire shop had a small steam plant for vulcanizing new treads on old tires. It was coal fired. Many of the yard locomotives at the railways were also coal fired.Next to us in the railyard was the power plant that supplied electricity for all the railway yard requirements. The furnace in our building also burned coal. With trains, tire shop, power plant and coal furnace all within a couple of hundred feet, we walked, slept and lived in grit.
The inside of our apartment at the Old Armour Block was far from sumptous. It was very small. It boasted a combination living room-dining room, two small bedrooms, a kitchen small enough to touch each wall when you stood in it's centre, and a tiny bathroom. A neighbour, on mother's request, built a plywood room divider in the larger of the two bedrooms so I, being the only boy, would have my own room. I lucked out. My half of the bedroom had the window, the girls half had no window. However, to get into my room, I would have to walk through a corner of my sister's room. Mother found an old upright piano for about ten dollars and found room for it behind the dining room table. The table had a couple of leaves in it, so could be folded into a fairly small space when not in use. One could not use the open table and the piano at the same time. The front room part of this arrangement had space enough for a chesterfield, a large chair, a radio-record player in one corner and a floor lamp. There was no space for a coffee table or end table.
The other bedroom had a dresser, a double bed, and mothers ever present treadle style sewing machine. (a year or two later she got an electric portable sewing machine that took less space.) Mother had always made dresses, blouses and other stuff for my sisters. My sisters friends, and later young women friends of mine also asked her to sew things for them. Soon she had quite a clientele. I'm sure she didn't charge near enough for her work, as the income she received from this endeavour didn't seem to make a dent in the lifestyle costs.
The kitchen had an old sink with very poor water pressure, and hot water was not always available. If the building caretaker neglected to stoke the coal fired water heater in the summer, there was no hot water. Or, even in the winter, when water was heated by the main boiler furnace, the caretaker would frequently partake of a gallon of wine, then fall asleep in the boiler room, letting the furnace die. When it began to get chilly, a tenant would head to the basement and attempt to waken the slumbering concierge. The kitchen had a counter beside the sink on one wall, the opposite wall boasted an ice box (for when we could afford a block of ice) and kerosene cook stove. There was only one very high, very small, unopenable window in the kitchen. When the kerosene stove was lit, expecially with the oven sitting on top of the burners, the kitchen would warm up to well over a hundred degrees. The fumes from the kerosene stove had no escape, and filled the apartment in a hurry. All tenants cooked the same way, so the entire building smelled of oil fumes at all times. It's a small wonder we weren't overcome by carbon monoxide gas.
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/eppp-archive/100/202/300/inditer/2001/08-06/one18/009.htm
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