cities throughout North America, was served by legitimate theatre buildings where both touring professional productions and local amateur productions were staged as well as by numerous movie houses: such public entertainments were offered in an abundance that seems astonishing in the 21st century city which is several times larger. The 1908 City Hall, as was customary at the time, and as with the obviously substantially larger (and surviving) Town Halls of London, New York City, Sydney and Brisbane, contained a large central theatre and concert hall-cum-ballroom. Mr Darke also donated the carillon of chimes to the then-Methodist, now United Church of Canada Metropolitan Church in downtown Regina which is still heard. Darke Hall opened in 1929. From 1929 until 1970 on the opening of the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts (now officially the Conexus Arts Centre) it was the concert hall of the Regina Symphony Orchestra. It remains the recital and concert hall for the Regina Conservatory of Music and the University of Regina's Department of Music as well as the venue for amateur theatricals and public lectures. Darke Hall was for many years Regina’s principal concert hall and theatre, particularly after: By the 1980s, Famous Players, which had acquired the Capitol, by then the last historic stage-theatre and cinema remaining in the central business district, was in financial trouble and desperately divided the Cap in half to make a poor-man's multiplex; ultimately the Cap itself was closed. By the time of its demolition in 1992 it was the last of many downtown movie theatres which had once thrived — the Regina Theatre, the Rex, the Grand, the Unique, the Roseland, the Elite, the Princess, the Lux, the Gaiety, the Broadway, the Roxy, (a) The destruction by fire in 1939 of the 800-seat Regina Theatre on the corner of 12th Avenue and Hamilton (now the site of the old Hudson's Bay Company department store building). It was home from 1910 to the Regina Operatic Society, the Regina Orchestral Society and travelling vaudeville and stage plays. The Regina Theatre doubled as a cinema and a legitimate theatre; famous travelling troupes which crossed Canada on the CPR before cinema and television performed there. One was being performed in by "Boris Karloff", when the "Regina Cyclone" struck in 1912; he famously took part in the exercise of helping out immediately afterwards. And (b) The demolition of Old City Hall in 1965, whose ballroom