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. Hospitals In its beginning, Regina had no hospitals and medical treatment was entirely by private doctors, both in their offices and by their paying home visits. Well into the 20th century the situation was rectified with the building of two which still use their original buildings, though both were considerably expanded, improved and modernised several times. Regina General Hospital is at the southern end of the East End at 14th Avenue and St. John Street, immediately east of Broad Street. (See map below in "Germantown and the west end.) The Grey Nuns Hospital, now the publicly owned and operated Pasqua Hospital, is on Dewdney Avenue between King and Pasqua Streets, towards the Mountie Barracks. (A third hospital, to the east of the Number 1 Highway bypass, was closed when it was discovered that building practises when it was erected included chemicals later found to pose a health threat. Construction repairs were made, but it did not reopen as a hospital but became the Wascana Centre branch of the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology: the second tertiary institute on the campus of or immediately adjacent