became and remains the dominating architectural presence in Regina. "The streets in Regina’s downtown all provide a clear view of the Legislative Assembly. A bylaw prevents construction of structures that would block this view." Additional provincial government buildings were erected south of the Legislative Building, beginning in the 1950s. Civic, government and business The 1908 "gingerbread" Romanesque Revival City Hall on 11th Avenue between Rose and Hamilton Streets provided publicly owned facilities for civic government but also contained a large audience chamber, used for public lectures, balls, theatricals and even boxing matches (see below). In Regina's early days after its 1908 opening—26 years after Regina's founding on the site of Buffalo Bones in 1882—this was an alternative public venue to the Regina Theatre and other privately owned venues. Across 11th Avenue from City Hall at the corner with Hamilton Street was the RH Williams and Sons Department Store. The Army and Navy discount department store was opened at the corner of 11th Avenue at Broad Street in 1920, only one year after Samuel Joseph Cohen opened the first Army & Navy location in Vancouver in 1919, and it would be across both streets from the Allen (later Metropolitan) and Broadway theatres. The Robert Simpson Company built a mail order house in 1915 at 1050 Broad Street. Considerably north of downtown and next to the original town cemetery, "[d]uring the 1930s the Robert Simpson Company operated a full-service department store on the first four floors of the building[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," when the Broad Street branch changed to wholesale operations; "[t]oday, after many mergers, the company has become Sears Canada, and the Broad Street building is still in use today as a call centre and warehouse." The downtown retail branch closed several years ago as retail trade increasingly moved to shopping malls in the outskirts of the city. It temporarily relocated for some years to the considerably smaller Beaux-Arts old Post Office building on Scarth and 11th Avenue which had been left standing and essentially without purpose after the construction of the new post office on South Railway Street (now renamed Saskatchewan Drive) after the demolition of the 1908 building, and this saved the old Post Office—now containing the stage of the professional Globe Theatre—from the