At the start of 2024, I bought a rustic old house in Val Marie. Turns out fixing up an old house is difficult, and draws on many skilled disciplines! So, rather than take on the most important tasks first (insulating the roof, insulating the basement, etc.) I thought I would distract myself by looking for the perfect decorative house number style.

This little mistake kicked off what would eventually become a month-destroying obsession.

Welcome to Old Regina

I often end up in Regina's leafy Cathedral neighbourhood - maybe even too often. See, Regina boomed in the 1920s, when Saskatchewan was Canada's third-largest province. The resulting body of inner-city housing stock forms the matrix of Canada's cheapest arts neighbourhood. It seems like every culturally minded person in Saskatchewan, if they so choose, can afford a decent century house in Cathedral.

I almost groan when I run into fascinating Regina residents who are especially interested in my work: Hey, this has been a great conversation. You live just west of downtown, right? Yes, of course you do! No, no, it was just a lucky guess. (This is the land of the grey hair and the graduate degree, where loving maps is a near-inevitability.)

In April, I had a free afternoon in the city, and I thought Cathedral would be the perfect place to start my vintage house number hunt. After a few blocks, I started to notice a pattern.

The oldest houses in Cathedral are disproportionately marked with these rusty blue number plates.

These must be original to the earliest days of the city!!!

Blue enamel number plates

Here are the essential characteristics of an original Regina house number plate.

• The plate is midnight blue, shifting from blue to near-black depending on the angle of the light.
• The numerals are white and have a very subtle relief to them.
• The colour contrast has held up perfectly over the years, but rust spots are common.
• Each number was individually painted by an expert hand.

Wikipedia helpfully explains a little more about enamel signs: the technology was patented in 1859, mass-produced in 1886, and remained globally popular until World War II. You're looking at powdered glass that's been melted onto an iron base, which explains both the excellent durability and the usual rust damage. The perfect material for a turn-of-the-century boomtown!

I am not a skilled archival researcher, so I have not been able to find a single original source describing early Regina addressing, nor any information about an original supplier. But if there's one thing I CAN do, it's latch on to an idea for much longer than a healthy person would.

I became obsessed with creating an accurate reproduction plate for my own house, and that meant documenting as many original number plates as possible.

The inventory

This project got out of hand really fast.

In October, I had a particular contract that involved a daily bicycle commute from Lakeview to Heritage, crossing the full breadth of inner-city Regina. This gave me an excuse to pick a different set of cross-streets every day, hopping off my bike to briefly photograph any original fixture that I noticed. I cannot call this a systematic inventory, because there are still streets in both neighbourhoods that I haven't walked, but it's close.

By the way, if you are ever doing harmless weirdo behaviour in a public place, I recommend weekday mid-mornings and having a fast, confident walking gait.

As of this writing, I have personally identified and geolocated 41 original number plates in Cathedral and 63 original number plates in Heritage.

I thought that pleasant old Cathedral would be home to the highest density of original fixtures in the city, but it's still an arts neighbourhood, and higher property values mean more redevelopment. East of downtown, cheaper Heritage is speckled with old ethnic churches and boarded-up nuisance properties, and it's not surprising to see a much higher density of untouched old exteriors there. Note I have not yet been able to find a single one of these plates in the actual core of Regina, although Regina is not that intensely developed and plenty of single-family dwellings survive just off downtown.

I would expect even more original number plates in North Central, the city's third old neighbourhood, but this part of town is literally on the other side of the tracks and was not part of my daily routine in 2024. My suspicions here are immediately confirmed by the headline photo in this CBC piece about Regina nuisance properties.

Reproduction

104 individual photos are much more than sufficient to accurately reproduce all ten digits in the original sign painter's hand. It really only took 22 photos to get a clear shot of every available number, the rest was pure overkill. By the way, not every blue enamel sign in Regina has exactly the same numbering style - but we're getting deeply in the weeds here, and the large majority of original house numbers are very self-similar, possibly all created by a single unknown technician. The number "2" is especially common in Cathedral addresses, and is what first made me realize that these were all painted by hand and weren't just using a set of common stencils.

So I opened up my favourite free vector graphics editor, Inkscape, and got to work. Here's my first attempt at, um, digitizing the digits:

When you are planning to work with a factory, it really helps to have an exact scale, something I soon realized I had completely neglected. I ran back outside with a ruler and measured the first sign I saw at approximately 8" x 4.5".

With the design finalized, where was I going to get this thing manufactured? Browsing through random Etsy sellers, I discovered that a few traditional enamel sign manufacturers still exist, mostly in Europe where this style of address plate is more popular. I decided to go with Sosenco, based out of Poland.

Shipping was slow but the final result was great:

The midnight blue colour and slight physical relief were a perfect match for the original Regina plates, and the classy brass grommets are an improvement over the originals, hopefully mitigating the long-term rust damage caused by drilling unshielded holes into this material. (Also, I would feel bad about making a reproduction that is truly indistinguishable from the original article, so a bit of feature creep is OK by me.)

Installation

When burning dozens of hours on an insane passion project that nobody asked you to do, it helps to stay in touch with your original motivations. This reproduction number plate looks fantastic.

Since I've put a ridiculous amount of work into doing all the research necessary to create reproduction number plates for any address, and I know so many people in Cathedral anyway, I have been meaning to spin this into a new side business. If only I didn't already have an enormous slush pile of potentially lucrative ideas that relate to prairie history.

I also think I am probably now the world expert on original Regina house numbers, so in lieu of any other sources turning up, I have some data science thoughts about what this 104-photo inventory is able to tell us about the historical manufacture and distribution of these plates. Expect a subsequent post, with histograms.

If you are interested in getting your hands on one of these reproduction number plates, please get in touch, and if you have ideas about how these could be marketed to Regina heritage enthusiasts, please super duper get in touch!