Vancouver after Dark

The Wild History of a City's Nightlife

Aaron

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781551527840
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

A raucous history of Vancouver's music and entertainment venues, from Prohibition-era nightclubs and Chinatown cabarets to gay bars, dive bars, goth hideaways, discos, and taverns. Archival posters and photos chronicle how the city's nightlife changed with times, and how some of these nightspots ushered in changes to Vancouver. Vancouver after Dark documents the famous people and infamous places that contributed to the non-stop party, at least once the sun went down.

CHAPTER ONE

The Rex Theatre at 25 West Hastings Street, 1914. Credit: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 99-240

THE CITY AFTER SUNDOWN

The history of Vancouver’s nightlife goes back much further than the first appearance of twentieth-century nightclubs and dance halls. The people of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations have inhabited the area that is today considered Vancouver and the Lower Mainland for about 10,000 years. There is a mistaken conventional wisdom that the Indigenous people of hundreds of years ago lived in such harmony with nature that they remained busy during daylight hours and did not have significant nocturnal activities. This assumption ignores the traditions that ran for centuries when First Nations people of the region lived communally in longhouses, where elders and senior members would often gather and tell stories into the night. There were also the potlatch traditions in which other communities would be invited to witness ceremonies that celebrated or honoured events such as births, weddings, and funerals.

“Generally, Indigenous people [of the Pacific Northwest] didn’t go out too much at night outside of their houses, for fear of spirits, ghosts, or the unknown—it wasn’t dogmatic, just cautious,” notes University of British Columbia professor Chris Arnett. “But it largely depended on the activities and time of year. During the winter season it was believed that guardian spirits revisited the villages and people held all-night dances where people ‘danced who they were,’ that is, their guardian spirits possessed them and they ‘danced’ them in the longhouse—every spirit had its own characteristics and style which the dancer alluded to, but it was never overt.”

The ceremonies of local Indigenous cultures are complex and sensitive traditions. To compare them to such whimsical modern activities as nightclubbing is brusque, reductive, and distinctly flippant. But it is still worth observing that these different cultures that have called this region home have each sought their own evening rituals and nocturnal lives. Over the centuries people who have lived under this same Lower Mainland sky, regardless of their individual cultures, have shared an idea—an impulse—that the nighttime could be a time for celebration, or enjoyment of songs, stories, and dance.

The wild history of Vancouver after dark, and the history of its gathering places, is a winding timeline formed in great part by the simultaneous combative attempt by the ruling class to quash them. The provincial government outlawed First Nations potlatching and dancing from 1884 to 1951, at the same time that it was wrestling with the mere concept of the city’s nightspots. The restriction of business hours, the prohibition of alcohol, the promotion of concepts that the city’s nocturnal hideaways were hedonistic dens of iniquity that “good people” simply didn’t go to—these were all tools used again and again to suppress the region’s nightlife.

Vancouver’s dance halls, clubs, ballrooms, and cabarets didn’t appear all at once or overnight. Perhaps the first thing that resembled anything close to the modern urban nightclub was the saloon.

One could argue that the municipality of Vancouver itself was built around a saloon. The genesis of the city was centred in what is now the neighbourhood of Gastown, which was named for bar owner “Gassy Jack” Deighton, who in 1867 opened the Globe Saloon at what is today Maple Tree Square. Saloons were predominantly rustic, blue-collar, male-only establishments that served beer or whisky. They generally did well in Vancouver in the years after the city was incorporated in 1886, benefitting in part from the Gold Rush, when travellers and prospectors would stop in the city for a drink or two before heading north.

By the early 1890s, more conservative citizens regarded saloons as merely places where men drank to excess and recklessly spent their income that might otherwise be used to support their families. Some establishments were perhaps more refined than what these teetotallers would have suggested, but, certainly, most of them were pretty rough around the edges. To attract business some saloons offered customers free food, which was often salty so as to encourage more drink purchases. And the revelry could go on all night, since saloons were allowed to stay open twenty-four hours a day. The legal drinking age was sixteen.

The Boulder Saloon and Barbershop at the corner of Cordova and Carrall Streets, sometime between 1900 and 1910. The building still stands in Gastown and currently operates as a restaurant. Credit: City of Vancouver Archives CVA SGN 36

What the saloons usually didn’t provide was entertainment. Some patrons were prone to break out in song among friends while imbibing, but there is little evidence that the saloons of the time had scheduled performers, or stages on which to properly present them. Our modern-day concepts of saloons having a ragtime piano player in a corner are likely inspired by the American westerns of film and television. There is little evidence that saloons along the coast of British Columbia featured formal, promoted acts or house entertainers. That didn’t mean entertainment didn’t take place—or at least crude forms of it didn’t break out in the occasional impromptu passing of the hat, or a beer bought for a performer stopping in. In Victoria in 1901, a juggler named Murphy entertained a small crowd of onlookers at the Albion Saloon by swallowing a spoon, and after that a two-inch iron bolt. “The next feat was the most difficult one,” reported the Victoria Daily Times. “Murphy tried and tried in vain to reproduce the articles. He was ultimately obliged to go to the hospital.” The story reported that, a week later, Murphy was “rapidly improving in health.”

Anything akin to what we might recognize today as a nightclub was considered to be evil by some city fathers in Vancouver’s early days. On April 20, 1897, a local licensing board called a meeting in front of Mayor William Templeton, where a businessman and would-be impresario named Edward Gold sought to open a music hall called Theatre Comique in a brick-and-iron building he owned on Water Street. His plan was to charge admission for entertainment, showcasing “good, salaried performers” that would be “respectable, proper, and a credit to the city.”¹ He also wanted to sell alcohol in the theatre. Music halls were then uncommon in the province, because licences for them were very difficult to obtain, mostly because they gave the bearer clearance to sell alcohol.

Those speaking to the licensing board that evening were not a group of Vancouver musicians or performers, or intrigued members of the public who wished to support local theatre. On the contrary, the presenters were two local religious leaders weighing in on the dangers of inviting such an establishment into the city’s precincts.

Reverend Eby, a Methodist, was adamant that a music hall that sold liquor should not be allowed. Assuring members of the board that he was not attending the hearing as a clergyman but as a citizen, the reverend said that the good people “and electors of Vancouver were not puritanical,” but they wanted to see “amusement carried out with purity.” Eby stressed that “the seductive influences of the saloons” were greater in Vancouver than anywhere else in Canada. Vancouver, with a population then of about 18,000, was home to sixty hotels and saloons. By comparison, Winnipeg, with a population of 40,000, had only forty. Eby even protested the free food and lunches given out by saloons and summarized what he considered to be a typical evening: “These sandwiches create a thirst like the devil. Then girls are brought in to wait serving beer … This is only a decoy to buy drinks.”² He also shared vague anecdotes about a music hall that had just opened in the small Kootenay town of Rossland, BC—more than 600 kilometres away—and created nightmarish morality problems for the town.

Reverend W. Meikle, a Presbyterian evangelist, added to Eby’s objections, urging that all saloons should disappear from the block where the proposed theatre would be. He also proposed that every other saloon in the city close at nine o’clock on Saturday evenings, leaving one to wonder if the reverend was more irked that saloons were compromising attendance at his Sunday sermons, with too many of his church’s congregation showing up the next morning hungover, or not showing up at all. The music hall licence was denied.

Pressure from other local Christian temperance league supporters and sympathetic conservative politicians across the province further impeded the development of other performance spaces where patrons might legally enjoy alcohol. In truth, even some of the more liberal citizens viewed the saloons as dens of excess and immoral behaviour. In 1905, Vancouver City Council voted to abolish saloons that were not connected to a hotel, and only those hotels that had bedrooms for twenty-five or more guests and a restaurant were permitted to have a bar. The province also raised the legal drinking age from sixteen to eighteen.

The interior of the Balmoral Saloon at 2 West Cordova in 1904. Credit: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 677-166

Despite opposition and regulation, British Columbia remained a rough-and-tumble outpost compared to the rest of Canada. “The temperance movement was weaker in BC than in other parts of the country,” notes Vancouver historian Lani Russwurm. “The majority of residents in the early twentieth century hailed from England and Scotland, where alcohol was a well-established part of ‘civilized’ culture. And even though Vancouver’s population was ballooning in this period, it was still culturally a frontier town that tolerated things like drunkenness and prostitution more than cities east of the Rockies, largely because of the disproportionate number of young male workers. Not surprisingly, the loud demands of the prohibitionists did not translate into political will in a provincial government making a killing on liquor taxes.”³

The hotel bars continued to operate without interruption—but still without entertainment. Patrons who wanted to see musical acts and have a drink were forced to visit establishments that catered to only one activity or the other. But soon the hotels faced another hurdle: outright prohibition.

Although many Canadians regard prohibition as a distinctly American kind of morality enforcement, it was indeed briefly enacted in British Columbia. During World War I, popular notions that temperance was patriotic and that alcohol fuels were needed for the war effort meant that prohibition was voted into law in British Columbia in 1917.

Oddly, it was prohibition that kick-started the appearance of cabarets in Vancouver. Some bars went out of business, others converted to cafés and sold “near beer” that had an innocently low alcohol content of one percent. But other bars, hoping to make money and attract customers, despite being unable to sell alcohol, converted to cabarets by offering live music and dancing.

“You see the word ‘cabarets’ mentioned in North America as early as 1912 and 1913, beginning in New York,” says Vancouver theatre historian Tom Carter. “But it spreads quickly. Soon you have waves of veterans coming back from the First World War who had seen the cabarets of Europe before they were sent home, where people could eat, drink, and dance, and there would be entertainment all night long—and that helped the idea travel.”

Although Vancouver City Hall viewed cabarets suspiciously as representative of the same kind of free-for-all as saloons, general public support helped make these establishments a reality—regardless of prohibition. This marked the beginning of nightclubs in the city.

“Around 1919 and 1920, Vancouver nightspots really begin to change,” says Carter. “The cabaret licences start to happen. Many of the old cafés change to cabarets. All the new places opening up in Vancouver in the 1920s are cabarets. Prior to that, it was segregated. You went to a restaurant to eat and a bar to drink and a theatre for your entertainment. Now people could bring their date and see a floor show while they’re eating dinner, then have the tables clear, and you could dance—that just left you to sneak your own alcohol in.”

With the arrival of cabarets in Vancouver but no liquor licences, thus began the era of the bottle club. These businesses effectively ran as restaurants, serving food and beverages no stronger than pop, with ice, which customers might add their own alcohol to under the table. Or some establishments allowed customers to bring in their own bottles, and then the staff would hide them behind the bar or elsewhere in the building and pour on their behalf. These kinds of tactics made them targets for inspections and raids by the VPD dry squad.

Prohibition in BC ended in 1921, and until then the cabarets tended to be small. But Vancouver nightspots were changing rapidly. By this time, ballrooms had come to dominate Vancouver nightlife. Although they didn’t have kitchens to serve food, and might only have a table off to the side to sell soft drinks, that didn’t mean there wasn’t any fun to be had in them.

¹    “The Concert Hall,” Vancouver Daily World, April 13, 1897, 3.

²    “Music Hall Question,” Vancouver Daily World, April 20, 1897, 5.

³    Lani Russwurm, “A Boozy History of Prohibition in Vancouver,” Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours, https://forbiddenvancouver.ca/2017/04/27/boozy-history-prohibition-vancouver/.

CHAPTER TWO

Danceland in May 1965. Originally the Alexandra Ballroom, it was renamed in the 1950s. Credit: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 447-351

BALLROOMS ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The City after Sundown
• Chapter Two: Ballrooms and Bandstands
• Chapter Three: The Supper Clubs
• Chapter Four: The East End
• Chapter Five: Never a Dull Moment
• Chapter Six: Night People
• Chapter Seven: Fly by Night
• Chapter Eight: Stepping Out into the Seventies
• Chapter Nine: Gastown and Beyond
• Chapter Ten: The End of the Golden Age
• Chapter Eleven: Last Call
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index