Next meeting: Tuesday October 2, 2018
Club Day! Celebrating our own!

 

Special announcements and members' moments:

Brian Street introduced speaker Aaron Chapman, Vancouver historian and author. He is the author of The Last Gang in Town, the story of Vancouver's Clark Park Gang; Liquor, Lust, and the Law, the story of Vancouver's Penthouse Nightclub, now available in a second edition; and Live at the Commodore, a history of the Commodore Ballroom that won the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (BC Book Prizes) in 2015. He lives in Vancouver.

The Commodore will celebrate its 85th year this December. It’s seen almost every kind of entertainment that’s come through Vancouver and the dance floor has seen everything from the Foxtrot and the waltz to slam dancing and moshing. The history of the Commodore is the history of how Vancouver as entertained itself. In a city where its seems we’ve lost so many heritage spaces, and even more so cultural nightspots… the list of long gone nightclubs are an arm long, from The Cave, The Arctic Club, the Quadra Club, King of Clubs, Club Soda, The Town Pump, Smilin’ Buddha, Gary Taylors, the Soft Rock Cafe, Oil Can Harrys, the Marco Polo, the Kubla Khan, the New Delhi,The Sugar Refinery, the Brickyard, the Marine Club, the Windmill, 86 Street Music Hall, the Glass Slipper, the Egress, Rime, The Silvertone, the Mesa Luna, Isys, the Archimedes, the Rock Cellar, the Gaston Music Hall, the Malcolm Lowry Room, the South Hill Candy Shop, the Lux Theatre, the Gandy Dancer, Faces, the Howden Ballroom are JUST A GLIMPSE…

Why is it that the Commodore has survived, and why do we as Vancouverites stop to recognize how good we have it, as this is not only regarded as the best concert venue in Canada, in a town that hasn’t respected heritage as much as most cities in the world.

To understand how remarkable it is that the Commodore arrived in Vancouver when it did, and on this street, its important to recognize how different Vancouver was in the 1920s. 2/3rds of city streets were unpaved or gravel. Horses still shared space with cars, even the interurban lineman carried a rifle on the car to shoo away animals. The city even smelled different.  Certainly spurred on by the construction of the 2nd Hotel Vancouver, and the emergence of Granville street being considered theatre row it became a destination. 

The Capitol theatre opens March 1921, and the Orpheum is under construction in 1927.  Even before the Commodore arrives, there are as many as 40 musicians working nightly in the pit orchestras on this single block of Granville. The interest in radios (the internet of the day) was culturally changing peoples lives as well. There were 103 licensed radios in 1922 in Vancouver, in less than a decade it became 21,000. Previously there would only be music in the home if somebody played an instrument, but now it could be in every home, and this gave rise to popular songs of the day, that music and the enjoyment of it was much more a part of people’s lives than it had on average been years before.

From Gassy Jacks first paddling into the harbour, liquor has oiled how Vancouver was created. From the lions gate bridge being underwritten by the Guinness family, to the Commodore ballroom that was built by the Reifel family. It’s important to note the contribution of the Reifel family. Vancouver through the years always had famous wealthy families. Perhaps not so today, except for Chip Wilson?! We’ve moved from Beer to Yoga Pants - if that says anything about how the city is changed…! A whole talk could be devoted to the significance of the Reifel family. The Reifels made money the old fashioned way, by selling alcohol during the US prohibition years, then sinking the money into the way all Vancouverites have gotten rich - real estate. In the 1920s the family had a presence in the city with their beer Cascade Beer which was one of the products they creatively exported, which had been brewed at their Vancouver Brewery location at 11th and Alberta. The brewery later became Carling O’keefe Breweries.

George and Alma spend their nights at the Hotel Vancouver luxurious Crystal Ballroom. According to legend it was Alma who felt that the Crystal Ballroom was getting too crowded, and that the city needed another ballroom. One can only wonder what exactly Alma said to her husband on that fateful night, but she planted the seed in George’s mind. Was George tantalized by the prospect that he could call a place like the Crystal his own? Luckily, he had the wealth to make these grandiose dreams a reality.

Reifel chose H H Gillingham and together they envisioned a whole complex, with a basement bowling alley and billiards area, ground floor retail space, and a new ballroom cabaret on the second floor. It was just a matter of finding where to build. If the new ballroom was to steal some patrons from the Hotel Vancouver, it needed to be close by. Granville Street, with the Orpheum and other theatres now establish was fast becoming an entertainment strip. Reifel found a small two storey row of storefronts in the 800 block of Granvillestreet between the Capitol Theatre entrance and the Orpheum. The stores were a mix of small businesses including a menswear shop, bakery, pork sausage manufacturer, radio store, dance academy school with a second floor space that sold japanese goods, and a small nightspot called the Commodore Cafe, run by Nick Kogas and Johnny Dillias.

The stock market crash happens, there’s hobo jungles in false creek, places like Burnaby and North Vancouver were forced into receivership. We have an attitude that all of Vancouver fell into poverty in the depression, but there were people like the Riefels who were insulated by their wealth and would have blithely gone through the depression living it up. While some other building projects stopped construction like the new Hotel Vancouver, or others were cancelled, the Riefels wealth assured that construction did not stop at the Commodore.

The Commodore CABARET opens Wednesday December 3rd 1930. High society, city aldermen, some 900 in attendance. The stage was originally an orchestra shell. The CABARET opening was viewed as a significant development in the city’s status. The day after the official opening the Vancouver Sun heralded the new “night club de luxe" that compares favourably with those of any eastern metropolis, and eclipses those in cities to the south when measured up to size, luxurious and modernistic appointments, dancing space, orchestra, service and entertainment, and is a distinct step in the progress of Vancouver.

Back then there was only beer halls. They were dreary places. The ballroom had no liquor license. Brown bag it. While the penthouse famously had spotters on the roof when the dry squad came, the Commodore had the long stairway, and if there was a police raid, the doormen pressed a buzzer, which signalled the band to play roll out the barrel. What the funny bit of this is that the police would frequent the Commodore on their days off so they knew well enough what would happen!

The stories are fascinating and endless! If you have any stories to share contact Aaron, perhaps he'll include it in his next book.

Interesting links:

• Purchase Aaron's books at Arsenal Pulp Press, CLICK HERE
• Vancouver Courier, Archives: Commodore Cabaret opens on Granville, CLICK HERE
• The Commodore, History, CLICK HERE
• The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, CLICK HERE

Meeting adjourned with a toast to Vancouver entertainment.