The Last Gang in Town Read online

  In comparison with much of the youth violence we hear about today, it’s easy to dismiss the gangs of the past as no more than rowdy, misguided, boys-will-be-boys street hoodlums whose activities were more like hijinks that got out of hand than that of violent marauders with a malevolent agenda. But while the street gangs of the past were poorly organized, and there are no records showing that they committed any murders, it’s worth noting that they were often armed, and the potential for violence was always high. For example, in 1935, the Silk Stocking gang was involved in a store robbery where the proprietor was shot and wounded. Elmer Almquist, gang member responsible for the shooting, was an adult, and sentenced to seven years in prison.11

  By the war-torn 1940s, while Vancouver had grown considerably, the ranks of the Vancouver police had been depleted of young constables with so many men going overseas. Most of the officers were World War I veterans or men now too old to serve in combat. The war years helped to create the next distinct era of Vancouver gangs, one with the soundtrack of a big-band playing bebop.

  The Vancouver Zoot Suit Riot during the summer heat wave of 1944 might be the most fabled, when mobs of civilians and members of the Zoot Suit gang fought against visiting merchant marine sailors on city streets over the course of three nights. One skirmish that took place near Granville and Smithe streets involved hundreds of people; it had to be broken up by military police.

  Unlike the gangs that had preceded them which had no distinctive uniforms, “Zooters” had “their own specialized vocabulary, they wore large waistlength, square shouldered jackets, [and] baggy trousers called ‘strides’ that were tight at the ankle.”12

  Newspapers of the time loved to repeat the sensational highlights of the riot. But the term “Zoot Suiter” may not have even accurately applied to Vancouver’s gang. The news of their presence in Vancouver followed the much publicized Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943, and the press in Vancouver may have jumped on the term to describe the local hoodlums who frequented and caused trouble at dance halls, cafés, and certain nightspots at closing time. To some, like Alan Morley writing in the News-Herald, their name didn’t matter; the “Zoot Suiters” were no different from “the perennial succession of East End gangs that… Vancouver’s slums have always bred.”13

  By 1950, Vancouver Police had identified twenty-seven gang meeting places or hangouts that ranged from pool halls to coffee bars and street corners, and an investigation revealed that one unidentified gang was making its own crude weapons, including “a gas pipe blackjack, wooden clubs, and chains.”14 The ’50s opened the switchblade and greaser decade of Vancouver youth gangs. Automobiles gave them wider access to the city, and inter-gang rumbles and street racing were coined “Friday Night Madness,” which was viewed with the same trepidation, and accompanied by a similar increase in police presence, that “Welfare Wednesday” has in recent years.

  North Vancouver, 1958.

  PHOTO: Fred Herzog

  The post-war era seemed to give rise to a new fear of street gangs. The very mention of the word “gang” captured newspaper headlines in Vancouver and abroad, ready to scare suburbia with a nightmare vision that lawless youth at any time were waiting to roar up your driveway in a hot rod, smash in the front door, and rape your family. Gangs became scapegoats for unidentified or unsolved crimes even when there was no evidence to indicate gang involvement. BC senator Tom Reid saw the Red Menace of Communism lurking behind the perceived new wave of youth gang violence, and told press that “gang members were the most susceptible to Communist doctrine and thus easy prey for recruitment drives.”15

  This period in Vancouver was not without gang-related criminal incidents, particularly when it came to the animosity between east and west side rivals. A gang called the Alma Dukes, which was based on the west side around Broadway and Alma streets and boasted a membership of 400, had been named by Vancouver police in an extensively reported rumble with an east side rival named the Victoria Road gang, which had 150 male and some female members of their own.

  By 1952, Vancouver police chief Walter Mulligan declared that the Alma Dukes and other gangs had been eradicated thanks to a “Youth Guidance Detail.”16 But Mulligan’s boast that he’d wiped out local street gangs was as short-lived as his own career; he famously fell from grace three years later in the wake of a sensational bribery and corruption scandal that forced his resignation.

  The 1960s and ’70s would bring on a new era of gang trouble. Some of the gangs in Vancouver were not territorial street thugs; their activities more closely resembled the workings of organized crime. Rumours swirled in those years about an Italian mafia presence in Vancouver. Names frequently bantered around included Joe Gentile, a local mob connection who ran his operation exceedingly quietly, and members of the Filippone family of Penthouse Nightclub fame who many simply assumed to be connected to the underworld because they were Italians who had publicly skirted liquor and prostitution laws for decades. It was known, however, that the Palmer brothers and William “Fats” Robertson were involved in Vancouver’s organized crime scenes.

  The Palmers were blue-collar heroin dealers with connections to the Montreal mafia.17 They drank at the Waldorf Hotel bar on East Hastings Street but distanced themselves from the possibility of arrest by avoiding handling drug transactions directly. Instead, they sold small maps to where “nickel” and “dime” bags (five and ten dollars’ worth) of drugs were stashed in the alleyways of East Vancouver.

  Fats Robertson had been involved in Vancouver’s criminal history since the 1940s, and had been linked to everything from trafficking and robbery to murder. His criminal career in the murky depths of the Lower Mainland’s underworld eventually included dirty trading in the stock market.

  Concern over gang violence involving young offenders in the city rose in July of 1962 when two female Vancouver police constables, responding to a report of a gang fight outside the Danceland Ballroom at Hornby and Robson streets, were forced to seek the safety of their police cruiser after gang members threatened them. While a crowd of about 300 gathered to watch, ten gang members took hold of the car’s rear bumper and tried to tip it over until the backup officers finally arrived to break up the scene and make arrests.18 The following year, constables Ted Urchenko and R.L. Kirkland were arresting a drunken youth gang member on West Broadway when they were attacked by ten other members of the gang while trying to place him in their patrol vehicle. Urchenko was knocked unconscious. While Kirkland radioed for reinforcements and an ambulance, the youth fled to nearby cars and escaped.19

  These incidents hit the front pages of the local newspapers, increasing concern over youth gangs to new heights. And while it’s difficult to trace an exact moment when the “park gang” era began, many gangs were already being identified according to their community of origin or territory, which often centred around community parks. By 1963, The Province reported on a skirmish at Grandview Park where more than eighty juveniles had rallied to engage in a rumble by the time police had arrived to disperse the crowd.20 Clark Park was one of several city parks that police had regularly named in the newspapers that year as a street gang hangout.

  For many years, Vancouver residents slept easily, knowing that the greaser gangs, as well as those in organized crime, were usually too busy warring amongst themselves to pose much of a threat to the general public. But the street gangs—influenced by changing attitudes of youth and counterculture, revolt against the establishment, a lack of respect for law enforcement, and a dismissal of what had previously been considered societal standards—would clash directly with the police in full view of the public in Vancouver in a way that had never been seen before.

  Ross Park in South Vancouver covers about 1.5 hectares (almost four acres), and in the late 1960s and early 1970s was part of a low-to-middle-class neighbourhood. The park was surrounded by one- or two-storey rancher homes built in the 1940s and ’50s, as well as the new, box-like stucco “Vancouver Specials” that were beginning to be bui
lt and would become a staple of East and South Vancouver neighbourhoods.

  Brothers Destry and Louis Galgoczy grew up in the area in the 1960s and were no different than many of the local youth hanging around Ross Park at the time, often well after the sun had gone down. “We had hung out at Ross Park since we were kids,” Destry explains. “We were around twelve years old, but there was also a crowd of older teenagers … who hung out there too, sort of showing us the ropes.” He and his friends would try to bum liquor or cigarettes off the older kids, or simply follow their lead.

  Members of the Riley Park gang.

  PHOTO: Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun, 1974

  Perhaps too young to be considered full-fledged Ross Park gang members themselves, they nonetheless socialized as young hangers-on with the older youths there. “A lot of the older kids were in gangs,” he says. “The Riley Park gang, Sunset Park gang, and Ross Park gang all sort of had allegiances to one another because we were all in South Van, so the territory from 33rd to Victoria Drive and over to Main Street was all considered part of ‘our territory.’”

  One early fall evening in 1971, Destry and his brother arrived as usual at Ross Park to find an altogether different mood. “When we got there, we knew something was up. The older guys had all shown up on their motorcycles or in cars if they had them. An older guy, Don Garrett, came up to us and told us we had to get out of there right now, that there was going to be a rumble.”

  Just then, swearing and shouting could be heard in the distance as another couple dozen older teenagers marched into the park from the east. They were long-haired and wore red mackinaw jackets (macks), some with the sleeves cut off, and a jean jacket over top, with jeans and Dayton boots. It was too late for the Galgoczy brothers to run off, so Garrett pushed the two boys on top of the roof of the field house and told them to wait there and stay quiet. “We just sat up there and hid,” remembers Louis. “Then these guys started squaring off. I didn’t see any knives, but people were hitting each other with bats and chains, right in the corner of Ross Park. All hell broke loose. It’s amazing how violent people were back then.”

  Neighbours in the homes that surrounded Ross Park might have sat in their darkened living rooms that night, bathed in the reflected glow of their Zenith Electrohome TVs, perhaps mistaking the yells from outside as noisy kids playing in the park. Maybe they only grimaced and turned up the volume. Others who got up to peer through their blinds perhaps did nothing further. Even the driver of a passing car glimpsing such a fight might be too intimidated to stop and break up something like this on his own. Many who lived around city parks, especially older residents, chose to avoid any confrontations with local youths, and told their own children to stay out of the parks after dark.

  Some braver residents, however, would telephone police to report fighting in the park. But unless officers were already in the area, they would rarely arrive upon a fight still in progress, as the warning sounds of a police siren would cause the gang members to flee down nearby alleys and pathways.

  That night in Ross Park, however, hiding on the rooftop of the clubhouse, the Galgoczy brothers kept their heads down low as they witnessed the fight, hearing the swearing and beating as the brutal rumble unfolded.

  “We knew who it was. We’d heard about them,” Destry says. “We knew they were from a tough park. It was the guys from the east end. The Clark Parkers.”

  11 “Long Terms Imposed on Holdup Men” The Province, October 21, 1935, 1.

  12 Michael G. Young, “History of Vancouver Youth Gangs” (master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1993), 42.

  13 Lani Russwurm, “Street Fighting Man.” Past Tense Vancouver Histories, November 12, 2009. https://pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com/tag/clark-park-gang/

  14 Young, 55.

  15 “Vicious Hoodlums Rob, Wreck House,” The Province, February 2, 1952, 2.

  16 Robert Hertzler, “Vancouver’s Juvenile Gangs ‘Wiped Out’ in Two Years,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, March 17, 1952, 12.

  17 “7 On Drug Conspiracy Charges,” The Province, June 24, 1972, 2.

  18 “Policewomen Saved from Teen-Age Mob,” The Province, July 9, 1962, 1.

  19 “4 Policemen Hurt in Gang Attacks by Young Hoodlums,” Vancouver Sun, February 25, 1963, 3.

  20 “Hoodlums Beat, Kick Two Men,” The Province, July 30, 1963, 27; “Gangs Attack Three in the City,” The Province, December 15, 1963, 15.

  FOUR: THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS

  You could say that there was always something crooked about Clark Park—and not just the downhill slope of the park ground itself. Vancouverites had been wary of Clark Park from its beginnings.

  The park sits at what was once the end of Park Drive, a road carved out of the forests as a logging trail that ran north to the Burrard Inlet near the original site of Hastings Mill where the city of Vancouver itself began. It is the second oldest park in Vancouver after the larger and internationally known Stanley Park. Park Drive cut through an area that eventually would be known as Grandview—one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods. Before European settlers arrived, and long before it was logged in the 1890s, Squamish First Nations communities lived in the area for many hundreds of years, referring to the region as Khupkhahpay’ay (meaning “cedar tree”). The area maintains a strong First Nations presence to this day, with one in ten residents identifying as Aboriginal.21

  The city’s most plainly told and superficial history would simply state that the Park came into being when, in 1889, Mr. E.J. Clark—a dry goods baron who had turned his profits toward real estate acquisition—graciously donated the land he’d purchased just a few years earlier to the city’s newly created Park Commission. For reasons that no one seems to recall, it was first known as Buffalo Park or South Park; senior Vancouverites who had grown up and lived in the area well into the 1960s continued to call it by either name.

  But the whole story of the land grant can’t be explained as solely emanating from the warm-hearted generosity of a local citizen who, once he’d done well, desired to give back to his burgeoning coastal town. Clark was also a shrewd businessman who felt there was more profit to be gained from giving the land away. Clark had donated it to the city with conditions attached: it should be cleared of stumps and roots, and the ground be ploughed and levelled. He hoped that the attractions of Buffalo Park would become a feature of the area and would benefit his other property taking up some twenty-five hectares (sixty acres) that he continued to own and intended to sell for home development.22

  By 1904, despite its official designation as a city park, it was not much in demand for recreational or athletic activities. Park Drive was a well-used road and even had a terminus stop for the streetcar line that ran hourly. And the local population did not significantly increase: too much of the city was still focused downtown and near Burrard Inlet.

  While a small portion of the park was left as a virgin forest, much of it had become covered with weeds and bracken. At one time, city engineers had to remind the park board that it was still in their possession.23 Dissatisfied with the way the park had yet to help develop any real estate interests, E.J. Clark’s nephew William Clark insisted that the city had breached its conditions and reneged on its responsibility. He demanded that the park be given back to the family. He sued the city and fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, but ultimately lost the trial.24

  Yet E.J. Clark perhaps had the last laugh. When he originally donated the land, he also had the surrounding area surveyed into lots, accounting for streets and lanes, which he sold. The lots eventually changed hands many times, but there was little development. By 1907, when the construction of homes began to take off, builders who applied to the city for a water connection were notified by Clark that they were trespassing on his property. Either by accident or design, one foot (30.5 cm) of each street end and lane was still the registered property of Clark himself, who stated that he did not intend to relinquish his claim on the one-foot strips without adequate re
compense. He even asked for fifteen dollars per lot before he would allow the streets and lanes to be opened to the city.25

  The story hit the local newspapers and even as far east as Quebec, as readers of the Montreal Gazette were amused to read of Vancouver’s real estate fiascos. It forced a city council hearing after which the various home owners and Clark were all eventually placated with a negotiated settlement. The home owners got their water tie-ins, and despite the bad blood between the Clarks and the city, Vancouver would officially rename the greenspace Clark Park in 1911. That same year, an effort begun by area merchants in the hopes of attracting businesses to Park Drive would succeed in having it renamed to what it is today: Commercial Drive. (The Clark Park gang might thank the Vancouver Park Board for this: The Buffalo Park Gang or South Park Gang doesn’t have the same ring!)

  In 1923, the Chambers family of East Vancouver gathered on the slope of Clark Park to take a photograph.

  PHOTO: Stuart Thompson, City of Vancouver Archives, CVA 99-3460

  By 1912, Grandview had begun to grow as a distinct village east of downtown, and the area within walking distance of Commercial Drive became filled with new homes. As the neighbourhood grew, Clark Park finally became more of a feature in the larger area and recognized as a recreational spot for East Vancouver families to enjoy on a pleasant day at an outdoor music concert or to take a family photo. The Chambers family was not unlike most of their neighbours; a broader wave of multicultural immigration was yet to show itself in the neighbourhood. Residents then were predominantly of British ancestry, as indicated by such local names as Britannia Secondary School, Queen Victoria Elementary, and Victoria Drive.