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LITERARY SITE: Clark Park, 1500 E 14th Ave, Vancouver
Vancouver's second oldest urban park, Clark Park, is the focus of Vancouver author/historian Aaron Chapman's The Last Gang in Town. At this location in the early 1970s the Clark Park Gang evolved into one of that era's most notorious street gangs. In 1972, after the gang was involved in a number of headline-making clashes with police, including the 'Rolling Stones riot' outside the Pacific Coliseum, the Vancouver Police Department formed an undercover squad to go after the gang. Hostile interactions culminated in a shooting death of a Clark Park gang member, Danny Teece, age 17. Chapman's history includes stories from both former gang members and undercover police officers who worked to stifle gang activity. The full title of Chapman's entirely original Vancouver history is The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. the Clark Park Gang (Arsenal 2016).
Born and raised in Vancouver, Aaron Chapman is a cultural historian who has been a contributor to the Vancouver Courier, Georgia Straight, and CBC Radio. A graduate of the University of British Columbia as well as a musician, he is also a member of Heritage Vancouver and the Point Roberts Historical Society.
Aaron Chapman spent the first twenty-five years of his life at 2475 West 37th Avenue in Kerrisdale, in a house next door to George and Angela Bowering, who lived at 2499 West 37th, at the north east corner of 37th and Larch. George Bowering became the first Poet Laureate of Canada. Another neighbour at 2527 West 37th was the UBC English professor Warren Tallman who spawned the TISH movement and hosted the noteworthy Vancouver Poetry conference in 1963. Although not directly influenced by Bowering and Tallman, the awareness of the city's literary life did influence Chapman to become an historian solely concerned with the city in which he lives--following in the footsteps of the late Chuck Davis.
His first book, Liquor, Lust and the Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub (Arsenal Pulp Press) was a finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize to recognize the author(s) of the book that contributes most to the enjoyment and understanding of British Columbia.
In recent memory, most people know the iconic Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver has played host to musical greats like The Police, The Clash, Blondie and U2, and more recently Lady Gaga, Tom Waits and the White Stripes. But that's only a small part of its story. Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver's Historic Commodore Ballroom (Arsenal Pulp Press $28.95) by Aaron Chapman respectfully and diligently recounts the history of Vancouver's best-loved music venue from its 1930s conception, when it hosted Vancouver's decadent society set, through WWII and the swing era, to its current state.
Having proven himself with Liquor, Lust and the Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub (Arsenal Pulp) Chapman has maintained a high standard of populism and scholarship by digging up stories behind the legendary acts that graced the Commodore's stage, whether it's the bass player for Talking Heads scoring grass or Patti Smith insisting on taking a bath in a tub that was primarily used as a urinal, he has cleverly mixed history with an assortment of rare photos, paraphernalia and posters. His thorough research also includes reminiscences from the likes of local bluesman Jim Byrnes (fondly recalling backstage conversations with the likes of Muddy Waters and Charley Pride) and reviews by the likes of the indomitable and always perceptive Georgia Straight and Province music critic Tom Harrison.
The central figure in the narrative is longtime Commodore head honcho Drew Burns. Back in the day, when there was no liquor license, patrons brought their own booze but were required to purchase ice buckets per table, hiding their liquor from police. The staff at the Commodore routinely placed the ice buckets on heaters before delivering them patrons, thereby making the ice melt quickly and requiring them to order another bucket.
This is commercial, popular history at its finest--amusing and enlightening.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Liquor, Lust and The Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub
Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver's Historic Commodore Ballroom
***
Real Enough: The Unlikely Story of Doug and the Slugs
By Simon Kendall and Aaron Chapman
(Anvil Press $25)
Review by Alex Varty (BCBW 2026)
Bear with me for a moment while I shake my fist at this cloud. There are, no doubt, many things that Vancouver has gained in its post-Expo 86 transformation into an international corporate megalopolis, but I’m not about to list them here. Instead, thanks to the trip down memory lane that is Real Enough: The Unlikely Story of Doug and the Slugs, I’m thinking about what has been lost. Imagine being able to stroll down to the port, unimpeded by chain-link fences or security, and feast on a spectacularly fresh shrimp sandwich in a longshoremen’s café while gazing down on the very wharf where said shrimp had been landed just hours before. Imagine smugly quaffing a “dark coffee” in the Classical Joint, watching the passing action on Carrall Street while hearing Al Neil demolish a piano or Dick Smith’s saxophone soar through some up-tempo bebop. Or imagine climbing up and up and up a steep and narrow staircase, paying a nominal entrance fee and venturing into the City Space loft, packed with a few hundred stoned and sweaty people gyrating to the sounds of the world’s second-best party band. Doug and the Slugs were never The Meters, but on a good night they came close.
To be honest, nobody quite knew what to make of Doug and the Slugs. This was 1977, or maybe early 1978, and if it was the era of punk, snotty kids with big attitude but little musical ability, it was also the era of hair metal, snotty kids with blazing chops and enough hairspray to puncture the ozone layer. Yeah, the punks had the lapel badges but everyone else had their genre signifiers too, except for these locals. Perhaps Mötley Crüe took the band name that should have been theirs. Slug’s drummer, John “Wally” Watson looked like a Hell’s Angel who’d discovered the joys of moustache wax. Bassist Steve Bosley was the sharpest dresser, in a very New Wave kind of way. Six-foot-five keyboardist Simon Kendall could have wandered on off the basketball court. Guitarists John Burton and Richard Baker played the game of opposites: Burton a total rockstar in teased red hair and (if I remember correctly) red leather pants, Baker a sound scientist armed with the guitar-world equivalent of a slide rule (a very unfashionable Gibson Les Paul Recording model, which came with its own operator’s manual). And the guy in front, Doug Bennett, was an undeniably pudgy fellow with slicked-back Humphrey Bogart hair and a fine line in five-dollar thrift-store suits.
The kind of people that listen with their eyes were going to be very, very confused—and for the most part they were, even as the band won some measure of fame. The ears, though, told a different story. These guys could play and their unlikely leader had a cutting line in on-stage banter, but softened by strong melodies and lyrics that sounded both enigmatic and heartfelt. The Slugs were anything but shallow trend followers—and maybe that’s why, 22 years after Bennett drank himself to death, we now have a second book about the act, as well as a well-received documentary film, Doug and the Slugs and Me.
Real Enough, which follows Burton’s 2023 memoir Doug and The Slugs: 50,000 Slug Fans Can’t be Wrong, is a collaboration between keyboardist Kendall, the band’s music director for most of its existence, and author and civic historian Aaron Chapman. It thus benefits from both firsthand experience and a bit of distance: Kendall, a rock musician of unusually sober habits, has most of his memory very much intact, while Chapman fills in the cultural context. Real Enough also draws on Bennett’s unpublished journals, which give some insight into an artist who, despite his ebullient stage persona, could be well-armoured and aloof.
“To some extent, Doug kept us all at arm’s length,” Kendall writes. “It was his survival instinct—he never wanted to appear vulnerable or dependent.” Yet beneath his adoption of a hardboiled film noir dress code, Bennett was secretly wracked with insecurity. “The only chance of redemption I see is one of my own songs becoming a hit, which is the longshot and we all know about longshots,” Bennett confided to himself in an October 1982 journal entry, perhaps in the midst of recording the band’s third album with Joan Jett’s producer, Ritchie Cordell. “All in all, this week marks the loss of innocence for Doug Bennett and the first steps towards selling out. ‘Don’t worry’ say the managers and producers. ‘You’ll always be accused of that.’ Being accused is one thing, feeling it in your very bones is another. And lord knows, right now I feel it awfully bad.”
Bennett’s instincts were right. Brought in specifically to make hits, Cordell botched the job. Kendall says the ensuing record, Music for the Hard of Thinking, was “the crappiest-sounding record we ever made” and the Slugs were released from their RCA recording contract, but with a massive debt outstanding. Their Canadian fans — and the band’s own road-warrior inclinations—kept the ship afloat, but the Slugs never won the international fame their management, at least, had hoped for. After such a promising start, it was a matter of diminishing expectations, with core band members slowly dropping out and being replaced by a rotating cast of Slug subs until the original six reconvened for a triumphal reunion at Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom, scene of some of their most acclaimed early shows, in 2003. But by then it was too late for anything other than the nostalgia circuit, and too late for Bennett himself.
That sounds as if Real Enough is a sad tale, and in many ways it is. But there’s wit here in the road anecdotes and remembered teenage antics; all of the Slugs save Bosley and Bennett grew up in the same Vancouver neighbourhood, and in-jokes abound. Kendall, who really is one of the nicest people in the music industry, is a droll and self-effacing narrator. One might wish for more insight into what made Bennett tick, however. A skilled graphic artist and video director as well as songwriter, he clearly harboured an artist’s nature but also some kind of wound that led him to self-medicate, resist intimacy and occasionally act out. The true nature of that injury went to the grave with him, but perhaps the songs are legacy enough. Real they most certainly are. 9781772142211
Alexander Varty’s 1970s art-punk band, AKA, once opened for Doug and the Slugs on a three-show mini-tour of the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island, which Varty says was “a weird and adventurous choice for the Slugs.” AKA encountered some hostility from the Slugs’ audience, but enjoyed interactions with the Slugs’ band and crew. Varty still plays “a nerdy Gibson Les Paul Recording guitar” of his own, he says, after being wowed by Richard Baker’s subtle and understated virtuosity.
BOOKS:
Liquor, Lust, and The Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub
(Arsenal, 2012; 2nd printing Arsenal, 2014) $24.95 978-1-55152-488-7
Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver's Historic Commodore Ballroom (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014) $28.95 978-1-55152-566-2
The Last Gang in Town (Arsenal Pulp, 2016) $24.95 978-1-55152-671-3
Vancouver After Dark: The Wild History of a City's Nightlife (Arsenal, 2019) $32.95 978-1-55152-783-3
Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City's West End (Arsenal Pulp, 2021) $27.95 9781551528694
A Sign of the Times: The Best of the Penthouse Marquee
(Anvil, 2025) $30 9781772142501. Co-authored with Benjamin Jackson
Real Enough: The Unlikely Story of Doug and the Slugs (Anvil Press, 2026) $25 9781772142211. Co-authored with Simon Kendall
[BCBW 2026]
* * *
A Sign of the Times:
The Best of the Penthouse Marquee
by Benjamin Jackson & Aaron Chapman (Anvil $30)
Review by Beverly Cramp (BCBW 2025)
Vancouver’s historic Penthouse Night Club has had its fair share of pushback over the years—from police raids during its time operating as an illegal bottle club to being temporarily shut down on Christmas Eve, 1975 and later charged with living off the avails of prostitution.
But it’s the Penthouse’s marquee with its sassy messages that has been getting attention in recent years, including getting its X account (@The Penthouse604) suspended last January over letters that spelled out “Forever neighbours, never neighbors.” The message highlighted the way Canadians and Americans spell words differently, but it was also around the time US president-elect, Donald Trump starting making swipes about Canada becoming the 51st state.
Four years previous, after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot in Washington, DC, the Penthouse marquee touted its bouncers with: “Better security than the US Capitol.”
At a Coldplay concert in July, 2025, a couple was caught embracing on one of the large overhead video screens and singer Chris Martin wondered out loud if the couple was having an affair because they had ducked out of view so quickly. It made headlines around the world and the couple’s “outing” led to job resignations as the couple worked together at the same company. The Penthouse quickly responded on its marquee with: “Relax guys, Coldplay isn’t here.” Someone took a photo of the sign and posted it on social media, garnering 10,000,000 views by the end of the day, and 22,000,000 views on Instagram by the end of the weekend.
Now there’s a book celebrating the Penthouse’s special brand of humour, A Sign of the Times by Benjamin Jackson and Aaron Chapman, featuring glossy photos of some of the more well-known marquee signs. Many are bawdy, some are political and others are just plain witty. Readers learn that the co-author, Benjamin (“The Sign Guy”) Jackson who works as a Penthouse bartender, is also the one who comes up with the jokes and messages. Jackson tells how he finds his ideas and shares some of his personal favourite signs from the past—many of which have been shared millions of times online.
“The whole thing started with me trying to make my friends at work laugh,” says Jackson, later adding, “We just wanted to have some fun and get some notice and promo for the club.”
“It’s okay if people don’t know my name, or just call me ‘The Sign Guy.’ In the early days, on Reddit, they referred to me as ‘The Marquee Boy.’ I just like making the city laugh through that sign—and that’s the point in the end. The sign speaks for itself!”
Cultural historian, Aaron Chapman, says the Penthouse signs have given attention to Vancouver and its local culture as well as the nightclub. “Vancouver doesn’t enter the national or global realm of pop culture too often,” says Chapman. “Our media is often overshadowed by images from New York or Toronto. We might see movies and TV shows where we recognize our own city street—but Vancouver never plays itself. When we see another of Ben’s outrageous or funny signs, online or in the news, we’re reminded that the sign is one of us. It’s from Vancouver, and from Seymour Street. It’s like spotting the face of a friend we know in a crowd of people. That’s the Penthouse marquee.”
9781772142501
Vancouver's second oldest urban park, Clark Park, is the focus of Vancouver author/historian Aaron Chapman's The Last Gang in Town. At this location in the early 1970s the Clark Park Gang evolved into one of that era's most notorious street gangs. In 1972, after the gang was involved in a number of headline-making clashes with police, including the 'Rolling Stones riot' outside the Pacific Coliseum, the Vancouver Police Department formed an undercover squad to go after the gang. Hostile interactions culminated in a shooting death of a Clark Park gang member, Danny Teece, age 17. Chapman's history includes stories from both former gang members and undercover police officers who worked to stifle gang activity. The full title of Chapman's entirely original Vancouver history is The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. the Clark Park Gang (Arsenal 2016).
Born and raised in Vancouver, Aaron Chapman is a cultural historian who has been a contributor to the Vancouver Courier, Georgia Straight, and CBC Radio. A graduate of the University of British Columbia as well as a musician, he is also a member of Heritage Vancouver and the Point Roberts Historical Society.
Aaron Chapman spent the first twenty-five years of his life at 2475 West 37th Avenue in Kerrisdale, in a house next door to George and Angela Bowering, who lived at 2499 West 37th, at the north east corner of 37th and Larch. George Bowering became the first Poet Laureate of Canada. Another neighbour at 2527 West 37th was the UBC English professor Warren Tallman who spawned the TISH movement and hosted the noteworthy Vancouver Poetry conference in 1963. Although not directly influenced by Bowering and Tallman, the awareness of the city's literary life did influence Chapman to become an historian solely concerned with the city in which he lives--following in the footsteps of the late Chuck Davis.
His first book, Liquor, Lust and the Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub (Arsenal Pulp Press) was a finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize to recognize the author(s) of the book that contributes most to the enjoyment and understanding of British Columbia.
In recent memory, most people know the iconic Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver has played host to musical greats like The Police, The Clash, Blondie and U2, and more recently Lady Gaga, Tom Waits and the White Stripes. But that's only a small part of its story. Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver's Historic Commodore Ballroom (Arsenal Pulp Press $28.95) by Aaron Chapman respectfully and diligently recounts the history of Vancouver's best-loved music venue from its 1930s conception, when it hosted Vancouver's decadent society set, through WWII and the swing era, to its current state.
Having proven himself with Liquor, Lust and the Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub (Arsenal Pulp) Chapman has maintained a high standard of populism and scholarship by digging up stories behind the legendary acts that graced the Commodore's stage, whether it's the bass player for Talking Heads scoring grass or Patti Smith insisting on taking a bath in a tub that was primarily used as a urinal, he has cleverly mixed history with an assortment of rare photos, paraphernalia and posters. His thorough research also includes reminiscences from the likes of local bluesman Jim Byrnes (fondly recalling backstage conversations with the likes of Muddy Waters and Charley Pride) and reviews by the likes of the indomitable and always perceptive Georgia Straight and Province music critic Tom Harrison.
The central figure in the narrative is longtime Commodore head honcho Drew Burns. Back in the day, when there was no liquor license, patrons brought their own booze but were required to purchase ice buckets per table, hiding their liquor from police. The staff at the Commodore routinely placed the ice buckets on heaters before delivering them patrons, thereby making the ice melt quickly and requiring them to order another bucket.
This is commercial, popular history at its finest--amusing and enlightening.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Liquor, Lust and The Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub
Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver's Historic Commodore Ballroom
***
Real Enough: The Unlikely Story of Doug and the Slugs
By Simon Kendall and Aaron Chapman
(Anvil Press $25)
Review by Alex Varty (BCBW 2026)
Bear with me for a moment while I shake my fist at this cloud. There are, no doubt, many things that Vancouver has gained in its post-Expo 86 transformation into an international corporate megalopolis, but I’m not about to list them here. Instead, thanks to the trip down memory lane that is Real Enough: The Unlikely Story of Doug and the Slugs, I’m thinking about what has been lost. Imagine being able to stroll down to the port, unimpeded by chain-link fences or security, and feast on a spectacularly fresh shrimp sandwich in a longshoremen’s café while gazing down on the very wharf where said shrimp had been landed just hours before. Imagine smugly quaffing a “dark coffee” in the Classical Joint, watching the passing action on Carrall Street while hearing Al Neil demolish a piano or Dick Smith’s saxophone soar through some up-tempo bebop. Or imagine climbing up and up and up a steep and narrow staircase, paying a nominal entrance fee and venturing into the City Space loft, packed with a few hundred stoned and sweaty people gyrating to the sounds of the world’s second-best party band. Doug and the Slugs were never The Meters, but on a good night they came close.
To be honest, nobody quite knew what to make of Doug and the Slugs. This was 1977, or maybe early 1978, and if it was the era of punk, snotty kids with big attitude but little musical ability, it was also the era of hair metal, snotty kids with blazing chops and enough hairspray to puncture the ozone layer. Yeah, the punks had the lapel badges but everyone else had their genre signifiers too, except for these locals. Perhaps Mötley Crüe took the band name that should have been theirs. Slug’s drummer, John “Wally” Watson looked like a Hell’s Angel who’d discovered the joys of moustache wax. Bassist Steve Bosley was the sharpest dresser, in a very New Wave kind of way. Six-foot-five keyboardist Simon Kendall could have wandered on off the basketball court. Guitarists John Burton and Richard Baker played the game of opposites: Burton a total rockstar in teased red hair and (if I remember correctly) red leather pants, Baker a sound scientist armed with the guitar-world equivalent of a slide rule (a very unfashionable Gibson Les Paul Recording model, which came with its own operator’s manual). And the guy in front, Doug Bennett, was an undeniably pudgy fellow with slicked-back Humphrey Bogart hair and a fine line in five-dollar thrift-store suits.
The kind of people that listen with their eyes were going to be very, very confused—and for the most part they were, even as the band won some measure of fame. The ears, though, told a different story. These guys could play and their unlikely leader had a cutting line in on-stage banter, but softened by strong melodies and lyrics that sounded both enigmatic and heartfelt. The Slugs were anything but shallow trend followers—and maybe that’s why, 22 years after Bennett drank himself to death, we now have a second book about the act, as well as a well-received documentary film, Doug and the Slugs and Me.
Real Enough, which follows Burton’s 2023 memoir Doug and The Slugs: 50,000 Slug Fans Can’t be Wrong, is a collaboration between keyboardist Kendall, the band’s music director for most of its existence, and author and civic historian Aaron Chapman. It thus benefits from both firsthand experience and a bit of distance: Kendall, a rock musician of unusually sober habits, has most of his memory very much intact, while Chapman fills in the cultural context. Real Enough also draws on Bennett’s unpublished journals, which give some insight into an artist who, despite his ebullient stage persona, could be well-armoured and aloof.
“To some extent, Doug kept us all at arm’s length,” Kendall writes. “It was his survival instinct—he never wanted to appear vulnerable or dependent.” Yet beneath his adoption of a hardboiled film noir dress code, Bennett was secretly wracked with insecurity. “The only chance of redemption I see is one of my own songs becoming a hit, which is the longshot and we all know about longshots,” Bennett confided to himself in an October 1982 journal entry, perhaps in the midst of recording the band’s third album with Joan Jett’s producer, Ritchie Cordell. “All in all, this week marks the loss of innocence for Doug Bennett and the first steps towards selling out. ‘Don’t worry’ say the managers and producers. ‘You’ll always be accused of that.’ Being accused is one thing, feeling it in your very bones is another. And lord knows, right now I feel it awfully bad.”
Bennett’s instincts were right. Brought in specifically to make hits, Cordell botched the job. Kendall says the ensuing record, Music for the Hard of Thinking, was “the crappiest-sounding record we ever made” and the Slugs were released from their RCA recording contract, but with a massive debt outstanding. Their Canadian fans — and the band’s own road-warrior inclinations—kept the ship afloat, but the Slugs never won the international fame their management, at least, had hoped for. After such a promising start, it was a matter of diminishing expectations, with core band members slowly dropping out and being replaced by a rotating cast of Slug subs until the original six reconvened for a triumphal reunion at Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom, scene of some of their most acclaimed early shows, in 2003. But by then it was too late for anything other than the nostalgia circuit, and too late for Bennett himself.
That sounds as if Real Enough is a sad tale, and in many ways it is. But there’s wit here in the road anecdotes and remembered teenage antics; all of the Slugs save Bosley and Bennett grew up in the same Vancouver neighbourhood, and in-jokes abound. Kendall, who really is one of the nicest people in the music industry, is a droll and self-effacing narrator. One might wish for more insight into what made Bennett tick, however. A skilled graphic artist and video director as well as songwriter, he clearly harboured an artist’s nature but also some kind of wound that led him to self-medicate, resist intimacy and occasionally act out. The true nature of that injury went to the grave with him, but perhaps the songs are legacy enough. Real they most certainly are. 9781772142211
Alexander Varty’s 1970s art-punk band, AKA, once opened for Doug and the Slugs on a three-show mini-tour of the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island, which Varty says was “a weird and adventurous choice for the Slugs.” AKA encountered some hostility from the Slugs’ audience, but enjoyed interactions with the Slugs’ band and crew. Varty still plays “a nerdy Gibson Les Paul Recording guitar” of his own, he says, after being wowed by Richard Baker’s subtle and understated virtuosity.
BOOKS:
Liquor, Lust, and The Law: The Story of Vancouver's Legendary Penthouse Nightclub
(Arsenal, 2012; 2nd printing Arsenal, 2014) $24.95 978-1-55152-488-7
Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver's Historic Commodore Ballroom (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014) $28.95 978-1-55152-566-2
The Last Gang in Town (Arsenal Pulp, 2016) $24.95 978-1-55152-671-3
Vancouver After Dark: The Wild History of a City's Nightlife (Arsenal, 2019) $32.95 978-1-55152-783-3
Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City's West End (Arsenal Pulp, 2021) $27.95 9781551528694
A Sign of the Times: The Best of the Penthouse Marquee
(Anvil, 2025) $30 9781772142501. Co-authored with Benjamin Jackson
Real Enough: The Unlikely Story of Doug and the Slugs (Anvil Press, 2026) $25 9781772142211. Co-authored with Simon Kendall
[BCBW 2026]
* * *
A Sign of the Times:
The Best of the Penthouse Marquee
by Benjamin Jackson & Aaron Chapman (Anvil $30)
Review by Beverly Cramp (BCBW 2025)
Vancouver’s historic Penthouse Night Club has had its fair share of pushback over the years—from police raids during its time operating as an illegal bottle club to being temporarily shut down on Christmas Eve, 1975 and later charged with living off the avails of prostitution.
But it’s the Penthouse’s marquee with its sassy messages that has been getting attention in recent years, including getting its X account (@The Penthouse604) suspended last January over letters that spelled out “Forever neighbours, never neighbors.” The message highlighted the way Canadians and Americans spell words differently, but it was also around the time US president-elect, Donald Trump starting making swipes about Canada becoming the 51st state.
Four years previous, after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot in Washington, DC, the Penthouse marquee touted its bouncers with: “Better security than the US Capitol.”
At a Coldplay concert in July, 2025, a couple was caught embracing on one of the large overhead video screens and singer Chris Martin wondered out loud if the couple was having an affair because they had ducked out of view so quickly. It made headlines around the world and the couple’s “outing” led to job resignations as the couple worked together at the same company. The Penthouse quickly responded on its marquee with: “Relax guys, Coldplay isn’t here.” Someone took a photo of the sign and posted it on social media, garnering 10,000,000 views by the end of the day, and 22,000,000 views on Instagram by the end of the weekend.
Now there’s a book celebrating the Penthouse’s special brand of humour, A Sign of the Times by Benjamin Jackson and Aaron Chapman, featuring glossy photos of some of the more well-known marquee signs. Many are bawdy, some are political and others are just plain witty. Readers learn that the co-author, Benjamin (“The Sign Guy”) Jackson who works as a Penthouse bartender, is also the one who comes up with the jokes and messages. Jackson tells how he finds his ideas and shares some of his personal favourite signs from the past—many of which have been shared millions of times online.
“The whole thing started with me trying to make my friends at work laugh,” says Jackson, later adding, “We just wanted to have some fun and get some notice and promo for the club.”
“It’s okay if people don’t know my name, or just call me ‘The Sign Guy.’ In the early days, on Reddit, they referred to me as ‘The Marquee Boy.’ I just like making the city laugh through that sign—and that’s the point in the end. The sign speaks for itself!”
Cultural historian, Aaron Chapman, says the Penthouse signs have given attention to Vancouver and its local culture as well as the nightclub. “Vancouver doesn’t enter the national or global realm of pop culture too often,” says Chapman. “Our media is often overshadowed by images from New York or Toronto. We might see movies and TV shows where we recognize our own city street—but Vancouver never plays itself. When we see another of Ben’s outrageous or funny signs, online or in the news, we’re reminded that the sign is one of us. It’s from Vancouver, and from Seymour Street. It’s like spotting the face of a friend we know in a crowd of people. That’s the Penthouse marquee.”
9781772142501
Articles: 2 Articles for this author
Liquor, Lust and the Law
Publisher's Promo (2012)
ABOUT LIQUOR, LUST, AND THE LAW:
Few Vancouver nightspots evoke such a fabled history as the Penthouse Nightclub. The after-hours watering hole for the famous and infamous, the Penthouse was opened in 1947 by brothers Joe, Ross, Mickey, and Jimmy Filippone and soon became the place to see and be seen in Vancouver in the 1950s and '60s. Acts like Sammy Davis Jr, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington regularly performed on the Penthouse stage, and the venue was one of the few in town not only to welcome African American entertainers, but to house them as well, at a time when Vancouver hotels refused to. Audiences often included visiting stars such as Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, and many others.
In the 1970s, the Penthouse became infamous for its exotic dancers--three of whom famously streaked across the ice at a Vancouver Canucks game at the Pacific Coliseum in 1974--resulting in a colourful, lurid history involving vice squads, politicians, judges, and con men, and culminating in the murder of Joe Philliponi, known as the "Godfather of Seymour Street," in 1983. However, through decades of evolving social mores and changing cultural styles in a city constantly trying to reinvent itself, the Penthouse has always survived, a testament to its storied history and the fortitude of the Filippone family that still owns it.
This first-ever book on the Penthouse includes recently unearthed photographs, police documents, and untold stories, kept under wraps over the course of sixty-plus years--until now. It is also the story of an immigrant Italian family starting a new life in a new country, and the changing times and attitudes of a port city coming of age.
Rife with nostalgia and just a hint of scandal, Liquor, Lust, and the Law reveals a glamorous and slightly naughty view of historic Vancouver after dark.
Russworm on Last Gang in Town
Review (2016)
REVIEW:
The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. the Clark Park Gang
by Aaron Chapman
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016. $24.95 / ISBN: 9781551526713
Reviewed by Lanni Russwurm
*
In The Last Gang in Town, Aaron Chapman tells the story of the Clark Park Gang, named after their hangout in Clark Park at East 14th Avenue and Commercial Drive in East Vancouver. Reviewer Lanni Russwurm traces the background and early years of the "Clark Parkers"; in the 1960s, determines their part in the Rolling Stones Riot on June 3, 1972, when dozens of Vancouver Police were injured, and discloses the secret and comprehensive undercover response to the gang by the VPD.
*
Aaron Chapman's latest foray into Vancouver's history, The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. the Clark Park Gang, deals with juvenile delinquents and the police who chased them nearly half a century ago.
The backdrop of Vancouver in the late 1960s and early 70s is almost as interesting as the main subject in that it shows us a city that has practically ceased to exist. Back then, this was a low-rise, working class town. The now-ubiquitous Vancouver Special house type hadn't yet taken over like an invasive species, and even regular people could afford real estate, at least east of Main Street.
For some folks, like the mayor at the time, most of the city's problems could be blamed on the draft-dodging, grass-smoking hippies who colonized Kitsilano, hawked copies of the Georgia Straight newspaper in Gastown, and loitered on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
But Chapman isn't concerned about the exotic hippie counterculture. Most of the teens who populated the Clark Park Gang had long hair, but would be better classified as greasers or rockers: working class, dyed-in-the-wool East Vancouverites, usually clad in mackinaw jackets and Dayton boots. To overcome boredom and avoid dysfunctional home environments, they spent their time in the park, drinking, fighting, and engaging in various other shenanigans of often dubious legality.
Several neighbourhoods boasted their own park-based youth gangs, but by the turn of the 1970s, the Clark Parkers had reached the apex of park gang infamy.
The book begins with the pre-Expo 86 social landscape of Vancouver, followed by a chapter on the Juvenile Detention Home, where wayward teenagers could network and school each other in criminality. Chapman then briefly surveys the evolution of Vancouver's mid-century youth gangs preceding the park gang era, such as the zoot suiters of the 1940s and the 1950s gangs with names like the Alma Dukes.
In the chapter entitled "The Good Old Bad Old Days,"; we are treated to the quirky history of Clark Park itself before meeting the hooligans who made it their headquarters in the 60s.
The story really gets going in the aftermath of the 1972 Rolling Stones riot, one of several riots detailed in the book. Its origins appear to lie with a Marxist-Leninist group called the Youngbloods that tried to ally with the Clark Park Gang to storm the gates and/or fight the cops.
The Clark Parkers were invited to the Youngbloods' activist house where they were plied with beer and weed, but the apolitical gangsters weren't enticed by the revolutionary rhetoric enough to stick around once the refreshments ran out.
Unfortunately, no surviving Youngbloods or activists from the (apparently) affiliated Georgia Grape newspaper (founded by former Georgia Straight radicals) were tapped to clarify (or obfuscate) what role the Youngbloods actually played in the riot.
Considering that the police blamed the Clark Park Gang for orchestrating the riot and essentially used it to justify starting their own gang war with them, it's not an unsubstantial omission.
The police response to the riot was to ramp up their efforts against the Clark Parkers. Burly cops with undercover experience were recruited to a new, dedicated "Heavy Squad,"; or H-Squad. Dressed in typical East Vancouver attire, H-Squad members threatened, harassed, and occasionally assaulted Clark Parkers.
Surprisingly, as Chapman reveals, H-Squad was formed with the blessing of the provincial Attorney General. We can only hope that this police response illustrates what a different world Vancouver was than the city we know today. Indeed, Chapman notes that one factor leading to the demise of H-Squad was a dramatic shift in the local political culture when progressive social democratic parties ousted old school conservatives from power both municipally and provincially in 1972.
The heat from H-Squad didn't scare the Clark Parkers straight, as perhaps was intended, but it did bring some blowback from neighbourhood parents who were tired of their offspring being profiled and harassed, as well as activists who used their access to the Georgia Grape to publicize the bullyboy police tactics.
Of course, other residents were elated that something was being done to combat the petty crime, noise, and violence that was now associated with Clark Park.
The story climaxes with the fatal shooting by police of a 17-year-old Clark Parker, followed by a legal drama that demonstrates the polarization of public opinion on the issues raised by the Clark Park Gang saga. The author follows the court in concluding that the shooting was accidental, but to his credit lays out the evidence (and lack thereof) so that readers can draw their own conclusions.
The book's greatest strength is the wealth of primary source material used to tell the tale, especially extensive interviews with both police and Clark Parkers. Having researched this topic before, I can attest that the available documentary record of the Clark Park Gang has increased exponentially with the publication of The Last Gang. Declassified police files and photos of the Clark Park Gang and H-Squad further round out this history to make it more accessible to the reader.
Chapman does a fine job of weaving the extensive but sometimes inconsistent and contradictory testimonials of aging baby boomers recalling events from over four decades ago into a coherent and compelling narrative.
Readers looking for an entertaining true crime story as well as those seeking a deeper historical meaning or a better understanding of their city alike will find The Last Gang a worthwhile and enjoyable read.
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Lani Russwurm researches and writes about Vancouver history for his Past Tense Vancouver blog. He is the author of Vancouver Was Awesome: A Curious Pictorial History (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013) and has contributed to numerous local publications and history projects, including Vancouver
Confidential (Anvil Press, 2014).
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