West Coast Central Club Archives

Multiplexes will soon replace single family homes all over Vancouver. How many stories will be erased from our history?

I was reading an article in the Vancouver Sun yesterday called “Multiplexes may be coming to your neighbourhood soon.” It’s City Hall’s way of densifying our neighbourhoods, replacing those entitled single family homes with up to six strata homes on a single lot.

2667 Pender Street — Vancouver Sun, January 6, 2024

2667 East Pender Street:

The article is illustrated with two pictures – the five-unit development proposed for an east Pender Street house in the Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood “made possible through the city’s ‘missing middle’ zoning,” and the little house that it replaces.

And, then I realized, hey I know this house.

Louise Ricci at 2667 East Pender Street. Eve Lazarus photo, 2014

The new project, says the article, would almost double the livable square footage, and the guy who now owns the property expects to get $1.65 million each for the two units in the front of the building and another $900,000 each for the ground level two-bedroom units. It doesn’t say what the new owners will pay for the laneway house at the back, or the monthly strata fees. But let’s assume fees will be hefty, and clearly at these prices, we’re not talking about first-time, average wage-earning home buyers.

Louise Ricci sitting on her dad’s knee, ca 1932 at 2667 East Pender Street. From Sensational Vancouver

Detective Joe Ricci:

So, let’s take a minute to look at the diminishing heritage house stock that these multiplexes will replace. The house in the article was built by Vancouver Police Detective Joe Ricci in 1922. Joe immigrated to Canada from Falvaterra, Italy in 1906, and six years later, he was the first Italian to join the Vancouver Police Department.

Joe Ricci Vancouver Police Detective — Joe Ricci and daughters 1930s, from Sensational Vancouver

Joe raised his two daughters in this house, and in 2014 when I took photos for my book Sensational Vancouver, his daughter Louise still lived there. I know because I sat with her in their kitchen going through boxes and boxes of newspaper clippings and photos about her Dad. Louise showed me the back porch where Chinese gangsters broke into Joe’s house during the Tong Wars of the 1920s, and threw chicken blood all over the cupboards. It was a warning for Joe to stay away.

West Coast Central Club:

Joe was on duty March 20, 1917, the night that Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan was killed in a shootout in Strathcona. He worked on the dry squad, the drug squad, and later, the Morality Squad. He left the force and founded the West Coast Central Club right next to the old police station on Main Street. Louise worked at the club and remembers serving newspaper reporters like Jack Wasserman and Jack Webster. “Webster used to sit beside the planters so nobody would see him. I’d serve him screwdrivers,” Louise told me. She remembered Officer Bernie “Whistling” Smith as well as crime boss Joe Celona and Judge Les Bewley.

That’s just one house’s story. I wonder how many more we’ll be erasing in the coming years.

2667 East Pender Street

One of the best parts about messing around with history, especially criminal history, is digging up connections. Angelo Branca appears as a Canadian middleweight boxing champion in the 1930s, and as the scrappy East End (Strathcona) lawyer and defender of madams and bookies in At Home with History.

In Sensational Vancouver, he is defence attorney to notorious brothel owner Joe Celona during the Tupper Royal Commission into police corruption. In another chapter, he pops up as a patron of former VPD detective Joe Ricci’s West Coast Central Club, and in another, he is boss and close friend to Tosca Trasolini a pilot and member of the Flying Seven, Canada’s first all-female aviator club.

In Blood, Sweat, and Fear, Branca swaps sides in 1935 and defends 17 VPD officers suspended for corruption. Every one of them got their job back. Ten years later he is defending a soldier accused of murdering a young woman in English Bay in 1945. It’s one of the few cases he loses in his career.

During his career, Branca defended 63 people on murder charges, and only one, Domenico Nassa, received the death penalty in 1928. Branca told his biographer that he had no quibble with that decision, but he didn’t think the soldier deserved to hang, and he fought the verdict all the way to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. He often took on pro bono cases.

Angelo Branca with client Joe Celona. Province photo, 1955.

Branca was born in 1903 and grew up at 343 Prior Street with parents Teresa and Filippo, two brothers John and Joseph and sister Anne. Filippo ran the grocery store on Main Street and he and Peter Tosi and Sam Minichiello were the three biggest importers of California grapes in the area.

West Coast Central Club, Main Street, ca.1950. Joe Ricci far left. Photo courtesy Louise Ricci

My favourite story comes from Ray Culos whose grandfather was Sam Minichiello, and says that the joke in the neighbourhood was that wine was a family affair. Filippo would sell the grapes to the bootleggers, his son John, a detective with the dry-squad would arrest them, and his other son, Angelo, would get them off in court.

The Canadian Lawyer magazine wrote that Branca was the most famous criminal defense lawyer in Canada’s history. In 1963, he became a Supreme Court judge. Branca died in 1984.

To read more about his remarkable life, check out:

Vincent Moore’s book: Gladiator of the Courts, Douglas and McIntyre, 1981

Ray Culos’s website

The House that Joe Built

2667 East Pender Street:

Detective Joe Ricci:

West Coast Central Club:

Related:

Italian Heritage Month – meet the East End’s Angelo Branca

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2667 East Pender Street:

Detective Joe Ricci:

West Coast Central Club:

Related:

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