Thirty years ago today, I was the lucky Vancouver Sun reporter sent out to Surrey to ride the Skytrain downtown at the end of the Stanley Cup final. It didn’t matter who won (we lost 3-2 to the New York Rangers) everyone it seems except police, knew that there was going to be a riot. Hockey was just the excuse.
Game over:
The final whistle sounded just before 8:00 p.m. and fans poured out of pubs, houses and apartment buildings and onto the Surrey Central Skytrain station. They carried open bottles of beer, tequila and whisky. A lone security guard hunkered down in the front, trying to look inconspicuous. I tried to hide the mobile phone I was given to call in my reports. It was the size of a brick and almost as heavy.
At Granville Street, fans stream out of the station and make their way to Robson Street. They yell and swear and shove each other into the windows of the Bay, cheering as glass breaks.
By 10:00 p.m. I’m one of about 70,000 people on the streets of downtown Vancouver. A VPD officer yells: “Watch yourself, we’ve been called off. They’ve sent for the riot police.”
Robson and Thurlow:
The street signs have been torn off on all four corners at Robson and Thurlow, and the glass logo of Starbucks is smashed. A man trying to walk across bus trolley wires falls to the street and is seriously injured. Crowds rock the ambulance that retrieve him.
The riot squad moves in. They’re wearing helmets and beating their batons against their shields and are way more terrifying than the crowd. They don’t seem to have a plan but start firing tear gas canisters. A kid who is trying to find a way out is pepper sprayed in the face by an officer. The rest of us, some VPD cops included, are trapped in the middle, eyes stinging, throats burning with no where to go.
crowd turns violent
Looters spread out. They break shop windows with rocks, sticks and beer bottles.
A few of us take refuge from the tear gas and wash out our eyes in the Hotel Vancouver. Shocked tourists stare out from the lobby.
One of the strangest sights is a group of young people dragging headless department store mannequins down West Georgia Street.
At some point during the night, I see VPD officer Anne Drennan interviewed on national television. She’s telling the reporter that everything is under control, while mascara runs down her face from the tear gas and shop windows break behind her.
At midnight, the riot police are still throwing tear gas at those of us left downtown. There is no transit and the streets are covered in broken glass and garbage.
I file one last dispatch and make my way home. The riot costs the city $1.1 million. One hundred and fifty people are charged.
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11 comments on “The Stanley Cup Riot (1994)”
The same type of goons did the same in 2011. Win or lose there was going to be a riot and unfortunately it started with those who travelled in from the burbs just like 1994.
I was on Robson Street following the Canucks game 6 win. A much different, family oriented, jubilant and positive vibe. The following day I was on a downtown bus listening to two young men discuss which stores they wanted to loot following Game 7.
I was again on Robson Street following game 7 and it was incredibly tense and so very different. I watched as a young man rolled a flaming device into the crowd. I confronted him and he scattered only to return moments later with 2 friends in tow. I found the closest policeman and tried to tell him what I had just witnessed. He seemed scared silly and couldn’t focus on my words. Not long after I realized that the riot squad were on their way in and I wanted no part of that and quickly headed towards Stanley Park and did an end run around them and made my way home to Kitsilano. I woke up deeply ashamed of my city, but it really was just a small number of opportunistic hooligans.
My son was 16. His friends were calling him, asking what size jeans, etc. he wore. My son was 6’4″ – a big guy. I looked at him and told him there was no way he was going down there. Everyone knew there was going to be trouble, regardless of the outcome of the game. For once, he listened to me!
Yeah I remember the Stanley Cup riots of both 1994 and 2011. The 1994 incident was small being isolated to around Robson and Thurlow, compared to 2011 where rioters vandlized and looted shops and burned cars as all over downtown.
In 2011 my son and his friend were going downtown to an early movie. I knew what was going to happen if we did not win the hockey game. I told him that when they headed back home and saw any disturbance to get on whatever bus was coming by and get out of the downtown core. They walked down to catch their bus and looked down a street and saw smoke and police lights. They got on the 1st bus that came by and it took what felt like hours to get out of the DT core. He thanked me when he got home. The next day he saw a fellow from his school front and centre on the front page. He was so relieved that he listened to me.
Yes, that is why we cant have nice things in our city. It is usually outsiders, the have nots and never wills who cause the most problems. I think the number of troublemakers was a little higher in 2011.
Complete lunatics. And I’ve never forgiven the Canucks for losing as both riots were on or just before my birthday. I haven’t liked hockey since these riots. I cannot understand lunatics.
Can’t believe it has been 30 years. Those are not true hockey fans.
Losing the hockey game was always the excuse to go ballistic but they sure looked to us like a bunch of hockey fan sore losers with the emphasis on “loser.” Shame.
Our family had just moved here and I saw the 1966 Grey Cup riots downtown after the evening parade ended. Beer bottles were tossed from hotel windows and there was a paddy wagon shuttle service. The Sea Festival eventually ended due to unruly crowds. As a city bus driver I drove through the aftermath of the Gastown Riots. I rode my bike out to the Coliseum and heard the Rolling Stones perform from outside, and then watched mobs at Renfrew and Hastings throw Molotov cocktails at cars. The police were all at the Coliseum.
So where was I in 1994 on that night? In Toronto in Massey Hall at a concert celebrating 100 years to the day that it opened. Gordon Lightfoot was there.
On the evening of June 15, 1994 I rolled into a little place called 40 Mile Flats in the middle of nowhere on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway (37). It was Day 32 of a two month bicycle traverse of southern Alaska, Yukon and the length of British Columbia.
I’d spent the previous evening in Dease Lake, at the home of a local teacher, watching that Stanley Cup game. That lodging had been arranged by a teacher from the Tahltan School who I’d met in remote Telegraph Creek. I was happy to have a break from my tiny one person tent, so I played along, though I’m not a hockey fan.
40 Mile consisted of a couple of buildings, one housing a Café. It had been a long, 75Km day climbing out of the Stikine River Canyon so I elected to pitch my tent there and treat myself to a restaurant meal (a break from endless instant noodles — though I did choose the Spaghetti Bolognese from the menu).
In a corner, across the spartan room, there was a colour TV dialled in to the Vancouver evening news (via satellite, I presume). As I recorded in my journal, the scene on the TV, from the perspective of this remote and quiet part of BC was surreal.
“….the streets of Vancouver convulse in a riot of looting and mayhem. The video images are a surreal record of the previous evening’s mass-hysteria, as hockey hooligans—sore losers all—had poured out of the stadium to throw a public tantrum. Yet, the concerns of the south and the world outside seem far away from here, focused as I am on the ever-contracting world of this journey.”
Of course, as others note, there was a reprise of this madness in 2011.
I remain indifferent to, not so much the game, but the culture of hockey which seems to me to have violence embedded within it.