The Lincoln Club

The Avenue Theatre, 11 June 1935. 102 East Georgia, just west of Main Street and home of the Lincoln Club, is the brick building right behind the theatre and in front of the Gasometer tower. City of Vancouver Archives #447-395

The Lincoln Club was an underground black social club in Vancouver in the late 1910s and early 1920s. It was located at 102 East Georgia Street, just west of Main, which means it was boxed in by the Avenue Theatre on the east and the original Georgia Viaduct on the north, and so was only accessible from below the viaduct and from the alley. During its six-year existence, it took on the role of the city’s earlier railway porters’ clubs as a social hub for Vancouver’s small black community and for performers passing through town on the vaudeville circuits.

The building that housed the Lincoln Club replaced an old horse stable, and first shows up as Central Rooms in 1911. It was a brick building with nineteen rooms, each equipped with a service bell, hot and cold running water, and steam-heat. It was one of the many rooming houses, or Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels, built during the 1908—1913 boom, but was probably fancier than most.

Shore Street

1913 Fire insurance map showing 102 East Georgia in red. City of Vancouver Archives

The names of the building’s neighbours listed in the 1911 city directory hint at the nature of the block when it was built: Andrea Morton, Blanche Douglas, Minnie Clayton, Nellie St Clair, Dolly Darlington, Alice Bernard, Blanche Lewis, Ollie Gilbert, Cleo Devere, Jewel Hall, and Kitty Clark. All women, and many with names that sound like hookers from an old west bordello.

Before WWI, red light districts were tolerated in Vancouver based on the idea that prostitution was inevitable, and so concentrating it in one area made it easier to police and minimized the impact of the “social evil” on the rest of the city. The 100 block of Harris Street (as East Georgia was known before the viaduct was built) became a red light district after the sex trade was chased out of Dupont Street and Shanghai and Canton alleys because a train station went in where International Village mall now stands. To allow the more “respectable” denizens of Harris Street east of Main to disassociate from these “undesirables,” the City renamed the 100 block “Shore Street” in 1908, although that name never caught on in popular usage.

Lee Jones was an American “sporting girl” arrested as a “keeper of a disorderly house” for turning tricks in her room above the Utopian Club, a brothel at 169 Harris [Shore] Street on 22 July 1913. City of Vancouver Archives, VPD series #S202, Loc. 37-C-9

Given this context, it was most likely a madam who commissioned the construction of 102 East Georgia Street. Unfortunately for her, a move to push the red light district from Shore Street to Alexander (chosen because few whites lived there) began not long after the building was completed. The only extant photos I could find of the Lincoln Club building show just the top part and were taken from a distance, but the few purpose-built brothels that have survived as low-income housing on Alexander Street give us an idea of how the building likely differed from similar structures.

A rare view of the brothels on the north side of Shore Street, shortly after the relocation of the “restricted district” to Alexander Street and during construction of the original Georgia Viaduct. CVA #LGN 1188 (cropped)

The Alexander Street brothels are a little more flamboyant than typical SROs, with more decorative features and custom flourishes designed to lure clientele and reflect the owner’s brand. They also differ in that the ground floors were not designed to be leased out as retail space, but rather as common areas that typically included a dining room, bar, and lounge with a piano for entertainment. Although much more modest in scale, Shore and Alexander streets were the closest thing Vancouver had to New Orleans’ famous red light district, Storyville, which happened to be shut down the year the Lincoln Club opened.

Brothels in the red light district era often had musicians on staff, such as William Morrison, the piano player at Mary Scott’s house at 666 Alexander Street. Morrison’s piano playing cost him a 30 day jail sentence as a “frequenter of a house of ill fame” during a 1913 crackdown. City of Vancouver Archives, VPD series #S202, Loc. 37-C-9

Prostitution continued on Shore Street at least until 1913 and construction of the first Georgia Viaduct began the same year. With the lucrative sex trade moving away and the viaduct practically dropped on the Lincoln Club building’s front doorstep, the value of the property plummeted. It was listed for rent in January on “easy terms,” and then for sale in March. “Will sell cheap,” says the ad.

In 1916, 102 East Georgia was owned by a miner named Charles Alexander who spent $1000 on a brick extension to the building. The first time the name “Lincoln Club” appears is when the phone line was installed in 1917. There’s no evidence of prostitution at the club, but there is for that other Storyville institution: jazz. The same year that the Lincoln opened, alcohol prohibition came into effect and kicked off Vancouver’s “jazz age.”

Oscar Holden

Oscar Holden (1887-1969). From the Grace Holden collection, via BlackPast.org

The most notable resident of 102 East Georgia was Oscar Holden, the band leader at the Patricia Cabaret, the hottest jazz venue in town at the time. By all accounts, Holden was a very skilled and talented musician, but his role in Vancouver seems to have been unfairly overshadowed and diminished by Jelly Roll Morton, one of the original jazz pioneers to come out of Storyville. In recalling his own time in Vancouver, Morton claimed to have been the bandleader at the Patricia, but all the extant evidence puts Holden in that role. In an interview with Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll pays Holden a backhanded compliment, saying he “was no hot man, but played plenty of straight clarinet.”

Oscar Holden left Vancouver for Seattle in the early 1920s and is remembered very differently there, as a pioneer and the patriarch of that city’s much larger and more viable hot jazz scene on Jackson Street. “Anything you set before him, he’s gone!” recalled a fellow Seattle musician. “He had a wonderful musical education. He was a great, great performer.” Indeed, Vancouver’s jazz history may have taken quite a different path had Holden not moved back to the States.

Oscar Holden’s business card. From the Grace Holden collection, via DoctorJazz.co.uk

A major difference between Oscar Holden and Jelly Roll Morton is that Holden was looking to settle down in one place and raise a family. He came north from Tennessee to spare his children the grotesque racism he knew in the Jim Crow south. Jelly Roll, on the other hand, travelled incessantly and never settled down or raised a family. Aside from his musical abilities, one of Morton’s great talents was his gift for self-promotion and telling great stories in which he was the central figure. In his version of jazz age Vancouver, the Patricia Cabaret thrived under his musical stewardship and wilted at the moment of his departure, claims that are contradicted by all the other evidence. Jelly Roll also stands alone in crediting himself as the inventor of jazz.

Oscar Holden’s “Hoosier drummer,” William Hoy, also lived above the Lincoln Club. It’s unimaginable that they and other performers from the Patricia didn’t stop by the Lincoln after hours to jam, dance, gamble, and drink into the night, including George Paris, Ada Bricktop Smith, and Jelly Roll Morton, not to mention black entertainers passing through town, such as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

This is the only image I found of 102 East Georgia while the Lincoln Club was still operating. Detail from a WJ Moore panorama taken from the Sun Tower, June 1921. City of Vancouver Archives #PAN N221

The Lincoln Club in the Press

The Lincoln Club was run by Reg Dotson, a black man born in Missouri. Dotson frequently played host to entertainers passing through town, according to reports in the Chicago Defender, an important African American newspaper in the post-WWI period. The comedy duo Green and Pugh noted in a letter to the paper that “Reginald Dotson, who owns the finest club in Vancouver, was waiting at the pier for us in his big car, and that is the way we have been treated since leaving Chicago.” Tom Clark, described by the Defender as “well known to members of the profession,” reported in 1919 that he was now living in Vancouver and that mail could reach him at 102 East Georgia. A month later, a correspondent living at 940 Main Street, noted that “Tom Clark has a neat little cafe.” L Louis Johnson wrote in and said that while visiting Vancouver in 1921, “we dined with Reggy [Dotson] at his palatial home and Oh, such a meal.” Joe Sheftell, the manager of a vaudeville act called the Creole Fashion Revue, said that “Reggie Dotson gave a banquet last night and we had everything from soup to nuts.” In 1922, ET Rogers, who worked at the Patricia Cabaret and lived at 804 Main Street, informed the Defender that “Vancouver is still on the map … The Lincoln Club is still headquarters. It is the best club on the coast.” Another 1922 Defender report noted that the “Lincoln Club gave its annual breakfast dance Easter Sunday.”

Headline in the Vancouver Daily World, 24 December 1919

Vancouver’s (white) press, meanwhile, painted a picture of the Lincoln Club as nothing more than a disorderly house. The first of only two incidents that earned Dotson and his club coverage in the local papers was a police raid in December 1919. “Among the colored members four white girls were found,” reported the World. Dotson was fined $50 plus costs for keeping a gaming house and $300 for “having liquor illegally in possession” under the Prohibition Act. Thirty-nine “inmates” found there were each fined $15 plus costs. We can only imagine how the presence of white women influenced the case.

The Extortion Case

The second newsworthy incident at the Lincoln Club took place in the spring of 1923 when a man named George McLeod came in claiming to be the chief inspector of the BC Liquor Control Board. According to Reg Dotson, McLeod told him that the unsealed liquor that had previously been confiscated from the club meant that Dotson was facing a $100 fine. “We don’t like to prosecute these cases,” McLeod said, “because the city gets all the money and we do all the work. The liquor board or government don’t get the fines.” McLeod gave Dotson the option of handing over $50 cash to ensure the matter would be dropped. Dotson was skeptical that McLeod was who he claimed to be and wasn’t too keen on being shaken down. He told McLeod to come back at 8 pm and in the meantime spoke with Inspector Charles Tuley of the Vancouver Police Department.

Charles Tuley was the Vancouver Police Inspector who coordinated the police sting operation at the Lincoln Club that snared George McLeod, a provincial liquor inspector. McLeod attempted to extort $50 from Reg Dotson in 1923. Photo by AJ Selset, 1914 or 1915, CVA #A-30-244

Dotson assisted the police in the sting that caught McLeod. The two men met downtown in Dotson’s car and spoke again on the phone (with the police listening in) to discuss the payoff. Dotson stalled by pressing McLeod for assurances that he wouldn’t be fined anyway after handing over the cash. The final meeting was at Dotson’s “palatial home” at 102 East Georgia. Dotson answered the door in his pajamas to appear like he had just woken up. McLeod came in to complete the transaction, unaware that police were hiding in an adjacent room listening to the conversation and peeping through a keyhole. Dotson handed McLeod $50 in marked bills supplied by the police. Inspectors Tuley and Sutherland and Detective Thompson burst out and arrested McLeod. When told at the police station that he “had been a fool,” McLeod replied: “I know. I wish I hadn’t. Keep this quiet and I will quit my job and leave the country,” according to Tuley’s testimony.

The case went to court in the fall of 1923. McLeod’s defense was simple. Rather than refuting the testimony of Dotson and the police, he claimed that he did what he did to find out which clubs were paying off the police to look the other way. Dotson took the stand, followed by Tuley and Thompson, who corroborated his version of events. McLeod’s explanation won the day and he was acquitted.

Looking east toward Main Street during construction of the first Georgia Viaduct around 1914. The large building is the rear of the Avenue Theatre and just below it is the top of 102 East Georgia Street. City of Vancouver Archives #LGN 1188 (cropped)

The papers don’t specify what made McLeod’s story more compelling than that of his accusers. It may have been simply the widespread belief at the time that the city police force was thoroughly corrupt. When asked in court if he had heard of payoffs being made to the police, Inspector Tuley replied: “to hear some people, every club in the city is paying for police protection.” The verdict may also have been influenced by the heightened anti-black racism in the city that followed the killing of a Victoria Cross-decorated police officer by a black man the previous fall. No doubt the cooperation between a black club owner and the police in a sting operation would have raised suspicions in many people’s minds in 1923.

The defense brought in two of McLeod’s underlings from the Liquor Control Board. One said that McLeod had mentioned his plan to entrap Dotson, but he didn’t question it because he “figured McLeod knew more about the business than he did.” Another said that part of his job was to report on the “beer club situation,” and that “the Lincoln Club was one of the worst in the city and was frequented by colored men and white girls, and he understood Mr McLeod was trying to get evidence.” The paper didn’t say what relevance the racial makeup of Lincoln Club patrons had to the case.

Before a verdict was reached, a “lady juror” was rebuked by the judge for remarking that she hoped McLeod got off because it looked like “a frame-up” to her, but her reasoning wasn’t reported. One of the officers “admitted under cross-examination that the police had been compelled to adopt certain methods, which he did not approve of, to secure convictions under the Liquor Act, and that in some instances ‘informers’ used had turned out to be rotters.”

McLeod’s lawyer grilled Dotson about the club, bringing up its history of alleged liquor violations. Dotson said that he shut the club down in October of 1922 and that since then the space was being used by black railway porters. When asked if it was operating as an illegal gambling den, he refused to answer on the grounds that he would not incriminate himself.

Conclusions

BC Hydro’s Murrin Substation, at the southwest corner of Main and East Georgia streets, under construction in 1946. This is the building that still occupies the old Avenue Theatre site on Main at East Georgia Street. If you click to enlarge the image you can see that the Lincoln Club building has been replaced with what appears to be storage shacks between the two billboards. Photo by Don Coltman, CVA #586-4792

There is very little documentation of the Lincoln Club, but enough to confidently draw some conclusions about its significance. The club was popular, given the police attention it received and its six year existence. Reg Dotson’s “big car” and his ability to routinely host and impress entertainers passing through town tell us that he was more than just eking out a living from the club. Certainly he was financially far better off than if he had worked as a sleeping car porter, janitor, or the handful of other legitimate occupations open to black men at the time.

The unexplained mentions of “white girls” in newspaper reports almost certainly were intended to add to the club’s notoriety by adding race-mixing to the other so-called vices committed at the Lincoln Club. But it also tells us that the social scene there was not racially insular despite being explicitly a black club. The annual Easter Sunday breakfast dance suggests that it had a community purpose beyond just drinking and gambling. And from the various performers that lived above or passed through the club we can reasonably assume that a vibrant musical subculture made itself at home there, specifically, jazz, right at the moment when the genre was beginning to come into its own.

Vancouver’s black population was tiny at the time, but in another sense, the black culture at the Lincoln Club was indistinct from the large and sophisticated black cultural network that traversed the continent on the railway lines and entertainment circuits. In subsequent decades, the culture being incubated in thousands of small venues like the Lincoln Club would slowly become woven into mainstream popular culture, in Vancouver and around the globe.

102 East Georgia was listed as “vacant” in the 1925 directory. Reg Dotson died ten years later.

The former Shore Street strip and the only remnant of the original Georgia Viaduct, as seen in 2005. This site is currently being used as a construction staging ground for condos going up on Main Street. The Lincoln Club site is off-frame on the left, now part of the substation.

Public Enemy No. 1

A rare, previously unpublished early photo of Joe Celona in the 1920s or '30s, courtesy Theresa Teppema.

Giuseppe Fiorenza, better known as Joe Celona, came to Canada from Italy via New York City in 1913, and landed in Vancouver six years later. From 1919 to 1921, he lived and ran a disorderly house at 272 Union, and operated a store on the ground floor. This was where he was first “pinched” by the police in 1923. He sold this building in 1928, but by then owned several other East End properties that operated as bawdy houses, including 204 and 244 East Hastings and 210 Keefer Street. Next door at 600 Main Street, Celona ran his legitimate business, a cigar store. By the 1930s, he was living at 4973 Angus Drive in upscale Shaughnessy.

One of Celona’s regular customers at the cigar store was Mayor LD Taylor. The extent of their relationship may never be known for sure, but allegations of corruption dogged Taylor for much of his time in office. Mayor Taylor argued that police energy and resources should be focused on serious crimes, not the vice crime that pre-occupied moral reformers. He didn’t believe it was realistic or desirable to try and run a “Sunday School town,” especially in a seaport like Vancouver. To Taylor’s critics, he was soft on crime and allowed commercialized vice to flourish in Vancouver, which probably meant he was being paid off.

The F. Morgan Building at 244 East Hastings was one of Joe Celona's disorderly houses in the 1920s. Others were on Union near Hogan's Alley, and at Keefer and Main, where the HSBC bank is today.

The issue of corruption was aired in 1928 in an exhaustive police inquiry conducted by RS Lennie. Countless criminals, police, and politicians testified at the inquiry, but Lennie found nothing that conclusively proved Taylor’s City Hall or the police department had been corrupted by the likes of Joe Celona, though Taylor was a regular customer at Celona’s cigar store. What the inquiry did accomplish was to help ensure LD Taylor wouldn’t be re-elected in the next civic election; undermine public confidence in the police; and firmly plant the anti-vice and anti-Celona bug in the mind of the inquiry’s lead attorney, Gerry McGeer.

LD Taylor was out of office for one term, but managed to get re-elected as the city’s mayor the following year. Taylor won more mayoral elections than anyone before or since, in part because the right-of-centre vote was typically split at election time. So in 1934, Vancouver’s business elite came together and formulated a plan to get LD Taylor out of office. The crux of their scheme was to unite the anti-Taylor vote behind a single candidate and they recruited Gerry McGeer as their man. Picking up where he left off in the Lennie inquiry, McGeer ran an aggressive “war on crime” campaign and targeted Joe Celona specifically. “We’re going to Barcelona,” was one of his favourite campaign quips. McGeer rolled into City Hall with a huge landslide.

The Maple Hotel (now the Washington) was a disorderly house operated by Joe Celona in the 1930s.

Chief Constable John Cameron was another target in the war on crime. Cameron was charged with conspiring with Celona “to effect a public mischief by perverting the course of justice.” Colonel W. W. Foster had replaced Cameron as chief constable and led the investigation, which included the Vancouver Police Department’s first use of a wiretap. From their listening post set up in the Carter-Cotton Building, detectives monitored Joe Celona’s telephone and heard conversations between Celona and police officers. Colonel Foster claimed they were advising Celona on how he could avoid conviction, but the sound quality of the recording was so bad that it was excluded as evidence.

The only other evidence against John Cameron was that he partied with Joe Celona on several occasions, at Cameron’s ranch, at Celona’s house, and on the police boat on a cruise in Howe Sound. The police detectives who testified all agreed that it was necessary to occasionally mix with criminals to gather information, and in lieu of any evidence of an agreement or monetary gain, the case of a conspiracy between Celona and the chief fell apart, and Cameron was acquitted.

Celona wasn’t so lucky. He was charged with procuring girls for prostitution and running a disorderly house at the Maple Hotel on Hastings Street. What made the case especially repugnant to prosecutor Dugald Donaghy was that it was Chinese men frequenting the Maple. “There are no words in the English language to describe the abhorrence of [white girls] being procured exclusively for the yellow men from China,” Donaghy told the court. “That these girls should be submitted to crawling yellow beasts of the type frequenting such dives.”

The top floor of 373 East Hastings was Joe Celona's bootlegging joint in the 1950s.

Celona was sentenced to 22 years in prison, but an appeal reduced it to 11 years. With good behaviour, he was paroled and back on the streets in five, but his freedom didn’t last long. A public outcry and a campaign led by Mayor Lyle Telford ended with Celona being re-arrested and returned to the BC Penitentiary in New Westminster to serve the remainder of his sentence. Some people suspected Celona’s political connections got him out early, even though there was nothing unusual about his case under the ticket-of-leave system in place at the time. One factor that helped get Celona back in prison – besides his nefarious reputation – was that he was Italian and it was 1940. Some felt he should have been deported to fascist Italy.

When Celona got out the second time in 1943, he turned his attention to bootlegging and set up shop on the second floor of 373 East Hastings. He had run-ins with the law and paid a couple hefty fines, but managed to stay out of prison.

After this was taken, Joe Celona (left) attacked the photographer and called him a dirty rat. His lawyer, Angelo Branca (right), tried to break the camera. Vancouver Sun, 21 January 1956.

Celona found himself back in the public spotlight during the “Mulligan Affair.” Chief Constable Walter Mulligan had established a police pay-off system for local organized gangsters. The story was broke in 1955 by a Toronto-based tabloid called Flash, and RH Tupper headed up the inquiry. Celona was subpoenaed after police witnesses testified that he seemed to have intimate knowledge of policing affairs, such as who was being transferred and when. Detective Grant said he first learned that he would be moved from the Dry Squad to Morality in a conversation with Celona on the corner of Hastings and Gore. Celona denied this, and said he had never been shaken down by the police or paid them off.

The 1955 inquiry was the biggest Canadian news story of that year, and the press were all over it. Despite being a household name in Vancouver, Celona had so far avoided having his picture in the paper, and he wanted to keep it that way. When a photographer from the Sun snapped his photo, he covered his face with his hat. As soon as it was taken, Celona’s lawyer, Angelo Branca, tried to break the camera and Celona hit the photographer in the head. Celona became less camera shy after that incident.

After the incident with the Vancouver Sun photographer, Joe Celona became less camera-shy. These were all taken during the 1955 Tupper Inquiry into police corruption.

Celona eventually retired from his life of crime, saying “there’s no dough left in bootlegging; all the bawdy houses are closed down and now they stop a man from taking a few honest bets.” His death at St. Paul’s Hospital on 4 March 1958 marked the end of an era.