The city that never stopped raining turned a dry sky to the burning strip club.
It was 2011, the last day of November, and the Penthouse was in flames.
For Danny Filippone, the Seymour St. club was the family trade. His uncle and father ran the place. Filippone’d waited tables in the Steak Loft above the club, back when he was “probably too young even to be in there,” he laughs.
And there he was, 30 years later, racing from Blueridge to Vancouver and wondering if more than six decades of people saying, “just one quick drink and then we’ll go,” was all over.
In Liquor, Lust and The Law, author Aaron Chapman describes 40 firefighters streaming toward the club that morning.
If it was a different club; maybe a little less appealing or a little less historic, 64 years of a family business might’ve been turned to nothing but black smoke on an autumn breeze. But battalion chief Randy Hebenton knew his trade and he had a little inside knowledge to boot, Chapman notes.
“I was, well, let’s put it this way, familiar with that part of the building,” Hebenton says in the book, referring to the open spaces behind the club’s main floor.
The smoke tattooed the walls, ceilings and floors but the walls – unlike one or two customers at closing time – could still stand up on their own.
Once The Penthouse was saved, Filippone set about preserving its history. Sure you can call it a “seedy strip bar on Seymour,” he notes, but you can also call it a Vancouver landmark.
He didn’t feel the gravity of the place when he was a teenager but that changed around Expo 86, Filippone says. That was when tourists got bright eyed over black and white memories of Louis Armstrong slipping into the club’s kitchen to stir the tomato sauce. When they talked in hushed, conspiratorial tones about Errol Flynn, in the bad days when he was more Prince John than Robin Hood, carousing in the club the night before he died.
The club might have run afoul of the ideals of even the most liberal temperance union, but there were ethics behind the bootlegged booze, Filippone notes. In a time when the Hotel Vancouver wouldn’t give a hotel room to a black man, The Penthouse put up Sammy Davis, Jr. for a month.
“The Penthouse was a melting pot,” Filippone says.
The dancers still dance and the neon still throws synthetic sunshine on the street. But under the watchful eyes of Seven Tyrants Theatre company impressarios Daniel Deorksen and David Thomas Newham, the club is opening a theatre and lounge. It’s meant to be a hub for comedy and jazz – with a little sex appeal.
The summer lounge series starts Friday with jazz and swing group the Tim Sars Trio and Two Apple Tobacco.
Stand-up comics Ivan Decker and Sophie Buddle takes the stage Saturday while Sunday is reserved for unplugged music from Jess Me, Celine Chandro, Brian Africa as part of The Goblin Cabaret, hosted by (who else?) Top Hat Goblins.
Reached a few days before the first show, Newham describes the: “moving parts still up in the air,” as he tries to fill what he sees as a void in Vancouver’s comedy and music scenes.
There’s a bunch of talented Vancouver comedians that have a hard time making it to the mic on Saturday night as big clubs tend to fly in “bigger names,” Newham explains.
To get an idea of what kind of audience they could garner, Seven Tyrants staged the play A Steady Rain in February.
The play, which looks at the guilt that follows two cops after they return a young boy to a serial killer, had its own challenges. Newham wasn’t sure if audiences would go to that show, but more than that, he wasn’t sure audiences would go to that at The Penthouse.
“We wrongly assumed that it would maybe turn people off because of the strip club downstairs,” he says. “To our surprise, and our delight we had middle-aged, upper middle class people from the suburbs who seized upon it as an opportunity to experience the night club.”
He’s hoping the jazz, comedy and drama gives the historically curious a chance to wander around the room and check out the joint and see where Ella Fitzgerald had private parties and pass by the piano played by jazz stars including Oscar Peterson.
The walls of The Penthouse are now adorned with photos that were “lost in time” after Filippone’s uncle stuck them in a duffel bag inside a wall and behind a Xerox machine “like Italians do,” Filippone says.
And after patrons check out what The Penthouse is, Filippone is hoping they’ll take a peek downstairs, look at the pictures, and see what it was.
