Chapman digs deep into the events that brought the now-gentrified neighbourhood into the forefront of public debate in this murder mystery mixed with investigative expose and cultural history. Since the s, the Seymour Street nightclub had a reputation as an establishment frequented by sex workersβa de facto red-light district unto itself.
The Penthouse had a well-earned reputation in the city as a popular nightspot for visiting entertainers, rounders, news reporters, and local show business people. They also had a long history of flouting liquor laws, and an equally extensive accumulation of fines for bootlegging. Sex workers, along with other patrons, had to pay a cover charge to enter the club. In the summer of , patrons of sex workers were photographed coming in and out of the nightclub by undercover police hiding in a camper van across the street.
Following a raid that December, the Penthouse was shut down, forcing a bitter three-year court battle that the Filippone brothers finally won on appeal. Many police of the era agree. But it was controlled there. After the trial, the hookers poured out into the streets all over the city, including to areas that were already dealing with it, but it really became like trying to capture quicksilver to manage it again.
One of those areas was the West End, which now hosted not only the women who fled the Penthouse but also a growing number of cross-dressing male sex workers. For years police had regularly found male sex workers dressed as women, and occasionally trans women sex workers, along parts of Granville Street, or near Main and Keefer Streets, just outside of Chinatown. By the early s, this was the case along the to blocks of Davie Street as well. Hobbs writes nothing of the extreme prejudice faced by those in the cross-dressing and trans communitiesβeven in the otherwise socially progressive West Endβthat left many marginalized and with few safe options for employment.
A community that had developed twice as fast as the rest of the city was dealing with more than its fair share of growing pains. In August , thirty-three-year-old Serge Jean Leroux was found stabbed to death in a West End laneβanother shocking West End crime that would go unsolved. The kind of character that only Vancouver in the s could produce, DiCimbriani was actually from Ontario.
