The Best Little Movie House in Vancouver

NOSTALGIC VANCOUVER Sophia Kogos was a good friend of ours. She was married to Nick Kogos who owned the Commodore Supper Club with Johnny Dillias. It had been built by booze baron George Conrad Reifel. They bought it from Reifel in 1929 when the stock market crashed. It was built in the Santa Fe art deco mode. In the words of the Georgia Strait newspaper, “Upstairs it contained a great dance floor which offered fox-trotters and jitterbugger’s an alternative to the Hotel Vancouver’s over-crowded ballroom. Gilded, ornate, and featuring a “New York style” stage capable of holding big bands, the Commodore boasted a one-of-a-kind “sprung” dance floor: There was a layer of horsehair stretched across a bed of rubber tires, allowing the hardwood surface to bounce and undulate beneath the hooves of twinkle-toed dancers.” Under Nick and Johnny the Commodore thrived as a dinner-and-dance club and was rented out privately to corporations and social clubs whose employees and members didn’t mind “brown bagging it” (liquor licences were virtually nonexistent at the time). –excerpt from My Greek Barber’s Diary