The East Side Kids
Huntz Hall as Glimpy McColsky and Leo Gorcey as Muggs McGinnis in the 1944 movie.
A Blake Street Boys lies on the stage during The Last Pogo while people stick safety pins in him.
In The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased & Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978 we focus on an explosively creative time in Toronto’s cultural history, with an emphasis on the musicians. Next week director Kire Paputts interviews The Blake Street Boys.
Lowrises on Blake Street courtesy movein.to.com
The Blake Street Boys weren’t a band, they were a gang, a loose collection of east-end rowdies that lived in the Ontario Housing Corporations apartment complexes (the “projects” for our American friends) around Blake and Boultbee, near Jones and Danforth in the east end of Toronto. Some of them still live there.
Pogo H.Q. got a call from “Hawkeye” a month ago, answering a relayed message left by us at Circus Books and Music. He said he’d try and round up Ally, a fondly remembered Blake Street Boy, and talk about back in the day.
Steven Leckie introduced The Blake Street Boys to the scene by using them as bodyguards. Whether he needed muscle is a moot point; they became a gritty, uglier texture of the scene and a striking contrast to the OCA (Ontario College of Art) crowd. They were not loved by all. “They’d just beat people up for the hell of it,” said Tony Torture of The Viletones. “And if they couldn’t find someone to beat up, they’d beat up each other.”
The area they lived in was tough, and still is. (During a movie shoot at local high-school Eastern Commerce a few years ago, Pogo director Colin Brunton was gobsmacked to learn that within the first four days of the shoot, there were two stabbings, one attempted suicide, and an attempt to pick the pocket of the location manager. By the end of the following week, the production had to hire pay-duty police to guard the lead actresses’ body-guards because of death threats from a couple of grade twelve twenty-year-olds.)
The grooviness of Greek Town on the Danforth has never reached east of Pape, and the Blake Street Boys ‘hood is still intact in all its harsh glory. Which, frankly, makes it more interesting than the gentrified neighbourhoods just a few hundred yards west.
Tags: ally, circus books and music, colin brunton, greek town toronto, huntz hall, j.c. chambers, Kire Paputts, leo gorcey, steven leckie, the blake street boys, the bowery boys, the east end kids, the last pogo, the viletones, Tony Torture