The Astoria Gym used to be a boxing factory for East End toughs from the wrong side of Main Street.

Back then, fighters like Geronimo Bie—a talented young native Indian who scrapped his way out of the nearby Ray Cam housing projects to win silver at the 1990 Commonwealth Games—gave the club a major reputation and a stable of Golden Gloves champions.

Today the club’s boxing demographic has changed.

Cubitt, the daughter of a North Vancouver stockbroker, is a college student with a diploma in fashion design. The 22-year-old who once dreamed about being a ring-card girl has just returned from Newfoundland, where she successfully defended her Canadian title belt in a three-round decision against Amanda Sobchak.

She now sports an 11-2-0 record and has remained relatively unscathed inside the ring. “Just a few black eyes,” she says matter-of-factly. “Nothing serious.

And while a new breed of fighters may be training here, the landmark boxing club, located in the basement of the Astoria Hotel, hasn’t changed a bit.

“This is an old-time boxing gym,” says trainer Jim Bennett, a 62-year-old former boxer with a white crewcut and gold chains draped around his neck “This isn’t a health club—this is where you come to box.

Tonight, down a steep flight of rickety wooden stairs located at the back of the hotel’s cold beer and wine store, past the stacks of empty beer flats and discarded mattresses, two dozen boxers are training in the cramped gym’s dim fluorescent light. Yellowed fight posters, framed pictures of former Golden Gloves champs and cracked full-length mirrors adorn the walls. Occasionally, training is interrupted as boxers stop to adjust spit buckets underneath the leaky water pipes.

“There are no rats here,” quips one of the club’s boxing coaches. “They’d die in here.

But it's that mystique—the infamously blood-stained ring, the dusty decades-old championship trophies, the fight tales—that keeps boxers religiously training here.

This is a tough gym,” explains Cubitt. “A lot of great boxers have come from here: Geronimo Bie, Dale Walters, Manny Sobral.

The Astoria Boxing Club came into being in 1966, when former Astoria owner Louie Valente donated the basement of his hotel, free, to boxing coach Walter Boyce.

The purpose of the club, Valente remembers, was simply “to provide a place for boys from the east end of Vancouver to train in the sport of boxing.

Since 1973, provincial court judge George Angelomatis has presided over the club. Down the years, he’s worked tirelessly to preserve the Astoria’s storied boxing rep...

The above fragment comes from "A night at the gym" by Justin Beddall, published in Vancouver Sun's Mix on June 8, 2002, with most of the pictures from this page. Justin is a recipient of Western Magazine Award. He also writes for the Vancouver Magazine.