Eager for a new rabbit hole, I was wondering why Providence still has so many strip clubs for such a small city especially when the general vibe seems to be that the strip club business is slowly dying. (A good topic for another article!)
Anyway, apologies to those in the know if this is basic Rhode Island strip club history. I just found it interesting because Providence seems to be an exception. The city has fewer than 200,000 people and still has the Foxy Lady, Cadillac Lounge, Desire, Club Fantasies and Wonderland within a few miles of downtown. And that’s after losing the Satin Doll, Providence Centerfolds and a succession of clubs at 245 Allens Avenue. Go just outside Providence and there were many more.
The story seems to have started in 1991. Providence rewrote its zoning code and, for the first time, specifically defined “adult entertainment.” In 1994 it tightened the rules further largely pushing new adult businesses into industrial areas. The city couldn’t just ban strip clubs outright because the Supreme Court had already decided that nude dancing has some First Amendment protection. But cities could regulate where it happened. Providence’s solution was basically: Fine. You can do it. Just do it over there, near the warehouses.
Then came the Satin Doll on Aborn Street downtown. One of the people behind it was a guy named Richard Shappy, a name that keeps turning up in this history. In April 1993, a city inspector walked into the club and observed a dancer exposing enough anatomy to meet Providence’s new legal definition of adult entertainment. There was one problem: the Satin Doll was in a downtown “D-1”district, where adult entertainment wasn’t allowed. Shappy and Jodi DiRaimo fought the city, and the case eventually reached the Rhode Island Supreme Court. In DiRaimo v. City of Providence in 1998, the club lost. Providence wasn’t banning nude dancing, the court said. It was regulating where it could take place. The Satin Doll then tried arguing that it should be grandfathered because adult entertainment had been happening there before the restriction. That didn’t work either. Its previous zoning approval specifically allowed live entertainment while prohibiting adult entertainment. Apparently, doing something for a long time does not turn it into a legal nonconforming use if it wasn’t legal in the first place.
A few years later, Providence managed to get trapped by its own logic. The Cadillac Lounge wanted to operate at 345-361 Charles Street. This time the property was in an “M-1” industrial district — exactly the kind of place Providence had designated for adult entertainment. Neighbors objected. The licensing board decided it didn’t like the location and revoked Cadillac’s adult entertainment license. Cadillac appealed. In 2001, the Rhode Island Supreme Court basically told Providence: You chose where these clubs are allowed. This is one of those places. The licensing board couldn’t invent a second zoning process because it suddenly regretted what the zoning map said. Cadillac won.
Shappy later turns up again in the court record as Cadillac’s general manager. In 2004 he asked the city to let the club run adult entertainment until 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Providence said no. Police subsequently walked in at about 1:30 and 1:40 a.m. on two nights in 2005 and found the entertainment still going. Cadillac fought the fines all the way to the Rhode Island Supreme Court too. The club lost on the violations but succeeded in getting the fine reduced. Rhode Island apparently produced appellate case law over exactly how late you could watch a stripper on Charles Street. Nice.
Then there is Allens Avenue which became the closest thing Providence had to a red-light district. Clubs sat among warehouses, highway infrastructure and industrial property. One address, 245 Allens Avenue, cycled through several names: Cheaters, Wild Zebra and later Silhouettes. The Cheaters story is where the history stops being funny. In 2013, police discovered that a 15 year old girl was dancing at the club using false identification. The subsequent criminal case showed that she had also been performing sex acts for money in a private area of the club and turning the proceeds over to a man who was later convicted on trafficking and prostitution related charges. Providence suspended Cheaters’ liquor and adult entertainment licenses for 45 days and imposed a $5k fine.
The biggest fight involved the Foxy Lady, probably Rhode Island’s best known club. In December 2018, undercover officers arrested three dancers after alleging that they offered sexual acts for money. Providence’s Board of Licenses responded by revoking the club’s licenses and effectively shutting down a business that had been operating for almost 40 years. More than 200 employees were suddenly out of work just before Christmas. The Foxy fought back, and the Rhode Island ACLU got involved. The argument wasn’t that prostitution was constitutionally protected; obviously it wasn’t. The question was whether alleged crimes by three employees justified shutting down the entire business when the club’s underlying entertainment was protected expression. On January 3, 2019, the Rhode Island Supreme Court agreed to review the case and allowed the Foxy Lady to reopen while the litigation continued.
And Providence wasn’t the only Rhode Island town fighting this battle. A few miles away, Johnston had Mario’s Showplace and the El Marocco Club, later Club Starzz. Johnston took a somewhat different approach: if a club wanted a liquor license, it couldn’t have nude dancing. Naturally, both clubs sued. And naturally both cases reached the Rhode Island Supreme Court. In El Marocco Club v. Richardson and Casa DiMario v. Richardson in 2000, the clubs lost. The court upheld Johnston’s ability to prohibit nudity at establishments serving alcohol. Johnston’s mayor, William Macera, was not subtle about the goal. After Mario’s lost, he said the clubs didn’t sit well with residents and predicted, “All these clubs will be gone.”
What made the whole thing click for me was comparing Providence with Boston. Boston once had the Combat Zone one of the most notorious adult entertainment districts in the country. In 1974 the city formally created a 5½-acre adult district downtown. At one point there were roughly a dozen strip clubs and dozens of adult businesses packed into the area. Today there are two strip clubs left: Centerfolds and the Glass Slipper, sitting next to each other on LaGrange Street. Even in 2026, when Centerfolds proposed moving its entrance about 150 steps to a more prominent street, neighborhood opposition was strong enough that it abandoned the move and renewed its existing lease.
So why does Providence still have a strip club scene? The big difference is where Providence put the clubs. Boston put its adult district on downtown land that eventually became incredibly valuable. Strip clubs and peep shows ended up competing with hotels, luxury apartments, restaurants, hospitals and developers with much deeper pockets. Providence pushed much of its adult industry into manufacturing districts. A club surrounded by warehouses and highway ramps had a lot less redevelopment pressure than one sitting on prime downtown Boston real estate. And over time, the surviving Providence clubs accumulated licenses, zoning status and operating rights that became increasingly difficult to recreate.
Anyway, that was my rabbit hole.
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