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.
Comments (21)Latest
Thank you for that history lesson, I enjoyed it. Now didn't prostitution in Rhode Island used to be legal as long as it was "indoors"? It was before my time, so I only heard about it.
Thanks for the well written and informative history lesson.
If you are feeling ambitious, I'd love to know more about the history of banning nude entertainment in businesses that serve alcohol. Why does the presence of alcohol render an otherwise protected category of "free speech," nude dancing in this case into an illegal activity. I suspect that this is a state by state, or even municipality by municipality ordinance but the Supreme Court ruled that nude dancing was a form of free speech.
Of course, I can ask "AI" but you did such a good job with Providence strip clubs, that I thought I'd also pose the question to you.
Thanks again for a good read.
@Electronman @Electronman Great question. The easiest way I found to make sense of it is to replace “alcohol” with “an AK-47.”
Nude dancing has some First Amendment protection. Gun ownership has some Second Amendment protection. But that doesn’t mean the government loses the ability to regulate what happens when a protected activity is combined with something else that creates an additional public safety concern.
I think courts have allowed governments to say that the combination of alcohol and nude entertainment creates additional “secondary effects” (crime, disorder, prostitution, etc) that can be regulated independently of the expressive content of the naked dancing.
So the rule isn’t “nude dancing is protected unless alcohol is present.” It’s more like protected activity A can still be subject to additional regulation when combined with regulated activity B.
At least that’s how my non lawyer mind worked it out!
@Electronman The laws vary by state. In places like Colorado and Texas, nude clubs can’t serve alcohol, but topless clubs can. Other states like Florida and Massachusetts you can have alcohol and nudity. One workaround I have seen clubs do is BYOB or the bouncer says no drinks but you are free to drink whatever you want in the parking lot. Some clubs will own the bar next door that is attached to the club. You can access the bar through the club but are not allowed to bring your drink into the Strip Club.
@Bostonasp69 I too did a bit of research and discovered that the claim of "secondary effects" is simply not supported by crime statistics. When you compare clubs that allow nude performances and also serve alcohol with matched clubs that serve alcohol but do NOT have nude dancing, then the crime is worse at the clubs that do NOT have nude dancing than at the clubs that do have nude dancing. I'd love to see someone challenge the claim of "secondary effects" for lack of supporting data.
@Electronman As a card carrying libertarian, I agree with you. The “secondary effects” rationale was the legal construct that allowed the government to regulate; not my personal view of the situation.
Who remembers when the Caddy was BYOB?!
@Miami I do!!
I had the same thought as All Weeks. I always thought Providence clubs gained huge popularity because “indoor prostitution” wasn’t prohibited there.
@Studme53 Yes that was real, although “legal indoors” is a slight oversimplification.
Until 2009, Rhode Island had a loophole in its prostitution law: street solicitation was illegal, but the statute did not clearly prohibit prostitution occurring privately indoors. That made Rhode Island a genuine outlier and likely contributed to Providence’s reputation and adult entertainment scene.
The legislature closed the loophole in 2009 and made prostitution illegal regardless of location.
I’d still separate that from why the strip clubs themselves survived. The loophole may help explain their popularity, while the zoning and licensing history probably better explains their longevity.
Thanks. I always wondered what happened to Satin Doll. RI per se doesn't seem to have neighborhood restrictions, since clubs such as Mickey's is right in a residential area, as is RIDolls, which is (was?) also next to a church of sorts.
Mickeys has residential buildings to one side and all along the other side of the street. Amazing, but its always been there. The guy who was pimping the kid at Cheaters was one on my first court appointed cases when I was in law school. Troy something. He was charged with deriving support from the earnings of a prostitute. Prostitution was never legal. It just was not illegal for a long time due to a fuck up by the legislature. The original law did not make street walking illegal and when they were overrun by hookers, in a panic, they made streetwalking illegal by rewriting the law. Of course, they never mentioned paid sex indoors either way. So while it wasn't legal, it wasn't illegal. It is now illegal, but nothing has changed. Just like bringing your own alcohol into the Saratoga Race Course is not legal, but its custom, so only 45,000 people did it on Travers Stakes Saturday.
The combat zone ended when real estate wasn't worth shit. That may have played a role in not coming back, but the murder of Andrew Puopolo, a Harvard football player by a streetwalker ended it.
One club still had "dirty Sunday" every Sunday even as late as 1992. You'd get a handjob at the bar lol. Small world but Puopolo's cousin was in my fraternity so it really hit some.
Former Providence clubs: Hawks (public handjobs and hookers); Cherries (public handjobs) and other clubs I barely recall.
Mario's in Johnston Rhode Island was imo the best club of all time, which killed itself because of success. First. It was never legally a strip club, but locals rule in small towns so it was open as topless club for many years. Dollar dances at your table were the rule. Then it was "nude Mondays". then "rooms" and then the town said good-bye and they came to Webster to ruin the Fuzzy Grape.
The reason Providence has strip clubs is fun and Boston doesn't (this will piss off a bunch of people) is very simple: ethnicity and culture. Boston is Irish which is great for bars and a libido killer. Least sexual people on the planet. They make Germans seem fun and wild in bed. They raised people guilted out by sex and seem to hate sex as much as they hate flavor in food and cooking in general. Providence is Italian. So they are passionate and like hot naked women and great food. In fact, when the mafia ruled the area, it was based in Boston's all Italian north end, but in Providence (actually) Lincoln and Boston answered to them Providence has been my club spot over Boston (even when I lived there) since the mid-late 80s.
Do you know why, until very recently (2009), Rhode Island was the outlier in the conservative/restrictive USA in terms of tacitly allowing prostitution, a la Europe, Canada and Australia? Is it because of more European demographics there?
@FrustratedInTheUS It was just a loophole. State law didn’t explicitly outlaw Indoor prostitution. But certain things around it were prohibited. The freedom party quickly moved to close that loophole in 2009.
I just know sometime around 2002? a dancer at CF got fired for doing extras, (and not charging more). CF lost their liquor license for a week. The Mandy rule... She was nympho.
It's funny about Satin Doll because in the early 90s downtown was still largely a ghost town. I can't imagine anyone being offended by a strippy there.
I have no idea if its true but I've had dancers tell me that in MA and CT touching the dancers is prohibited and in RI its not, so a lot of guys will travel to RI clubs. Foxy at least seems to also get a lot of dancers coming down from Boston.
Good history lesson and well researched. I do quibble with the premise though: Providence's city population might be only 200,000 but the metro area is over 1.7 million, and the number of clubs in the metro (7 counting Marios) is probably actually slightly below average for a city its size. Throw in the proximity to Boston and it is easy to see why there are several clubs. (To see how close the regions are culturally/economically, Providence is the largest metro in the US that doesn't have a dedicated major sports franchise and it is due to the proximity to Boston)
@blahblahblahs "Throw in the proximity to Boston and it is easy to see why there are several clubs" i.e. Providence is serving an otherwise underserved Boston SC market
Who says strip clubs are dying?!?!?
Providence had a lot of strip clubs when Boston had 27 instead of 2 in the combat zone, so the two are not related.
Providence has a lot of strip clubs because #1 of it's proximity to the affluent Boston area and #2 Providence and RI are run by a bunch of corrupt pols where everyone can be bought off. Boston doesn't have any real strip clubs because it's run by an alliance of old hypocritical Puritan folks and a bunch of transplant politically correct queers like Maura Healey and Michelle Wu.