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End of Era in Ft. Lauderdale?

Cheo_D

I'd better be where I can Look AND Touch

Oakland Park, FL is a smaller municipality on the North side of Fort Lauderdale and has been the location of the two corporate-sister strip clubs Solid Gold and Pure Platinum, which people tend to call the "Fort Lauderdale" strip clubs because let's face it, this is one of those "municipalities" that was incorporated to give developers a better land/tax deal and it's mostly surrounded on 3 sides by the parent city, existing as a satellite thereof.

The City of Fort Lauderdale, seat of Broward County, FL, has since the 80s been on a massive campaign to "clean up" the tourist-intensive zone between the beaches and US1 leading into and out of itself and to promote "improvement" redevelopment along US1 ( = go more upscale for more tax collections, natch). They cut down bar hours and drove out the drunk Spring Break kids and sought to do the same to the adult businesses.

Strip joints like Mike Peters' Dollhouse, immortalized by Mötley Crüe, were part of that wild past that Broward County wanted to forget. Oakland Park as a good satellite went along with big-sister-city and tightened its adult business regulations to the strangling point. In the end Solid Gold and Pure Platinum were the remnant of "Fort Lauderdale" strip club legacy (including part ownership by Peters), after in the early 00's the town made a settlement with the then-management of both SG and PP to "grandfather" them for a time period in the regional-standard full-nude full-bar mode.

The time in the deal ran out in November.

Their current lawyer claims that the then-managers could/should not have made that deal, but they did; also that they need still more time to change the businesses to something compliant as the agreement had called for. Solid Gold, the more "upscale" (and costlier to run) sibling was the first to fall. Pure Platinum ostensibly remains open as the company fights City Hall, under the argument that their contracts and papers are in order for yet more time and third parties would be harmed if they were to shut down cold turkey, but the city still wants them to lose the full nude or go juicebar.

I visited the SG in the Fall as the court dates approached and the Shadow of Death already hung heavy. It may be that greater Fort Lauderdale will indeed become "clean" along US-1, the damage to business may be already done even if Platinum prevails legally.

Broward County's remaining major concentration of strip clubs would be in Pompano Beach, a larger incorporated city further north that has the advantage of including a huge chunk of land on the "bad" (West) side of I-95, far away from the tourists, where there's industrial/warehouse zones, trailer parks and working class/black neighborhoods. So it can simply zone its strip joints (Cheetah Pompano, Booby Trap North, Diamond Dolls, 4Play, Club Pink North, etc.) out of the way of the "nice" travelers.

The other area would be all the way almost to the Miami-Dade county line in Hallandale, most notably the "clean" club Scarlett's and the kinda clean-ish Cheetah Hallandale, which are also in areas unlikely to be gentrified any time soon and that anyway would be more associated with the North Dade scene than with Fort Lauderdale in people's minds.

So it looks like the Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls" will finally have its reference to Fort Lauderdale become doubly a historical artifact, gone in the name of gentrification and family friendly tourism, and there will be no more nude dancing and lap grinding convenient to tourists near US-1 until you get well down into Miami.

News reports:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/br...0…
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/br...1…
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/br...1…