Where is the Center of the Strip Club Universe?

Based on what people say, its probably Detroit or Tijuana.

I'm not there yet, but I will be in both of these places.

SJG

I can't for the life of me understand the constant praise for Vegas strip clubs. Yeah there's a lot of nice looking strippers but that's all its good for. They definitely aren't worth the prices(but I get it, they have to pay for all the flashy signs somehow). Half the strippers don't say anything besides wanna dance. The staff isn't particularly welcoming. They are way too crowded. To top it off I have never in any other city heard so many strippers say they only do vip. Then when you do vip there's no guarantee they will actually dance but they will sure as hell keep trying to upsell you to the next room. Imo most of them are only worth going once just to see it. I would rather visit a more down to earth joint where my money is more appreciated.

Detroit clubs are too spread out. It could literally take you an hour some days to go from the clubs on the East side to the clubs by the airport.

Not only that, Detroit is a very large city...land wise. It doesn't have a lot of residents, but there is plenty of land inside the Detroit city limits. They just happen to be empty lots or abandoned homes.

No joke, there has been talk of farming the land that is vacant in Detroit. And in fact, urban farmers have been popping up in areas where blocks of houses once stood.

So as far as having strip clubs "close by" each other, in a central location? Not Detroit.

But if you are looking for extras or using it as a criteria.... It just might be the center of sex in the USA for strip clubs.

Wherever my ATF happens to be.

Detroit isn't the center of the strip club universe either.

The kinds of places we seem to be talking about here are those that least deserve to be called strip clubs. Strip clubs developed because of what was prohibited. But today these limits are getting harder and harder to enforce.

But given this, the places which have lots of strip clubs seem to be:

1. Atlanta
2. Portland
3. Greater Los Angeles
4. Houston
5. Dallas
6. Areas of Florida
7. New Orleans
8. Detroit

But there are also other much loved strip club areas, and then also some rural areas too.

SJG

Let's set the criteria. If they don't mix nudity and booze, they are out. Sorry Chicago and Tampa.

Extras have to be fairly available. Not as rampant as Detroit, but perhaps at a Phoenix or Miami level.

What else can we do to help wittle down the list and set a standard?

Stf up SJGuy, and what did you do with sjgay?

I think Vegas is the center of the universe for what the general public thinks a strip club is. For me a strip club is a place to have fun drinking and chilling with a wide variety of young ladies that don't expect anything from me but a little money. And when we are done chilling, she'll rub up on me like a dirty dirty girl for just a few dollars more. If I went to Vegas clubs and spent as much time as I have at COI, Phoenix, Providence, Portland, Houston, Illinois and Iowa clubs I'd be broke and disappointed.

My ATF is a witty, smart, sweet girl that will sit and chat with me for much longer than she should, will return my texts, and is never super demanding, but will also provide a very good (yet sadly completely legal) lap dance. If I even could find a girl like her in Vegas, I would have to sell my condo, my ex-wife's house, and 700 million gallons of plasma to keep her.

Vegas clubs are fun enough for staring and splurging but not at all why I have been spending time and money in strip clubs for the last 20 years.

I've made several trips to the Philippine,,, Angeles City is number one on my list..... Nana Plaza in Bangkok could be number two... But to many lady boys mixed in with real women....

California law prohibits mixing nudity and booze. I prefer it this way. It yields a better grade of dancer.

Sounds like it is mostly the same in Las Vegas, except for that Palomino building, along with Club Lacey, in North Las Vegas

Still, based on what people keep saying and saying on this forum, I'm inclined to pick Detroit.

SJG

Sex, Drugs and Gnosis Roll in the Bible youtube.com

I think perception plays a big part in assuming Las Vegas as the center as @Meursault pointed out. Bachelor parties don't tout going to Portland to party. However, I hadn't thought of New Orleans. The Bourbon St row of clubs certainly beats the closest grouping of clubs (if there is any) that Vegas has and NOLA has its own reputation. Second to that per square foot presence may be "the block" in Baltimore though not really a good stand-out place to party, get killed maybe

I can respect @Clubbers and @Meursaults point of view that the center of the universe is where ever your ATF is. I've had some much better experiences in clubs in other cities besides Vegas. Still, as a perceived standard to which other places compare themselves, would Vegas be it?

And props to @chessmaster. One thing that happens when you think of yourself as the center is taking advantage of it and getting sloppy and expensive and wanting more for less because it's "Vegas baby."

A shout out to @eyeamlong for bringing up cities in Bangkok and the Philippines for an international perspective. Both places would probably best Tijuana. Anybody have any thoughts on Berlin? Paris? After all, the topless showgirl sort of started there.

I've been to strip clubs in about a dozen states, mostly Midwestern, plus a few countries (UK, Germany, Austria, and Thailand, off the top of my head) and I still think Detroit is the center of the U.S. strip club world. (Dearborn, of course, is the Mecca of the U.S. Islamic world.) By Detroit I mean primarily Eight Mile Road plus the Dearborn / Inkster / Romulus cluster of clubs with their wide range of atmosphere, from posh to dive, and their astonishing availability of extras.

Every PL should make the SC pilgrimage to Vegas once, just to say [s]he's been there. If nothing else, the high prices and hustle factor will make you appreciate your local clubs more!

gammanu: Chicago Heights and Harvey, which are just outside of Chicago, allow nudity and booze, though sadly the city of Chicago doesn't. Also sadly, most dancers at Club O in Harvey and Club 390 in Chicago Heights don't avail themselves of the opportunity to get naked on stage, though some do. At Skybox, just up the street from Club O, all the dancers get nekkid on stage.

The Vegas clubs which via online look interesting to me are Talk of the Town, Club Platinum, Club Lacey in the Palomino building, and maybe Girls of Glitter Gulch. I like dives. I'll pick which girls I want to engage with, so some of the negative factors people cite don't make any difference to me.

Arnies in Harvey, and then Passions in NOLO, and then closer to home that San Gabriel Valley and Tijuana.

Detroit still sounds like the best in the US, but by the time I get there I'll be drained dry many times over. :)

And I still have to emphasize that though we are talking about the best strip clubs, these are the places which least deserve to be called strip clubs.

SJG

For me philadelphia. I haven't been to Miami or Houston clubs.I have been to SFO,LA,NY,LV strop clubs. Real Full contact two ways dances are available in philadelphia

"Real Full contact two ways dances are available in Philadelphia"

I would say that most of the people weighing in on this want more than that. They want what in any other country would simply be referred to as a brothel. And if they think the way I do, they want the girls to be openly and aggressively completing with each other by encouraging front room GFE before any back room agreement is reached.

SJG

@JackKash, Berlin strip clubs are actually kind of lame. Surprisingly tame. That may be because the FKK clubs have the sex market covered. If you're looking for fun in Germany, traditional strip clubs are not the place for it.

I dont think there is a center.

Desertscrub- you like Portland so much you have it twice on your list :)

As far as the black strip Mecca, that is Atlanta. I'll say Miami is the center.

Hard to say which city is the center - there are a few w/ a very good SC scene.

Vegas may qualify in some ways but for most experienced SCers perhaps Vegas may be better described as the show-club center of the universe.

@Meursault, yeah I should have looked at the TUSCL listings first. Looked like Munich has the most clubs for Germany and Pattaya in Thailand. Paris turned out to be rather thin and seems to have the same problem as NYC, many Eastern European and Russian girls. I wonder how you say "Vanna Dance: in French?

Obviously everybody has their favorite areas and there is a "personality" to each of them. Singling out Las Vegas as the lowest value though is not necessarily true. I've been to some clubs in Ohio where a dance charge was $30 and it was all air (chickie actually moved my hand off her leg as if it was a dirty napkin). I waited for the 2-fer-1s in that case.

My hat's off to my fellow travelers, @mrdeuce and @ desertscrub. Would be interested to hear one day your take and strategy as a transient man in a regular's club.

Likewise @Papi_Chulo, I'm impressed with your numbers. I agree that the more experienced, or the hounds that are particular will not see a center to the universe, nor care if there is one as long as their ATF or favorite club(s) are always there. Me, as a traveling PL, hope for a variety and numbers of clubs in the cities I go to better be able to pick and choose the club which I hope will have the best experience. Therefore I may look for the center in the hopes of going there.

I have not been to Vegas - but from most of what I read on TUSCL the issue seems to be not necessarily the cost; but the value - i.e. as in not getting as much value for one's $$$.

Ditto deuce. In the US it's definitely Detroit.

Why no love for Tampa?

MBOT in San Francisco may have invented the lap dance. Alan Markovitz in the Big D may have developed the independent contractor model. But Joe Redner revolutionized strip clubs. He claims to have invented the nude lap dance.

From a historical perspective, our modern strip club experience can be directly attributed to what Redner did in Tampa in the 90's.

From the current perspective, I counted 32 clubs in Tampa and another 25 in Pinellas County/Clearwater/St Pete. Pretty formidable numbers. And there's something for everone. Bikini clubs. Black dives. Nude full contact clubs. Party clubs with booze.

Quality IMO counts more than quantity - I'm def no Tampa expert but these days it seems the only 2 Tampa clubs that get above hit or miss reviews is Mons and 2001.

I totally agree that Tampa has not "kept up with times".

Ybor Strip used to be well reviewed but I'm not sure how it is now.

I think Tampa gets points for their history.

I've been to Las Vegas 3 times and never had a good SC experience.

Sjg says, "...these are the places that least deserve to be called strip clubs." This is an excellent point as well. Having never been, seems like most of Detroit are really whorehouses disguised as strip clubs. Nothing wrong with that per se but naturally the dancers are bound to be a bit more attractive in extras optional cities elsewhere. But I digress. If Detroit or Vegas is the census for the strip club universe then who I am I to argue. I actually think it would be easier to name individual clubs that could be the center of the strip club universe.

My takeaway of my lone visit in 2014 to the Detroit extras-clubs is that it was as easy getting extras as getting LDs and it may not be exaggerating that in some of the clubs it may be easier to get extras than LDs.

Papi - that last statement is not incorrect. To this day, I have not gotten a single lapdance from my ATF, and I've asked for one multiple times. And I've had other experiences where no lap dance ever occured even if that was what I wanted.

Go Red Wings

:)

I go to Vegas every year and don't go to the sc's there.

Detroit is probably the center for the sc monger looking for extras in the US.

There are plenty of US cities to get high contact dances with no extras with pretty dancers. That's a little harder to define.

Prostitution is legal in many international counties so it's harder to pinpoint the best place to be the center. That might be more personal taste based on the type of woman you like.

In Europe, it's Prague. In Asia, it's Thailand. Both are in a state of gradual decline, as often happens as the economy improves. Germany has FKKs, but they don't really qualify as strip clubs. In Mexico, Tijuana, which may be the world's strip club hub. In Australia, legal brothels mostly means that strip clubs aren't worth going to. I've never been to Central or South America, but my impression is that there are stripclub/brothel combos that are worth sampling. Nothing beats the Hong Kong club in Tijuana for scale and options as part of an actual strip club.

I don't know about the US, but I'm pleased with Phoenix. There are exactly 3 clubs that make Phoenix worthwhile. Each has a very different approach. The variety and value of these 3 clubs makes visiting or living in Phoenix very worthwhile. Is that enough to make it the Center of the SC Universe ? Doubtful. But I'd choose visiting Phoenix to Detroit.

Yes, I think we do need to better define what we are talking about. The better these places are, the less strip club like they are. So what do we really seek? And then does it have to be in the US? Is right on the border okay?

Strip clubs developed in the US because of what our laws do not allow. And so where such laws are not enforceable, you don't really have strip clubs.

SJG

Juice's bedroom with the stripper pole.

Without a doubt, for non-PLs, it's Vegas.

But this is a PL board. I haven't been to many of the places mentioned here as being off the chain, like Phoenix, Atlanta, and Detroit. But for me, the PL center of the universe would need to have either ITC extras or abundant OTC, a wide range of options from skanky cheap clubs to high-end no-extras clubs to mid-range and high-end extras clubs -- I think that last bit is the trickiest to pull off.

SF might be one of the worst cities today, but late '90s, the SF crew all felt SF was the best SC city in the country. PLs from SF would go to other cities (including Tampa, Atlanta, etc) and come back with reports about how spoiled we are in SF. What made it so great?

Market Street Cinema: easy, abundant extras, in curtained off rooms, complicit management and police (NEVER an issue or fear of management or police busting in) so whatever sex perversion you wanted, it was just a matter of whether the stripper would do it. Extras were VERY inexpensive for SF standards, but quality was relatively lower also, and the club seedier.

Mitchell Bros O'Farrell Theater: a high end club, easy abundant extras, in curtained off rooms, complicit management and police (NEVER an issue or fear of management or police busting in) so whatever sex perversion you wanted, it was just a matter of whether the stripper would do it. Super sexy stage shows, including the occasional girl-on-girl sex shows, and occasional open public sex in some of the common rooms. The quality of the girls easily matched any of the most beautiful LV strip clubs, although prices were relatively higher to match. I wonder if ANY club today can compare to MBOT's golden age. Is there anywhere today lineups packed with 9s all offer extras?

Between those two, 10 or so clubs with varying degrees of beauty, price, extras, alcohol.

THAT is what I think the standard is. "Lots of extras from skanks in dumpy clubs" doesn't particularly excite me, and unfairly or not, that's the general impression I get of Detroit. There should be lots of options to match whatever mood you're in, from cheap & fast to "lineup full of 9s and sex available" to "super hot lineup and alcohol available". From the reports here, it feels like Atlanta or Phoenix are closest

Subraman,

You know that when DA Terence Hallinan steered it that way, saying he would never enforce in the indoor venues of SC's and AMP's, he was also going to new extremes in cracking down out on the sidewalk. So while in many ways it was great, the sidewalk is usually the cheapest and he was destroying that as no one had tried to do in decades.

Most people see Hallinan as a great liberal. But he was not pro-prostitution. He was just looking at the whole thing from a harm reduction vantage point. He figured that indoors was safer than outdoors. So he tried to drive it indoors. But this shuts out the bottom end of the provider and customer market.

Then to enforce out on the sidewalk he went to a never before seen level of busting johns. And one of the ways he was able to do this was by getting everybody to plead guilty, via this Norma Hotaling program.

sfgate.com

So what I am saying is that Hallinan was a mixed bag. And then once he was voted out of office, enforcement at SC's and AMP's resumed. While it is still a good scene, it is not like what it had been.

SJG

I live in Suburban Detroit, and while I'm totally happy with the variety of clubs from Posh to Dive, what Warhawks said is at one level correct: It is spread out, certainly not a compact area like "the block".

I'll go along with the area that there is no "center of the universe", to the SC experience, and there are various adult disneylands that flourish across the country for a while (or at least until local ordinances become more restrictive e.g. Memphis, Providence RI, SF Bay as mentioned earlier). While some would say Detroit might be the center, as a local who frequents the Hamilton dives I would say it is closer to Ground Zero. Yes, the extras are out of this world- its almost like the Alphaville red light district on Mars from "Total Recall" was recreated in the US rust belt. If you want the closest experience to that possible in 2016, by all means HenryVIII's-Inkster, Bogarts, HenryVIII's-South and Club Venus (before the curtains were removed) are your kind of place. Not as big on Extras but Centerfold on John R by 8 mile also has that kind of 'ambiance', and the Criket in Dearborn, BT's on some nights and Subis all get 'honorable mentions'. Now Get Your Ass to Mars (and yes for the less adventurous, Flight Club, Penthouse, Players, Landing Strip are pretty much sure things with a lot less of that Alphaville vibe, Bozoukis no extras but just awesome time with great eyecandy as well. There's something for all tastes and all wallets, but I had to prop the total freak show that some of the lower end clubs entail- once again its out of this world!

SJG:

While I am strongly for decriminalization of the entire sex industry, from the selfish point of view of an SC customer, he basically extra-ified the scene nicely.

I'm not aware that enforcement at SCs has ever resumed. It is still open in a few places. AMPs get busted, probably rightfully so.

AMPs did not get busted when Hallinan was running the show. And I don't know what you mean by rightfully so.

And since Hallinan we have lost Market St. Cinema and Pink Diamonds.

SJG

Hmmm... I"m struggling to remember what happened to MSC and PD. But regardless, I'll repeat again: the extras are open in the extras clubs here, there have been no busts. Police action is not the reason for the current state, unless it's happening behind the scenes, and only in some clubs but not others.

Ok, with MSC, my hazy memory is, DJV drove it into the ground. In the end days, the girls hit a new low of skankiness, and pimps actuallly gathered IN THE CLUB to watch their "strippers", since many of the girls working there were street girls formerly. I believe the place closed due to lack of business, no customer wanted to be in that environment.

Pink Diamonds, by contras, was a clusterfuck. Fights, violence, and crime in and out of the club. I wouldn't be srprised if police actino closed it, but again, it had nothing to do with extras enforcement, but closing a public nuisance.

In short, you can't name a single raid or police pressure on, say MB, despite open extras ... There is and has been none

The center of the stripclub universe is the club that I am in at that moment. I think that's true of most of us.

The City takes credit for closing both of those places. Now yes, it probably was not just one bust, it was all sorts of problems. But the City is still taking credit.

SJG

TUSCL

-->"The City takes credit for closing both of those places."

No, the city had nothing to do with MSC closing. And yes, they closed Pink Diamonds, but you implied that was because Hallinan left -- he almost certainly would have closed it also, not for prostitution reasons (again, those are not being enforced and have not been enforced even after TH left), but because it was a den of crime

When Camille Harris became DA, first thing she did was send cops into MSC, and they made busts. It wasn't hard. She wanted to show that she was not Hallinan.

I know there are more wrinkles to this. My point is simply that SC's and AMP's can't be totally fearless anymore.

With one big day of AMP busting, which people on RedBook called Black Friday, Mayor Gavin Newsom took point when they went into a large AMP.

I don't know how it is on the street now. But Hallinan was the most aggressive in street enforcement.

We will see how things go.

Overall San Francisco does not have enough strip clubs. So it is not that competitive. Clubs worth more for their name and real estate than for the money they take in. This means they don't take risks.

SJG