Back To The Death Spiral In The Atlantis Cycle

This place has had a lot of ups and downs in its time, and unfortunately, it seems to be in another down cycle. My last couple of visits here were disappointing, but I chalked that up to arriving too early. In the past, even when it's at its peak, it gets a lot busier after midnight.

So I decided to head out in the wee hours and see if maybe I just had a couple bad trips. Nope. I arrived around 12:30 or 1 a.m. on a Tuesday (early Wednesday morning, technically) and there were fewer than 10 customers. Even worse, the girls were not worth it. There were one or two I could generally rate a 6, and the rest were below that. I don't know what you call the opposite of a 7-UP club -- Sprite? Coke? Malort? -- but that's what Atlantis has turned into.

I did take a couple of the (relatively) more attractive girls back for dances. The first one was so lackluster that I stopped after one dance, which is something I rarely, rarely do. The second one gave a little better grind but it was still much more tame than Atlantis in its heyday. Also, neither girl got fully naked -- and I didn't ask, because frankly I wasn't that interested. Still, they're charging 30 dollars a dance. So you pay the same price for topless-only, light-grind dances with unattractive women, as you would down the street at 390, where you get full nudity and a good grind from hotties. Not a good business model.

Others have commented on the space itself, so I'll be brief. It's huge, it's nicely appointed, it could be and at times has been the best club in the Chicago area. You walk in with the bar on your left and a stage up front, opposite the bar, configured to come out to a point in the middle of the room. All of this is very cool. Sadly, they seem to be using the same furniture in the private dance booths from way back when they opened more than 10 years ago. It's starting to show its age. The two dance sets I did were in the same booth, and the padding in the chair was completely gone to the point that I sunk down into it. Not a comfortable position for a lap dance.

So, basically, Atlantis has pretty much nothing going for it at this point. That's usually a death spiral: No fun to be had, so customers don't come, so good dancers go somewhere else, so there's no fun to be had. But Atlantis has been in this position before and managed to pull itself out. For the sake of a Chicago scene with drastically few quality options for strip clubs, here's hoping it comes back again sometime.