WASHINGTON, DC — Strip club owners – especially those with a predominantly gay clientele – have long joked about the nearly underground nature of their profession. If Ward 1 Council Member Jim Graham has anything to do with it, at least some of the XXX clubs displaced by the South Capitol Street baseball stadium and still without new digs may find themselves literally underground. Directly beneath Dupont Circle, to be precise.It’s only talk at this stage, but it’s talk that’s generating a lot more talk. The local press is having a field day outlining the lascivious possibilities and tragedies likely to accompany the creation of a strip club ghetto underneath the very streets of internationally respected moral capitol, Washington DC.
The abandoned underground streetcar stations on either side of the Connecticut Avenue overpass have become Graham’s favorite suggestion for where to put the clubs, which have been homeless for more than a year.
Dupont Circle Merchants and Professional Association executive director, Edward Grandis isn’t impressed by Graham’s idea, insisting that “he did not do his homework,” in spite of Graham’s correct observation that previous attempts to revitalize the area with more traditional retail establishments has met with failure.
Nonetheless, Grandis insists that the area decided against such establishments during the early 1990s, when business owner Geary Simon unsuccessfully attempted to convince the Advisory Neighborhood Commission to allow him to introduce a number of establishments, including a nightclub with a liquor license, into the Dupont Down Under, as it is called. Grandis would prefer to see the area dedicated once again to a trolley system.
Not all local residents share Grandis’ opposition to the idea, however.
Rick Rosendall, vice president for the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, for instance, thinks that “people are jumping the gun,” since no one knows which businesses might choose to make use of the location. Given that a D.C. Council bill passed recently decreed that only one such venue could exist in the location at a time, it’s possible that displaced businesses might choose to opt out of the Circle entirely, or take up professional residence there as an entirely different kind of business entity.
Since the clubs were forcibly removed from the gentrification development area, some have found homes in Ward 5, but two have been left dangling, thanks to restrictions placed upon them by the D.C. Council. The Ivy City neighborhood where the bulk of the clubs were reassigned was granted $3.6 million to lessen the supposed “impact” of their arrival upon the community.
