| |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
After a recent favorable court decision, the odds are increasing that a strip club will soon make its home a couple blocks from uptown Athens. With that prospect growing, neighboring business owners earlier this week expressed mixed feelings on what the club will bring to the area.
Athens County Common Pleas Judge J. Alan Goldsberry on Nov. 23 overruled the Athens Board of Zoning Appeals' rejection of the permit to open the club on Stimson Avenue. The judge ruled that the club fits the category of entertainment business that is allowed in the business zone where the club proprietor, Three Wide Entertainment, wants to open the club.
Three Wide Entertainment plans to lease space in a building at 11-13 W. Stimson Ave., currently used as a car and scooter dealership, and owned by Athens businessman Demetrios Prokos. The location is near a number of retail businesses, including a bowling alley, a convenience grocery, an upscale wine and beer store, a Chinese restaurant and a bank. The proposed strip-club site is also within a few hundred feet of one of Athens' main student neighborhoods, the Mill-Palmer area.
One of Three Wide Entertainment's lawyers, Scott R. Mergenthaler, said the strip club does not have a liquor license, and that serving alcohol is not currently part of the club's business plan. But patrons will be able to bring alcohol into the establishment.
Bellavino is an upscale wine and beer store located at 22 W. Stimson Ave., directly across the street from the strip-club site. Owner Lili Chandler Glover said Wednesday that she doesn't think such a club is a proper use for the Prokos property.
"I don't think that location is appropriate for a strip club being so close to a school and neighborhood," she said by email. "I think that the community will lose if this actually goes through. I'm more than concerned about the type of people that would be prone to patronizing the proposed club."
While the BYOB nature of the proposed strip club might create business for Bellavino, Glover said, "I'm not sure the positive (a possible increase in sales) would outweigh the negative (the need for increased security, especially during evening hours)."
She added, "I'm not greedy enough to want to increase my profits by banking on that kind of business."
Busy Day Market, 30 W. Stimson Ave., sits catty-corner to the proposed site of the strip club and sells beer, wine and low-proof liquors, along with regular grocery items. However, business owner Libby Markham declined to comment on the proposed strip club.
Hocking Valley Bank CEO Bick Weissenrieder said that he and the bank, 7 W. Stimson Ave., do not support the club coming to the area. "I think it is not conducive to the business neighborhood that we are trying to create here," Weissenrieder said.
While the strip club likely could bring business to the bank though ATM traffic, Weissenrieder said, even if this happens, "we don't make enough off an ATM to make it (the added business) worthwhile."
At 26 W. Stimson Ave., Hammer God Tattoos owner Derrick Young and his wife, who asked to be known only as "Mrs. Young," acknowledged that some people may think poorly of a strip club, but it could bring more revenue to the area. "That's basically all it comes down to. It's either money or morals," Derrick Young said.
Mrs. Young added that from a business standpoint the club could benefit its neighbors. "New business around other businesses generates business," she said. "So whether it was a strip joint or whether it was a pool hall, it wouldn't matter. If it's a new business, then that's a good thing for the business community because it brings more people to the area."
Young also acknowledged that his business could have to deal with more unsavory or drunk clientele because of the club. But Derrick and Mrs. Young both said that they always refuse intoxicated patrons. "It's receptionist sport," Mrs.Young said.
Kevin Tidd, the new owner of The Farmacy Natural and Specialty Foods store, 28 W. Stimson Ave., said his immediate reaction is that the club won't be good for the business neighborhood. Still, he said, he thinks the club could be run tastefully if the owners can keep its activities confined to the business.
Mergenthaler said worries that his client's business will cause problems are premature. He said there is no indication that Three Wide will run the club in a way that is harmful to the businesses or people around the area.
Three Wide Entertainment applied for a permit to open the strip club in 2008. Since then, permit rejections and court decisions have continually delayed Three Wide's permit application. The city of Athens resisted the strip club so much that Three Wide Entertainment's owner Christopher Stotts and Prokos filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the city. In the lawsuit, Stotts and Prokos cited an alleged denial of free-speech rights, as well as a denial of access to property without due process.
The city of Athens has not made any formal announcement of its next move since Judge Goldsberry repealed the Board of Zoning Appeals' rejection of Three Wide's permit application.
"Money or Morals"? Well, Athens has always been a little conflicted in both areas...
If the strip club actually happens, I think you can probably say goodbye to the Farmacy -- and BellaVino will sell and probably become another low-class bottom-feeder carryout, with the cheapest wine beer -- in order to cater to their new clientele.
The "Mexican" restaurant will probably become a diner.
The street after 8pm will be a white-bread miniature version of West Broad St in Cbus, with "customers" smoking meth in the alleys behind the "businesses" and with both johns and strippers loitering and looking to score.
Good luck with that, until some local tires of devaluation, and decides to take care of paying taxes to live in a ****hole neighborhood by fire-bombing the place...
What a sweet glimpse of our future.
Sometimes civil rights ain't right --especially when a neighborhood has no say in its own development.
OMG people it's a strip club who gives a shit!? I think there would be way more damage to the nearby neighborhood if it were a biker bar but a strip club, seriously? Why don't you worry about all the meth in Nelsonville, or the heroin in Glouster, or other issues that really damage people’s lives and the neighborhood? For a town that is so liberal where people so openly binge drink, and college girls dress like strippers most of the time Thursday -Saturday nights, I find this debate incredibly hypocritical. As a woman, if something like this can come in town and give low income women (because let’s face it there won't be men stripping in the there ) high paying jobs the I'm for it.
Get over it. When did Athens become overrun by a bunch of puritans?
Really? You don't see why this place's neighbors might be concerned? Like it or not, but a strip club, like a porn or adult video outlet, has a way of defining a neighborhood like no other kind of business. Drive into a new town, and it's a good bet if you drive through an area with one or more strip clubs, you're probably going to lock your car door. And being concerned about the apparance and reputation of a neighborhood does not preclude one from being concerned about meth and heroin in your community. Moreover, in a lot of places, illegal drug use goes hand in hand with adult entertainment venues. While it's fair to have a tolerant attitude about this sort of thing, don't put down people who have very understandable concerns about it.
PS. Not all strippers and their clientele are low life drug addicts looking to turn/receive tricks, that is incredibly narrow minded. It's like saying that all people who eat at MCDonalds are morbidly obese, or all people who go to bars are raging alcoholics.
And for the record Athens is already overrun with meth and heavy drugs without a Strip Club to blame (they even found heroin in the MIDDLE SCHOOL last year), there was LSD in the middle school 15 years ago when I was in school. So yeah there are lots of problems in the area (drug related, mainly because of a strong demand from college students, making supply available to high school students). I wish that the world were so simple that there were already a strip club in town so we could just say : our kids are doing drugs because of the strip club, nice little package of cause and effect.
Who said "not all strippers and their clientele are low-life drug addicts..."? Not me.
Listen closely: Being concerned about Item A does not automatically mean a person isn't also concerned about Item B, Item C or Item D. For better or worse, human beings have the capacity to hold multiple concerns in their gray matter.
The fact is, a strip club on Stimson will devalue that neighborhood, and in a small town like Athens, where the neighborhoods are close together and overlap, you can't segregate one sort of neighborhood from another, especially in the core of the city.
If, when I was a prospective student touring Athens and Ohio University, my parents and I had driven past a strip club, as one of our first impressions of Athens, we would have come away with a very different outlook on this little college town. I can't imagine it would be too much different today.