Forced Out by Baseball, Whither the Strip Club?

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006

From behind his desk at his club a few blocks south of the Capitol, Ron Hunt ponders the future. He's playing simultaneous online poker games, brown eyes darting between dueling screens, his face illuminated by the white glow. Every few minutes, the computers make sounds like clinking chips. Between moves, he drags on his Newport and exhales frustration.

"This ain't no raunchy business," Hunt says. "There's actually human beings here who are worried about what's going to happen."

He picks up his phone. "Tell Sasha, Visage and Chyna Doll to come up here, please."

A 28-year-old woman appears in clear Lucite high heels and false eyelashes. "Chyna Doll," from Woodbridge, is one of Hunt's original employees, with seven years under her garter belt as a stripper.

"I want to be in a place where I'm respected," she tells a visitor. "Like, they don't really even call us 'strippers' here. We're 'dancers' and 'entertainers.' "

Unfortunately for Chyna and Hunt, "here" has an expiration date.

Ron Hunt's strip club -- a fixture for 21 years -- must move by December. The warehouse that houses the Nexus Gold Club, just north of the planned baseball stadium in Southeast, has been sold for about $8 million to make way for river-view luxury condos.

The real problem is: Where to?

In a fast-gentrifying city such as Washington, where can strip clubs go? The club's current neighborhood of rubble-filled lots and barbed-wire fences was one of the few that allowed them, but with the impending stadium boom, it has been rezoned. Hunt couldn't so much as move across the street, even if he could afford the surging real estate prices.

"Not only is there no place to move within the zone, but the zone has disappeared," said Michael Fonseca, Hunt's attorney.

And Hunt is fuming. "I have proven in the worst neighborhood I can make this happen," he said. "I've operated for years without incident. My food is even good. . . . Doesn't that allow me to graduate to downtown?"

He pays his taxes and is a regular at community meetings. He drove the drug dealers off his street and gives turkeys to the needy at Thanksgiving. The police inspector calls him a good neighbor. He employs about 50 full-time workers.

On a good day, 300 customers pass through his heavy black doors -- lobbyists, lawyers, bankers. His nude-dancing license is precious. Only 20 exist, and there will never be any more, as the city stopped issuing them in 1994. Observers say each license is worth $3 million to $10 million, depending on the size of the club.

But in eight months, Hunt's framed license will become about as valuable as a used cocktail napkin unless he can find another spot. "This takes something of incredible value and incinerates it," Fonsera said.

Although zoning allows adult entertainment clubs downtown, the laws governing nude dancing licenses prevent the clubs from locating within 600 feet of a residence.

That would not have been a problem 20 years ago. But the city's push since 2000 to create a "living downtown" and the resulting frenzy of condo construction mean there are few, if any, downtown commercial properties far enough from residences.

To some, of course, squeezing out strip joints is a good thing. But to Fonseca, Washington is losing the grit and texture that define a city. "They've built these high-end residential units for people who want the urban experience," he said. "So they go into their home and close the door and, at that point, they want to be in McLean."

Hunt has been combing the city for a spot that would work, talking to brokers, checking maps, driving around. Finally he found a vacant brick building tucked away in an alley off 14th Street near Franklin Square, which ironically was the heart of the city's red-light district a generation ago. The building is in a discreet location, surrounded by office buildings and parking garages. Thinking it was perfect, he started talks with the building's owner, Jon Gerstenfeld.

Then Gerstenfeld got a call from Terry Lynch, an activist and executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations.

"He said he would fight me tooth and nail," Gerstenfeld said. "He said it wouldn't help the neighborhood. I more or less thought the same thing, although I don't like people telling me what to do with my property."

Still, Gerstenfeld indicated that he was torn. "He's running a legal business, and he ought to be able to run it," he said of Hunt. "But some of these businesses don't help. It's a very fair question, and I don't know what the answer is."

To relocate, adult entertainment clubs need approvals from the D.C. Council or the Zoning Board of Adjustment -- and, in some cases, from both. But in a campaign season when most of the D.C. Council is running for reelection or higher office, politicians are not competing to be saviors to the strippers.

"Nobody wants to deal with this issue," said Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), one D.C. Council member who's trying to find a solution. "It's extremely complicated to locate a place where no one will be offended, no one will be upset, where these little businesses can operate."

Robert Pincus, chairman of Fidelity & Trust Financial Corp. and a Nexus Gold customer, said the District must make room for Hunt's club and the others displaced either directly by the stadium or by the intense development pressures it has triggered.

"The city council and the mayor have a responsibility to find a place to accommodate them -- we cannot ignore them," he said. "It's a huge contradiction to say we're going to enhance that area with baseball and retail and not support the local businesses being pushed out by it."