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COPYRIGHT 2002 Providence Journal
Byline: W. Zachary Malinowski
Apr. 23--Two miles south of downtown, away from Waterplace Park, Providence Place mall and the upscale restaurants, lies another world that has become a destination for tourists. Chartered buses pull up to the curb outside the gaudy pink building on Allens Avenue with the flashing police light on the roof. Hundreds of cars pack the lots and side streets. Next door, dozens of pedestrians, almost all men, venture into a windowless brick warehouse.
The visitors, many from Massachusetts and Connecticut, are in pursuit of a common goal: sex.
Welcome to the underbelly of the Providence Renaissance. In recent years, the sex industry has exploded in the city, and a dreary industrial strip along Allens Avenue has become the most densely concentrated red-light district in New England.
Sex clubs have sprung up across the state capital: strip clubs, gay bathhouses, an under-21 strip club, a private swinger's club, massage parlors and sex video stores. There's also a studio on Allens Avenue that satisifies customers' appetite for bondage and other fetishes, including foot worship.
The sex industry represents another form of economic development. It pays millions in taxes, creates hundreds of jobs and attracts thousands of out-of-town spenders. The city's biggest gay bathhouse, the Megaplex, is owned by the man who, until recently, was Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr.'s liaison to the gay community. The club has 15,000 members and charges $60 for annual dues; $40 for a six-month membership and $10 for an 18-hour pass.
In February, the Megaplex's owner, Fitzgerald Himmelsbach, was forced to resign his city post after publicity about a possible syphilis outbreak at his club, underscoring the gray area in which such clubs exist.
The sex industry in Providence is nothing new, but the pace of its recent expansion has been startling. A decade ago, there were four strip clubs and a gay bathhouse in the city.
Today, there are 13 strip or sex clubs that are operating, or will soon be opening. Five of them are found in a tight cluster on Allens Avenue beneath the Route 95 overpass. "Why here?" said Luis A. Aponte, a Providence City Councilor, representing the 10th Ward that includes Allens Avenue. "It seems odd. I don't see that type of concentration anywhere else in New England."
For years, the city had its low-end strip joints that were little more than brothels.
In the '60s and '70s, there were two major strip clubs, the Gemini Hotel and Civic View Inn. Both downtown clubs were constantly under the eye of law enforcement. Strippers were regularly arrested on prostitution charges. Shootings, assaults and thefts were commonplace. In 1974, Providence Police Chief Walter A. McQueeney asked the city's license bureau to shut down both clubs, saying they were "wholesale prostitution" operations. Prostitutes come "from all over the country because they have been told Providence is a place to make a buck," said McQueeney.
Around that time, the state police investigated allegations that officers from McQueeney's police force got free liquor and sex from prostitutes at the two clubs. A third, smaller strip club, the Peppermint Lounge, on Broadway, a hangout for mob figures, also had its share of shootings, fights and robberies.
All three clubs are gone today. The Gemini Hotel, near the site of the new Providence Police Station, was razed a few years ago. The Peppermint Lounge has been replaced by a parking lot; and the Civic View Inn is now home to The Sportsman's Inn, a strip club on Fountain Street. A lesser known club, Club Providence, at 257 Weybosset...
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