“Stripping in New York is no longer only about stuffing G-strings with $1 bills in sleazy clubs but handing over $3,000 tips to women who shed their gleaming evening gowns for a lap dance in lavish cabarets. A decade after New York began cracking down on seedy strip clubs, the business has flourished and turned upscale. While the city continues its fight against the few remaining sordid joints that once populated Times Square and along Eighth Avenue, fancy establishments catering to executives with large corporate expense accounts have sprung up to the west of the famous landmarks… In the past two years, half a dozen high-end cabarets opened in renovated warehouses amid car repair shops in a long decrepit industrial area on the West Side of Manhattan, from Chelsea to Midtown near the Hudson River. Here they avoid stringent laws regulating adult establishments closer to residential streets and take advantage of cheap real estate. ‘The city said ‘If you’re going to have an adult club in Manhattan, have it on the West Side,” said Steve Karel, director of marketing at the Hustler club, which opened last year at 51st Street and 12th Avenue. The new clubs have valet parking and dress codes — sneakers or T-shirts are banned. They charge as much as $25 for admission and $10 for a beer.” —Yahoo (US)

Anyone who went to Times Square a decade or more ago saw that it embodied Sin City. It was sleazy, trashy, weird, decadent, and glorious. Perhaps every city has its red light district but, New York being New York, Times Square was greater and grander than them all. And it remains an impressive place these days, but more because of the sheer quantity of neon and foot traffic than because of its sleaze. Today Times Square looks like it could be an attraction at Disneyland — which is another way of saying that it hardly expresses the quintessence of New York anymore. Tourists come here thinking they’re seeing the city, the Big Apple, but really what they’re seeing is a sort of scrubbed-up fantasy of it.

You’d think that, when former Mayor Giuliani squeezed out all the sleaze, it would have gone somewhere or other. And it’s true that tiny bits and pieces remain, but there is no longer any Sin City epicenter. Gay bars and clubs have flourished in the same decade that porn emporia have dried up. Prostitution has exploded — not on the street but on the internet and in the back pages of local newsweeklies. And there are these high-end strip bars, where the cost of a lapdance with a wannabe model is about the same as a blowjob from an escort with more modest professional ambitions. The ironic part about this gentrification of strip clubs is that it shows the hypocrisy behind “cleaning up” the city. After all, isn’t the underlying message clear? It’s ok to indulge in decadence — if you’re rich.

It’s a sign of the times. Corporate executives have scandalized the country lately with their expense accounts and creative accounting. The latest emerging brouhaha involves the co-founder of a large brokerage firm, [name excised per request]. Besides being a jerk to his employees, apparently the guy has spent buckets of company money on hookers. A story in the New York Post details how the executive, [name excised], could drop $40,000 in an evening at a strip club. And apparently he had a budget of about $22,000 a month for hooker parties at the exclusive W Hotel in Union Square. It’s outrageous — but apparently this guy is precisely the sort of audience targeted by these newly gentrified strip clubs. And while it would be wrong to say that the exclusivity of these clubs create beasts such as [name exised], it certainly is galling to see how they encourage this sort of waste while leaving the blue-collar man with nowhere to blow his wad. It’s not fair, Mr. Giuliani.

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