 |
| Protestors in front of Jerry Schaeffer's mansion in Kalorama |
ASSETS PROTESTED IN WASHINGTON DC
May Raucous Laughter prevail
Extra-Long Journalism by David Arthur Walters
January 9, 2020
Paul Schwartzman, a reporter for the Washington Post, admired what he called the "raucous" or shameless laughter of one Elizabeth Calomiris, 66, in his 19 December 2019 coverage of a small group of wealthy Kalorama neighbors protesting an old "gentlemen’s" strip club, newly named "Assets" by Jeffrey Schaeffer, 55, the son of taxicab king and real estate investor Jerry Schaeffer, 74. Ms. Calomiris referred the article to me and I engaged in some raucous laughter myself at his stereotypical treatment.
The well-mannered demonstration of the neighborhood notables was staged in front of the elder Schaeffer's magnificent mansion in Kalorama instead of in front of the strip club itself, which is four blocks northwest of Dupont Circle at the intersection of Florida and Connecticut Avenues, a lower corner of the classy neighborhood named Kalorama, adjacent to the Sheridan Circle neighborhood. Mr. Schwartzman noted that it was unusual for Kalorama neighbors to take exception to one of their own.
Kalorama is a relatively elevated area that looks down on Washington and lies north of the original city boundaries. It fondly embraces elegant mansions, fine apartment buildings, embassies, chanceries, churches and private schools. It became a social and political center after Joel Barlow bought an estate there in 1807 and gave it the Greek name for all-around goodness or broad beauty. Residents proudly note that Thomas Jefferson frequently visited Kalorama back in the day, and Robert Fulton demonstrated his torpedoes and steamship designs to members of Congress on the estate's millpond. The current neighbors are mostly liberal hence showed their disaffection for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner when they moved into the hood. The Obamas were more than welcome.
 |
| Marie Drissel |
Besides Ms. Calomiris, the protestors named by Mr. Schwartzman included one Marie Drissel, identified as a woman who lives in a "townhouse" at the "far end of a long block" away from Assets, Donald Friedman, 74, a prominent lawyer and president of the Sheridan-Kalorama Neighborhood Council, and Jim Groninger, 74, a recently arrived resident who runs a biotech company and recommended Amsterdam as an ideal location for Assets.
Mr. Schwartzman, who did not disclose his own age despite repeated requests, is a political columnist who was well known at the New York Daily News for his celebration of the rise of Rudy Giuliani, 75, as mayor of New York, 396. In fact, he carefully included in his piece the ages of all but one of the protestors, Marie Drissel, 73, whose age he took care to ascertain but for some reason failed to report. He mentioned that Mr. Friedman was accompanied by two Shih Tzu spaniels, but he did not provide their names and ages: "Two of the demonstrators arrived in a Cadillac. Friedman stopped by with his two dogs, a Shih Tzu and a Shih Tzu spaniel." (sic)
His angle on the story was that a few wealthy old white fuddy duddies, horrified by the new sign on the club, were making an ass of "Assets" in front of their neighbor's house in an attempt to shame him into closing it down. Ms. Drissel, the master organizer of the protest, provided her assessment of word Assets on the sign: She said it was "crass" and said she knew what it meant the minute she saw it.
Formerly the Royal Palace, the Assets strip club has been an insult to the neighborhood for decades. The neighborhood forged a Settlement Agreement with it back in 2001, signed by Vinh Quy Nguyen for Fabwill Inc. dba Royal Palace. He promised to keep the sidewalks in front of the place clean and unobstructed, not to display advertisements of any kind referring to dancing or anything related to sexual activity, not allow any noise from individuals to disturb residents, not to change the hours of operation with obtaining prior approval from the city, and not to lease or use any part of the entire building for sex-oriented business.
Ms. Drissel, as Washingtonians well know, is the famous DC finance watchdog and dog lover sometimes referred to in the District as "Ms. Rottweiler" and "Ms. Pittbull," compliments Marion Barry yelled down the hall at her one day when he was with reporters at City Hall—she reserves other, far more saucy details of her battles with Mr. Barry for inclusion in her memoirs.
She sports a masters in Finance with honors, studied up to her comprehensive exams for a Ph.D. in Public Administration, and took a year of law school at George Washington University before taking up a career in budgeting and finance. She served as a liquidator in the S&L debacle, and was the CFO/HR Director of World Links, an NGO spun out of the World Bank to establish computer education in underfunded schools. She has been a civil rights activist since she was a teen. Liberal minded as well as a proponent of law and order, she opposed, for example, legalizing online gambling in the District.
More recently, Ms. Drissel opposed legalization of prostitution, although she said arguments on both sides of the question were persuasive. The defeated 'Community Safety and Health Amendment Act of 2019' was advanced in the District of Columbia to increase public health and safety in the District by removing criminal penalties associated with sex exchange. The bill would have repealed statutes that criminalized adults consensually engaging in sexual exchange while upholding existing laws prohibiting sex trafficking.
Strippers are not necessarily prostitutes, yet prostitution is naturally prevalent around strip clubs if not within them, at least before prostitution went underground with the Internet. Closing strip clubs on Chicago’s Rush Street in the 80s, for example, allegedly reduced prostitution arrests in their vicinity by 80%. On the other hand, legalizing prostitution may eliminate as many arrests.
It is even offered that prostitution should be legalized because it is healthy. The notion is hardly novel. Prostitution was sacred and ritually practiced in caves and temples, and primitive religions were rooted in sexual conjugation prior to the advent of Protestant protest of natural or diabolical urges; nevertheless, Catholic licensing of brothels financed many churches. Prostitution was once legal in most of the United States. Its proponents argued that it is a necessary evil that protects unmarried women from being ravaged and lessens violence and terror by providing a release for basic urges. Feminists claimed that its aggressive women led the rise of female power. Courtesans were once the mostly highly educated members of society, and they, in turn, civilized brutal men. Lenin declared marriage to be legalized prostitution while Marx thought labor was mass prostitution.
Moriah McSharry McGrath, in her 2013 feminist thesis, 'Neighboring in Strip City: A Situational Analysis of Strip Clubs, Land Use Conflict, and Occupational Health in Portland, Oregon', said that strippers have a hard job and they need to be protected. They are, she pointed out, unorganized independent contractors with no benefits, entirely at the mercy of businessmen, and looked down upon by society. She interviewed strippers and officials and residents in her home town. The bottom line for her is alcohol causes misbehavior and not the sex business. She said there is no conclusive research associating strip clubs per se with crime, so regulation is driven by public perception not empirical data. Further, police enforcement helps curb all crime. Some well-kept clubs are accepted in some neighborhoods while others are not, so residents' opinions are divided wherever they happen to be.
Katherine Frank, a Washington, D.C., anthropologist who claimed she is a feminist, stripped in clubs for six years to research the Ph.D. dissertation that became her book, G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire (2002) — She did not say she financed her education with the proceeds, a practice I discovered when I stayed in a San Francisco hotel with a lobby in between the strip club and dressing room. She concluded that men desire different kinds of bodies, not some standard ideal body, and that the clubs actually save many marriages because they can be at one with their fantasies, although she would not want her husband in one because of the expense.
Nevertheless, Ms. Drissel wants Assets shut down for good. "I do not believe there are long term careers for women nor men in the world of strip bars," she told me. "Further, there is a lot of information about labor law violations, no health benefits, only cash received for services, without being able to establish financial histories, and also for the trafficking of young children in the world of strip bars." Furthermore, she said she does not believe a strip club let alone a bar or nightclub is economically viable along that commercial strip at the foot of the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood — Sheridan Circle with General Sheridan's statue is at one corner of the area.
Jerry Schaeffer bought the corner of Florida and Connecticut Avenues in early 2019 for considerably more than the assessed value. Ms. Drissel believes a tax free exchange may have been at play to make the transaction more attractive. Apparently the adult entertainment license came with the building, which was then inhabited by the old strip club, the Royal Palace, which was not known to do much business, and the Fab Lounge upstairs, closed since 2016, which has an interesting history including being a meeting place for a sex-workers trade organization.
"So many people do not know the history of the Royal Palace and Fab Lounge," she told me. "They have not been good neighbors. The Royal Palace hardly had any clients after Fab Lounge closed in 2016. Many of us have lived in the neighborhood long before it was a strip club. We met with the owners and they ended up hiring off duty police officers to sit at the bottom of our streets to keep the drunks from tearing up our cars and properties and awakening us at night with their noisy fights."There have been few liquor license applications in the immediate area.
The strip club and the "sports bar" now being built above it do not seem to be the highest and best use of the property. Jerry Schaeffer said back in March 2019 that he had considered leasing it to Wawa, the expanding convenience store chain, but there was no demand for anything but a strip club. That may be because his son Jeffrey, listed as an officer of the company operating the strip club, wanted the place for his wife along with its cash income.
Mr. Schwartzman's prejudicial narrative jibed with the race card played by that wife, the nightclub's purported owner, Saxton Gabrielle Miller, 26, a beautiful black woman whom the reporter engaged in conversation while she threw stacks of dollar bills around as scantily clad dancers wiggled around. The club has been advertised as woman owned, yet her name had yet to appear on the official documents.
Unfortunately, the lack of information provided by the esteemed political reporter on the taxi companies, strip clubs, and a brothel called Sky Spa or Spa Sky closed by the attorney general for the District has led to unnecessary speculation that there may be some sort of vertical integration involving Asian immigrants working in the taxicab industry, nightclubs, and brothels, perhaps with ties with Asian organized crime groups. I was, however, unable to find any known mob ties to Jerry Schaeffer and his interests or any relationships to an outfit of loose associations such as that enjoyed by New York taxi king Gene Friedman, taxi medallion speculator Michael Cohen, limousine king William Fugazy, automobile executive Lee Iacocca, gambling casino entrepreneur Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and so on. Mr. Schaeffer was scandalized by the press for doing what kingpins normally do —put politicians in their pocket — when he unsuccessfully tried to get a medallion system of licensing legislated in free-wheeling Washington, but his reputation is not nearly as tarnished as members of the clan associated with today's legal outfit in the White House.
Ms. Miller told Mr. Schwartzman that protestors against her strip club were just saying what she expected 75-year-old white people to say after seeing black faces come out of the door manned by bouncers. He was evidently more than willing to play that race and age card. A Kalorama neighbor scoffed, in turn, at the notion that race was a factor in the objection to the strip club.
Prejudice is real and sells papers, but the facial protest of Assets was against the word “Assets” as advertising that would increase an already established public nuisance. That is, the protest was not against purported immorality but against the "secondary effects" of whatever was going on in and around the club. After all, the mores of a community, especially of a "swamp" occupied by so many transients, politicians, and lobbyists are subject to change as is more than evident in the current demoralization of America. Washington is said to be the U.S. capitol of corruption, but that does not preclude reform for better or worse depending on one's definition of progress, the current progress being relatively regressive as far as progressives are concerned.
What we have in this Washington Post report with its heading, 'A D.C. strip club had been there for years, but a new name is sparking protest,' is an occasion of something our nation's great leader would call "fake news," albeit unfairly, for something new is there but it is merely superficial. It is balanced in some respects, but seeks stereotypical answers to a very serious fault in our society. The article is composed in the style of the New York papers Mr. Schwartzman served well, the Daily News and Post, to please a populist base with foreshortened brains further shrunk by the rise of the internet and small screens.
Washington does not have the population of New York but it has Mr. Bezos, who saved its Post from folding. Mr. Bezos, by the way, has been quoted by Motley Fool, much to the dismay of Amazon investors who observed him unloading stock, as saying his innovative Amazonian enterprise will be out-innovated and bankrupted someday due to rapidly advancing technology. We may suppose that, instead of thinking, people will be thought by the Supermachine. The President will no longer have to mechanically cite his speeches from a monitor because his unstable mind cannot grasp long reads. His addresses will be broadcast directly to the monitodal devices implanted in brains shortly after birth.
Although Mr. Bezos saved the Washington Post and proceeded to build an "embassy" in liberal Kalorama, it is difficult to divine just what his “ideology” is from his donations, unless we define 'ideology' according to its original meaning, scientific thinking, which we know is objective as it observes bits and pieces of nature. One might expect a wealthy businessman to contribute to the two ideological sides just in case, as if there are only two sides although they reverse themselves every so often, yet thus far his most noted contributions have been somewhat neutral and rather paltry in comparison to his vast fortune. For instance, he contributed to an apparently non-partisan committee advancing the causes of veterans. That naturally drew criticism because its contributors are allegedly gun happy. He has also contributed to education, anti-homelessness, and journalism programs. He has not bragged about giving by taking the Giving Pledge. Instead, he has asked for ideas on what to do with his amassed fortune.
Mr. Bezos would be wise to stick with scientific endeavors helpful to humanity regardless of the "ideological" prejudices of its constituents. After all, he is a technocrat in the Comptean sense, that of Auguste Compte, a "positive" or scientific thinker who foresaw human progress achieved by technical collaboration and cooperation of all sorts of workers in contradistinction to uncooperative, parasitic individuals. Most of our developed economy is devoted to the production of wants and not needs, a process fraught with the destruction of the very nature we need for life. Even then, there is no good reason for unemployment for everyone who would participate, and now that we have a relatively free virtual world to participate in, there is no limit to what artful people can do without polluting the physical world given friendly energy to power the grid.
Compte's sociology, as Mr. Bezos must know, was influenced by Henri de Saint-Simon, a French businessman and veteran of the American Revolution who envisioned society led to utopia by an industrial elite. Science is not, however, the highest good without motivation. Comte fell madly in unconsummated love with one Clotilde de Vaux, a married Catholic woman, and subverted his rational system into a humanist religion after she died. He was assisted in that project by John Stuart Mill, the practical philosopher who thought men and women could resolve their sexual differences and be united in loving friendship, enjoyed a purportedly sexless marriage with Mrs. Harriet Taylor after her husband died. The new "science of ideas" and social sciences evolving from the physical sciences was elaborated as "Ideologie" by Pierre Cabanis and adopted by Thomas Jefferson at his university, replacing theology —John Adams referred to ideology as "idiotology." The political bias of this line of positive thinking was generally republican-democratic, 'republican' being a political state led by highly qualified individuals, 'democratic' meaning the best among the highly qualified are elected by its liberated citizens. The conceptual regime was conserved with constitutions written and unwritten as verbal bulwarks against the tyranny of vain, egotistical despots.
Setting that digression aside, our long journalism having lost almost all our readers by now, we or our computers know the racial divide in the area ran deep even before rented slaves helped build the White House, and much can be said about the difference between the sexes and generations. So Mr. Schwartzman was right to quote what the young black lady said to about white fear of black faces of the salt-and-pepper clientele at the Assets strip club. The reader should still know, however, regardless of his or her gender, age, and income, that, generally speaking, strip clubs are unwelcome near any residential neighborhood, despite what a student may say in her thesis for a university degree or the attempt of jurists to split pubic hairs. The combination of alcohol and public displays of genitalia in strip clubs, absent relaxing orgies, fuels violence, prostitution, drugs, and racketeering in same, not to mention traffic and parking issues, and the usual nightclub racket that keeps working folk up at night.
Mr. Schwartzman did not have time or space to disclose that, among taxi king Schaeffer's real estate holdings was a property nearby, at 1215 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., scandalized by allegations that it was being used by an Asian massage parlor tenant, S&S LLC dba Spa Sky, presided over by Hak Jae Lee of Flushing, New York, a person previously arrested for provision of illegal sexual services. The facility was owned by Sun Hwa-Lee Lim of Falls Church, Virginia, was suspected of trafficking in immigrant girls, and allegedly operated as a house of prostitution employing unlicensed massage therapists offering services not permitted in the District of Columbia.
The District has a long reputation for prostitution: in 2005, more than 40 Asian massage parlors operated as fronts for brothels, claimed Derek Ellerman, co-executive director of the Polaris Project. Each earned an average of $1.2 million a year, he said. At Spa Sky or Sky Spa, undercover police officers arrested prostitutes providing the well-advertised "Perfect Hot And Beautiful Massage." The attorney general of the District filed civil suit 0001450-11 on 24 February 2011 against the operators and Mr. Schaeffer's real estate company, and the operation, whatever it was, shut down. According to Ms. Drissel, it was only after a vigorous clamor from neighbors that decisive action was taken against the health spa.
Mr. Schwartzman also failed to solicit and include in his article the opinion of Mr. Bezos on the club despite the fact that he is one of the wealthiest men in the world even after his divorce, a prominent member of the neighborhood, and the savior of the newspaper the political journalist writes for. Furthermore, Mr. Bezos, like Ms. Calomiris, is celebrated for having a raucous laugh, the vestige of the ancient Greek roar or howling laughter of relief from tyranny after democracy was invented. That is perhaps one of the several reasons President Donald Trump, 73, who loves strippers and prefers caustic humor, hates Mr. Bezos. Mr. Bezos laughs raucously all the way to the bank, and his wad is evidently larger than the President's, at least according to stripper Stormy Daniels.
Washingtonian insiders are disinclined to warmly embrace outsiders, but the affluent residents of Kalorama, the District's knobbiest neighborhood, are glad Mr. Bezos is making the old Textile Museum into a 27,000 square-foot home with 25 bathrooms and 11 bedrooms, thus saving them from the horror of conversion of the structures into carpetbagger apartments. Speaking of George Washington, it is to the internet prophet's credit that his primary home is in a state named after George Washington, in the city of Medina, so named after the holy city on the Arabian Peninsula where Mohammad changed the direction of prayer towards Mecca.
Mr. Schwartzman sniffed around the group of protestors and kept coming back to Ms. Calomiris, dogging her for information including her telephone number. She happens to be an attractive and gregarious blonde, something she has in common with Ms. Drissel, accustomed to being the cynosure of gentlemen's attention at social functions where she has had occasion as guest speaker to raise funds to help abused women and children. She told the newshound that she believed in profitable free trade after he prompted her to do so when he discovered she was somebody, but she added that the sort of trade that Assets engaged in belonged in Las Vegas and not in Kalorama because the times had changed with #Metoo and Jeffrey Epstein.
She made the mistake of responding with persiflage as the reporter persisted with his flirtations, coming back around to her time and again, yet not inviting her to Assets for a drink. She is old school, hailing back to the days when the likes of Marilyn Monroe knew that they could joke around without editors using every detail volunteered, like what she said to a reporter when she dismounted from an airplane to marry Joe DiMaggio in 1954, so she did not expect every scintilla of her banter to be used as if it were news by the prestigious Washington Post, particularly her shameless brag, followed by a "raucous laugh," that she has a young Brazilian boyfriend in Miami.
The "flurry of personal details" Ms. Calomiris "volunteered" included the fact she is a member of a prominent Washington family, had never demonstrated before, had attended finishing school in the '60s, had never smoked, and had been married "several" times. The last, unnecessarily reported detail was perhaps printed to imply that women who protest strip clubs and have been married more than twice but not many times are hypocritical strippers themselves. That being said, it is true that Elizabeth Calomiris, nee Betty Jane Houser, is the matriarch of the Calomiris family, landholding Washingtonians of Greek heritage. She brought to the Greeks her noble German heritage. Her own forbears settled in Tennessee, where her grandmother was the land purchasing agent for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Her late father served the nation as a nuclear warfare intelligence consultant.
If the biased political reporter had been more interested in people instead of the sensationalist angle on his story, that rich old white residents were making a fuss in front of a strip club owner's house in their neighborhood, he would have questioned Ms. Calomiris properly and discovered that, after attending finishing school, which comes highly recommended for good girls along with ballet or gymnastics, she served National Geographic as an illustrator. Not only does she not smoke, the mere scent of marijuana tempts her to call the police, and, she is responsible for the conviction and rehabilitation of a former husband, a major stock swindler, in Clinton prison, notorious among cons for its tight security although several people then escaped with the help of a guard, a married woman enamored by a prisoner. Although she refuses to speak of politics in polite society, she is a staunch conservative who goes to work rather than protest on the street as liberals are wont to do.
A precise division into conservative or liberal is a false dichotomy depending on what some people want to preserve and from what they would be liberated. Many women who believe they are conservative do not know that they are conserving themselves as wage slaves and sex slaves who dare not protest patriarchy. The subordination of females is prehistoric despite the rumors of a matriarchal society. Women had to succumb to the stronger sex in order to survive, and suicide ran rife in some cultures. Their complaints were necessarily limited to pouting and sulking, as described in the Vedas. And upon the death of their husbands they were considered worthless and were thrown onto the funeral pyre and burned with their husbands. Fathers loved their daughters but moaned their birth, for they were treated like cattle, and even of late are raped and butchered. The only cultured and sophisticated women in the “good old days” some conservatives would conserve were concubines and prostitutes in harems. That is why historians have said the progress of civilization may be measured by the way women are treated. And that includes the manner in which they are respected, and that does not mean being placed romantically upon a pedestal and idolized and then taken down and debased including put in showers nude and be ogled at pruriently as so much brainlessly wiggling meat.
Despite her conservative tendency, Ms. Calomiris is no prude. She knows what all too many females have suffered in order to survive since time immemorial. Yet here, in the Washington Post Political section, politics being about who has power and why, including in the great battle between men and men and women in general, she was cast as one of twenty wealthy old white prudes making a big deal about a sign that might as well have been a pornographic illustration of a giant derriere for all they were concerned by the vision of ASSETS. If he had conducted a thorough investigation, he would know that young people have protested the renewal of the license because of disturbances of the peace and parking issues, and they have made videos of noisy incidents.
I suggested that, if the neighbors are interested in making a case against the renewal of Assets' liquor license, they should call the police about every disturbance and make sure their complaints become reported by the police department for future reference. And they should obtain the police record of complaints over the last ten years and examine the possibility that there is some concealed connection between the old and new operations of the club.
It seems that only one serious police incident so far at the newly named club, which got its certificate of occupancy in June 2019 and applied to renew the license that Mr. Schaeffer’s limited liability front, Voyager 888 LLC, had obtained thanks to the real estate deal. The nightclub was investigated in December by George M. Garcia of the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration (ABRA), Investigation Number 19-251-00157, Case Report signed 4 December 2019.
A complaint of Robbery and Assault at Assets was made to the police department on 19 October 2019 by a man who had fled the scene to a place nearby to call the police. The victim of the alleged assault and robbery was accused of stealing money from the strippers. He was evicted from the club, beaten up, knocked down and kicked until he bled on the ground, by four of seven security guards present at the club after he tried to retrieve seized property he had taken from his person and placed on the hood of a vehicle to be searched.
A member of the security staff said the victim hit him in the face and grabbed his necklace when he tried to return the phone the man had dropped. A security guard said the man had tried to enter the club with a knife on him, but was then allowed to enter after he hid the knife at the Rite Aid across the street.
Jeffrey Schaeffer was identified as the owner and interviewed by the ABRA investigator. He was found to have scant knowledge of proper security procedures. He was not present at the time of the incident and was unaware that the club's surveillance cameras were inadequate. None of the guards were employed by Assets, Mr. Schaeffer said. They were employed by "American Protection Professional."
The victim was arrested later on in an unrelated matter yet was not available for an interview. Curiously, neither was the policeman who responded to the complaint at the club.
Mr. Garcia found no violation of the 2001 Settlement Agreement, but he concluded that the club was in violation of their approved Security Plan because the manager was not notified of the incident immediately; the violence was not immediately reported to the police department; several surveillance cameras were inoperable; the incident involving injury was not logged into an Incident Report Log along with contact information of the persons involved; and no such log was being kept in the office as required. Furthermore, an investigator determined that security staff lied about details of the event.
The ABRA report appears deficient enough to call for a further investigation into the possibility of a most troubling violation of the section of the District of Columbia Official Code, requiring the licensee or a manager licensed by ABRA to be present and responsible at the establishment during the hours liquor is being served. The outside security company was apparently running the club, so it should be thoroughly investigated.
Mr. Schaeffer was not present when the incident occurred 19 October, and, when interviewed on 17 November, he was found ignorant of the details of what had happened. The report does not include an interview with a licensed manager. A form dated 2 November requesting the surveillance camera record names one Tracy Kirby, ABRA License #115580, Exp. 28 January 2020, as the licensed manager, yet that name does not appear on the original police report nor was she interviewed by ABRA although a licensed manager is required by law to have been present in the absence of Mr. Schaeffer. The signature on that form is redacted, blacked out, leaving only two high loops in the hand of the person that signed. Those loops suggest that Mr. Schaeffer, who was not present on that date, but was interviewed on a later date, may have signed the form on the later date, rather than Tracy Kirby. If that is the case, it would arouse suspicion of impropriety.
Ms. Miller, when interviewed by the Washington Post, claimed to be the wife of the owner and the "proprietor" of the establishment, according to the reporter, and for all intents and purposes, the manager, yet her name does not appear as a licensed manager or owner. Neither was she reportedly interviewed by the police or the ABRA investigator, so it is fair to conclude that she was not present at the event either. All that if true would be cause to suspend or revoke the establishment's license.
The District Code provides a procedure for parties to protest liquor licenses. A protest dated 24 November was made by St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, which is located across the street from the strip club. Conceived in 1892 in what was then an affluent suburb, the church's patron is Saint Margaret of Wessex (1045-1093), an English princess and a queen of Scotland known for bringing the practices of the Scottish church in line with those in Rome and on the Continent. She was canonized in 1250 by Pope Innocent IV for her piety, charitable projects, and ministry to disadvantaged people. St. Margaret's and its Priest-in-Charge, Rev. Weinberg, who is fluent in Spanish and has served God in Costa Rica and El Salvador, are well regarded for ministering to Hispanic immigrants, the homeless, the poor, LGBTQ, and other underprivileged persons in accordance with Christian precepts and their fundamental mission, to realize the full potential of humans as beings created in God's image.
Rev. Weinberg opined in his protest letter that stripping does not support "vibrant all-inclusive family friendly worship." He said the church's opposition started in 1986, when a former rector of St. Margaret's voiced formal opposition to the Royal Palace operating there since 1975, presenting evidence to the liquor control board that parishioners and staff had been attacked by drunken clients of the strip club and the church property had been littered. Considerable expenditures were made since to improve the church property, he said, and damage to the property was feared.
"Now we are confronted with the name of the operation changed from an innocuous name -- the Royal Palace -- to a signage in pink and purple with the name Assets. We believe this is sexually suggestive and not in keeping with the residential character of our changed neighborhood." At least the name should be changed, he wrote, and hours of operation limited.
I thought confession booths, an important element of the Catholic Church, should be recommended for Assets’ customers, but confession of sins to priests is not practiced in the Episcopal Church.
The protest from the church was dismissed by the Board because a representative did not appear for the hearing and because a non-profit church does not have legal standing before the Board. Official neighborhood councils do have standing, and other protests against the renewal of the license are scheduled to be heard in March and April of 2020.
A protest to ABRA was also made by Mr. Friedman, president of the Sheridan-Kalorama Neighborhood Council. He is a prominent Washington litigator who in his 43-years of practice thus far has litigated almost every kind of commercial dispute. He happens to also be a pilot, someone very interested in getting to a destination as directly and quickly a possible. He advocated efficient case management for early dispute resolution long before arbitration and mediation became the ethical thing for lawyers to do instead of fighting for the sake of fighting to run up fees. Given his penchant for mediation, he may attempt to arrive at some sort of settlement agreement with the club, whereas Ms. Drissel wants it gone.
Assets disturbs the peace, Mr. Friedman wrote, interfering with the residents' quiet enjoyment of their neighborhood with noise, litter, and at least one instance of violence thus far. It has an adverse impact on the parking needs in the area, interferes with traffic flow including access by emergency vehicles, has only two parking spots on Florida Avenue, and the sidewalk in front of the club is inadequate for the crowds attracted, endangering pedestrians and persons getting in and out of cars. Nude dancing "is like to depress property values" in the area. Finally, the sign "Assets" does not comply with applicable laws and the settlement agreement because the word "Assets," according to the Urban Dictionary, denotes "boobs, bett, hips" and the root word of the noun is "ass." So the neighborhood looks forward to settlement discussions on the issues with Assets, and a hearing of their protest if settlement is not obtained.
The actual root words involved are the Latin 'ad satis' or 'to enough,' in French 'asez' or 'enough', meaning asset, sufficient estate to allow for the discharge of a will. That was done in England, as Mr. Friedman would know, in a session of a law court called an assize where cases are assessed and settled. Neither of the terms are directly related to our 'ass', derived from the Latin asinus, in Old English 'assen' or 'she-ass', meaning, first of all, a horse-like animal, applied to a stupid person often said to be a horse's ass, and, more vulgarly, the buttocks, or the ass-end of anything.
An ass is an ass is an ass by no other name. Ms. Miller said that the name "Assets" could be changed to "church" and the stodgy white people would still complain.
Obviously the sign is not the main issue nor is it race. The problem seems to be the unwanted crowd public nudity attracts. The advertisement is protested because it might add to that crowd, all to the detriment of the neighborhood. As for the District itself, there is a moratorium on establishments which permit nude dancing. A licensee who regularly provided entertainment by nude dancers before December 15, 1993, may continue to do so at its establishment. Nine of twelve transferable licenses are presently in use, and here are zoning limitations to transferability. Since nobody wants strip clubs in or near their neighborhood except a limited number of clientele, perhaps the majority of them transient, it may behoove the government to zone them out without grandfathering any of the existing clubs.
Several cities have banned nude exhibitions in public places from city precincts altogether or have exiled them to boondocks on the city limits.
In 1976, Detroit became one of the first cities in the US to introduce zoning laws that were designed to counter the clustering together of adult businesses into a red light district. The law banned strip clubs from locating within 1,000 feet of any two existing adult businesses or within 500 feet of any residential area. Eagerness to follow the Detroit zoning method quickly spread to other cities.
New York City's former Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously abhorred New York City's adult establishments, calling them a "corrosive institution." It was during his reign in 1995 that New York City Council amended certain zoning laws to ban adult entertainment in commercial districts like Times Square and barred them from operating within 500 feet of residences, schools, or places of worship. These restrictive zoning laws are what forced strip clubs to sprout in neighborhoods on the peripheries of the outer boroughs, like the South Bronx, an industrial zone.
In 2015 an effort was made to wipe out strip clubs in the Bronx. Politicians led what was called a "witch hunt" in the Hunts Point neighborhood to shut down the clubs by revoking their liquor licenses. A club called Platinum Pleasures was closed down in the South Bronx during the crackdown. Their tactic was been simple and effective, particularly in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx: Instead of going after the clubs themselves, they went after their liquor licenses, considered to be a faulty approach by defensive lawyers.
In 2017 the Reno City Council voted to require adult businesses like strip clubs to move out of the downtown area to industrial zones closer to the edges of town. Indeed, that approach, to put their adult uses in industrial zones and not in urban mixed-use residential and commercial zoning districts, is typical. Votes as well as money counts, and politicians are wont to heed bigger numbers of both. Wealthier neighborhood lead the way, so perhaps politicians and the residents and attorneys for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood will expand their crusade to the entire district, doing away with the moratorium on new licenses as well as getting rid of existing licenses.
Specific city ordinances funnel strip clubs and sex shops into specific areas downtown, virtually spot zoning those areas. Perhaps the District of Columbia will keep them of Connecticut running northwest from Dupont Circle.
As of 2018 in Minneapolis it was legal to open a strip club downtown as long as it was not within 500 feet of a church or within 1,000 feet of a residential zone, or on Nicollet Mall, or if another strip club is already on the same side of the block. I visited a museum converted into a strip club in Minneapolis, at the turn of the century when I was a jazz dancer. I liked the bartender, a young lady studying to become a mortician. I was not interested in strip dancing unless it was artfully choreographed, so I offered some choreographic advice along the lines of striptease dancing.
Back in New York, a federal judge in 2019 blocked the city from enforcing the controversial strip club rules. The case worked its way through the courts for 17 years while the clubs remained open. Judge Pauley ruled that the city's zoning regulations infringed on freedom of speech rights and left them without viable alternatives, that is, places where they could move their business to comply with zoning law.
In another 2019 case, two strip clubs will keep operating in downtown Augusta while they challenge the city's zoning laws. The Augusta Chronicle reported that the heirs of James “Whitey” Lester sued the city in May of that year, saying city zoning laws violate constitutional guarantees of free speech and equal protection. A 1997 city ordinance had decreed that businesses in heavy industrial zones could host nude dancing or serve alcohol, but not do both. While four other strip bars closed, Lester's two businesses were grandfathered and continued to operate. Earlier in 2019, Lester, Augusta commissioners denied his request to allow him to transfer licenses to operate the Discotheque Lounge and Joker’s Lounge to a relative.
The constitutional right to free speech is not a right to inflict harm on the public, and the constituted police power including the courts have an immediate governmental interest in protecting the public from harmful behavior. There is, for instance, no absolute right to incite riots or advocate the violent overthrow of the government. In the case of Assets the jurists would consider the a city's substantial interest in protecting the public from the so-called negative secondary effects of strip clubs: an atmosphere conducive to violence, sexual harassment, public intoxication, prostitution, human trafficking, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and other deleterious effects such as the demoralization of children.
The Assets nightclub might prevail in court given the current demoralization of the nation and the stacking of the court with justices favored by a President fond of strippers. The U.S. Supreme Court has not been enthusiastic about banning strip clubs on the basis of nudity. Challenges have indeed reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the usual hairsplitting was conducted in accordance with the inherently irrational casuistry or case-by-case law typical of the Anglo-American judicial system, which supports the political-economic dominance of the legal profession over all walks of life via the speciously divided three branches of government. So we have “the O'Brien test” for evaluating restrictions on symbolic speech; to wit, the government generally has a freer hand in restricting expressive conduct than it has in restricting the written or spoken word. We should not be surprised, however, if so-called pussy-whistling is considered to be free speech; there was a popular place on Oahu frequently by men and women to get a laugh, and a free drink if they retrieved a flashing dildo a woman on a swing emitted from between her legs, and then she played the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.
The decisions made in a particular case are not, on the one hand, supposed to apply to all similar cases because each case is unique, yet, on the other hand, the rationalizations arrived at in a "leading" case may be used as doctrine to guide to decisions in other cases. The casuistry may become so obviously absurd from time to time that precedents must be overturned and new ones fabricated. Judges, despite their dissents, which are supposed to be ignored after rendered, prefer to remain steadfast in their biases for long enough to give their interpretative law a semblance of permanence or legitimacy. Yet there is almost inevitably a time for the overturning of everything man made, including leading cases, maxims, and doctrines, given the presumed moral progress of the race.
In the end, the people rule, if need be, by revolution: the judges will be hanged if they do not abide with the Rousseauian “general will.”
In any case, if Assets winds up in the courts, we cannot be certain of the outcome except that that it may have no assets left after payment of the legal fees. I have suggested that the wealthy residents of Kalorama arrange for the purchase of the property to put it to what they perceive to be its highest and best use instead of wasting time and money on protesting its present use and trying to get its license revoked. After all, $10 million is chump change to the likes of Bezos. Or they could prevail on their neighbor to please not only the neighbors but other tenants to convert the usage of the corner to something decent, like a Turkish restaurant with belly dancing and a dance school upstairs, and to enforce residential parking with immediate towing and $1,000 fines.
xYx
From the first photo I would immediately protest Jerry Schaeffer, for his despicable neglect of his property and would ask the good citizens of Kalorama to immediately fine him for his unkept front lawn and ill trimmed grass--what a disgrace! If he counters, capitalist that he is, that he does not have to maintain between the sidewalk and the curb, city property. We should still protest him for his lack of liberalism in relying on his taxes to take care of the vital curbside domain of dogs and their primary source of a bathroom.
So well written as usual. Enjoyed the segues into the Obamas and Mr. Bezos.
Ron