and the begining of another!
The fun and excitment in OV never ends!! Thanks to the Virginia Pilot for this...
NORFOLK — On a recent Thursday evening, Tony Rominiyi sat at the bar of his Platinum Gentlemen’s Club and Sports Bar at the corner of East Ocean View Avenue and 10th Bay Street and pondered his place in local history.
Behind him, a baseball game was in progress on the big-screen TV, but nary a gentleman was watching. Instead, their attention was trained on a pair of young women slinking around the T-shaped stage that ran down the middle of the room.
One woman in a wisp of white bikini dropped to all fours and set her rear end on spin cycle as the hip-hop blared . The other pranced the length of the stage in a brown bikini and impossibly high heels, approaching one of the floor-to-ceiling poles with a “Now who put that there?” expression on her face before embracing it like a lusty firefighter.
Rominiyi shuts his doors today for good in a deal to avoid criminal proceedings for a host of violations. Nearby at the end of Shore Drive, The Flame Gentlemen’s Club and Sports Bar closes today as well to make way for a marina expansion.
So end the days of go-go in Ocean View, the latest chapter in the redevelopmental explosion of the past decade, fueled by the steady march of high-end real estate down Ocean View Avenue.
How one views these clubs’ passing depends on which side of the T-shaped stage one stands.
On one side: the club owners, their staffs, the dancers, the customers. On the other: the City Council and neighbors who don’t care where the first group goes as long as the go-go’s gone.
It’s as if they think, Rominiyi said, that “the land will be paved with gold if you run these businesses out of town.”
Go-go bars and their equally nocturnal cousins – the dive bars, the seedy night clubs – have long been part of the city’s unwritten history, rolling from one neighborhood to another in waves, popping up wherever they could find solid ground.
Once a staple of Granby and East Main streets, they were pushed out of downtown by redevelopment. Some set up shop at the north end of Hampton Boulevard, near Norfolk Naval Station and its reliable supply of customers.
By the late 1970s, the clubs were settling like sand throughout Ocean View, where city zoning was too vague to prevent them. In the early 1980s, there were about three dozen such places, said Jim Janata, president of the area’s Ward 5 Partnership of civic leagues.
The names gave passers-by a good idea of what was going on inside the mostly windowless buildings: Grinders, Foxy Ladies, Connie’s Go-Go, Lovely Ladies, Flirts.
At the time, an overwhelming percentage of East Ocean View homes were rentals, Janata said.
With so many absentee landlords, the bar owners ran the community as their rowdy customers sped through neighborhoods late at night, throwing out bottles and cans, urinating in yards.
The homeowners’ response was to strengthen the civic leagues. At first, the groups got nowhere with the state bureaucrats who regulate bars, Janata said. If there were already 35 clubs, the logic went, how could a 36th make a difference?
So the civic leagues changed tack and started going after the clubs based on proliferation, Janata said, arguing that too many created an aura of permissiveness. They chartered buses to carry their members to Richmond for hearings. After countless such trips, they began to prevail.
The City Council added another weapon in the late 1970s, requiring an extra layer of approval before an establishment could serve alcohol. By the mid-1990s, that permitting process had expanded to include places providing adult entertainment.
The existing nightspots were grandfathered in, but that would lapse if they ever closed. Neighbors and city officials waited. But they didn’t exactly sit on their hands.
As for whether the city actually went after the clubs, Councilman W. Randy Wright prefers to say, “We’ve monitored their activities.” In the case of The Flame and Platinum, they didn’t have to look hard.
In February 2005, a couple of dancers at The Flame performed a bit overzealously in front of undercover agents. Wardrobe malfunctions ensued. The state fined the club’s owners and briefly suspended their license.
In Platinum’s case, “lewd and disorderly conduct” also was the tipping point. First, the club was put on probation for an illegal lap dance in one of the club’s private booths in January 2005.
As the year passed, the charges kept coming: noise complaints, more lewd dancing, several assaults, a dancer soliciting an undercover police officer for prostitution. A security guard was stabbed in the hand. In a separate incident, someone was shot to death in the parking lot after the club had closed. Most recently, a dancer was accused in February of flashing an undercover officer.
State regulators found that Rominiyi wasn’t to blame for the stabbing or shooting, but declared that Platinum’s lewd and disorderly conduct was chronic. In April, they revoked Rominiyi’s license.
In early May, in exchange for the city dropping charges against him, Rominiyi agreed to close and to never again hold a liquor license in Norfolk.
At his club last week, he defended himself as three young women worked the stage behind him to a pulsating backbeat , their neon bathing suits glowing eerily orange and green in the low light.
A native of Nigeria, Rominiyi spent much of his 22 years in this country working in New York City. Norfolk has been even tougher, he said, no matter how hard he’s tried to cooperate.
“These are jungle tactics that happen in a Third World country,” he fumed. “I come from a Third World country. I know!”
Platinum has eight employees and 25 dancers, he said, all of whom will be out of work as of Thursday. One of the dancers, a woman who would give her name only as Dazzle, is among them.
“The way they treat this club is absurd,” she said as she waited for her ride. “There’s nothing going on here that’s not going on at other clubs.”
Dazzle ha s been dancing for 10 years up and down the East Coast.
She now dances six nights a week, four or five hours a night, solely for tips. The money is her half of the family income, she said, and is helping raise her two young children and put herself through school.
“It’s hard to protest with the type of business we’re in,” she said.
“We’re just trying to make a living here.”
The worn-out strip mall where The Flame stands once housed a thrift store, hair salon, home-style cooking restaurant and pawn shop. The only other remaining tenant – adult bookstore Shore Drive Books – will consolidate at its other location near Norfolk Naval Station.
One afternoon last week, inside the empty club, a dancer lay stretched out along the edge of the octagonal stage, watching a daytime talk show with a bartender.
Kim Davis, The Flame’s manager for the past 16 years, walked to the back of the club, passed through a storage room and threw open the back door to the midday sun and the future.
The massive Taylor’s Landing boatel loomed in the distance. In the foreground, dozens of high-end boats stood on trailers and blocks, filling the parking lot all the way to the club.
The owners of Taylor’s Landing bought the building and The Flame’s lease last year.
They plan to develop 51 condos, a coffeehouse, and some shops aimed at a trendier clientele. Construction is expected to start in August.
Emmanuel Oshin, who owns The Flame with his brother, said they are fans of the development.
“It’s doing a good thing for the area, for the city, for the community,” he said. “The city of Norfolk is doing excellent. It’s time to move on.”
The Flame celebrated last week with a farewell party and dance-off featuring the Still Crunk Girls versus The Flame Girls.
Next stop, a “re-grand opening” at the remodeled Flame II on Lynnhaven Parkway on Friday.
For his part, Rominiyi chose to exit without fanfare.
“It’s not a good feeling to go out of business,” he said.
He paid off the club itself last year and thought he would have at least five more years to recoup his investment. He doesn’t own the squat cinder block building that housed Platinum and doesn’t know what will happen to it.
Now that he’s outlawed in Norfolk, Rominiyi plans to focus on his Club Paradise go-go bar in Chesapeake and on “another investment,” upon which he declined to elaborate.
“I can walk away from this city,” he said. “There are millions of cities in America. I can make it big-time.”
Behind him, customers approached the stage, dropping dollar bills at the dancers’ feet.
