Strip club facing its last dance Diva’s owner faces closure unless council reconsiders

loading...

BANGOR – Jessie, a 23-year-old single mother, steps off the blue-lit stage at Diva’s clutching a handful of bills and the red dress she had thrown to the floor earlier in her performance.

With plans to go to college once her 3-year-old daughter starts school, Jessie – her stage name – holds up her cash and makes her way into the adjoining Bikini Lounge for a glass of water.

But with the club’s owner facing a city-mandated June 1 deadline to either move the exotic dancing establishment out of the downtown or stop the music altogether, Jessie – who just found out she is pregnant again – is worried.

“There’s not many people here tonight, but you still make some money,” she said over the thumping music and the disc jockey’s booming introduction of the next topless dancer at the city’s last remaining “gentlemen’s club.”

On a good night the controversial club draws 20 to 30 men, each of whom pays the $10 cover charge. Tipping the dancers is “required and appreciated,” according to a sign in the entrance.

Jessie is one of about 20 dancers – “a family,” she said – at the State Street establishment, nestled between one of the city’s most prestigious churches and most powerful companies.

“This works for me,” she said in an earlier interview after booking a bachelor party during a break from cleaning the club. “Here, I have the opportunity to make some money and support my family and spend time with my daughter during the day.

“When you have something that works, you want to keep it,” she continued, snuffing out a cigarette at a small corner table.

For Diane Cormier-Youngs, the 38-year-old owner of Diva’s, keeping her business open this long has meant a three-year battle with the City Council, which in 1998 passed an ordinance that requires her to relocate her 5-year-old exotic dance club to the city’s outskirts in about six weeks.

Today, “Boss Lady Di,” as she’s known to her employees, will return to the council in hopes it will consider amending its decision and allow the business to stay put.

“This is my life,” Cormier-Youngs said as she looked out her third-floor window onto the nearby City Hall. “I just can’t give up what I’m good at, and there’s a lot of people depending on me.”

But armed with a signed 1999 agreement in which Cormier-Youngs – under extreme financial pressures, she said – resolved to relocate and drop any legal appeals of the ordinance, city officials are unlikely to review what proved a highly contentious issue three years ago.

“We’ll certainly listen to her thought process, but unless there’s new information, I don’t believe there’s going to be a councilor willing to pick up that banner,” Mayor John Rohman said.

Reacting to a number of public concerns, including those from the neighboring All Souls Congregational Church and Bangor Hydro-Electric Co., the council in 1998 crafted a slate of rules regulating commercial nudity in the city.

In addition to banning alcohol and full nudity from such establishments, new zoning requirements relegated exotic dancing to the high-priced land near the Bangor Mall as well as remote commercial sections of Hammond and Union streets.

Cormier-Youngs insists that part of the new information for the council to consider is that, despite her repeated attempts to do so, relocation in those areas has been impossible without daunting capital investment.

“I’ve tried,” the club owner said this week pointing to the poster-sized zoning maps of Bangor taped to her upstairs apartment walls. “There’s no place to go.”

That’s just fine with the club’s harshest critics, who say the establishment’s high-visibility location is but one of the reasons to oppose such businesses, which are often seen as fronts for prostitution rings, magnets for crime and deterrents for new business.

“Location is part of the issue but certainly not the whole issue,” said the Rev. James Haddix from All Souls. “We simply think it’s an inappropriate business.”

Cormier-Youngs, mentioning that she was raised Catholic, insisted that the club enforces strict no-touching rules, has abided by all city decency ordinances and only seldom has required a police presence.

Bangor Police Chief Donald Winslow confirmed that the force is rarely called to the establishment, attributing the low crime rate to the fact that the business cannot serve alcohol.

On an early Wednesday evening, the establishment was far from raucous, with just a handful of casually dressed middle-aged men sitting quietly watching the dancers perform to the pulsating music. The men, on a dancer’s cue, carefully slipped bills into a waiting garter or thong.

Despite her relatively clean track record, she said, Cormier-Youngs has no illusions that the public would rush to the defense of her adult-entertainment business.

But questions remain – at least in the mind of one city councilor – whether the club owner was treated fairly by the city, which for the first time in recent memory didn’t grandfather an existing business after changing the rules.

“As a businessman, I can sympathize,” said City Councilor Daniel Tremble, adding that he would consider bringing the measure before the council at another meeting if he felt there were enough support. “If that happened to me, I’d be ballistic.”

Portland, which adopted ordinances similar to Bangor’s in 1997, did grandfather that city’s only strip club, Mark’s Showplace. But New York City has an ordinance with a one-year grandfathered period – with the availability of an appeal under economic hardship if the business couldn’t move.

While the Bangor council didn’t exempt Diva’s from the 1998 rules, the city’s 1999 agreement with Cormier-Youngs did extend the time the business could stay downtown in an attempt to allow the club’s owner to recoup her investment.

Cormier-Youngs said that if the council declined to grandfather her downtown club, she would likely apply for a liquor license and look to turn the place into a “Hooters-type” establishment, referring to the national chain of restaurants known for its scantily clad waitresses.

But, for now, the club owner is looking to keep doing what she’s been doing.

And, for now, so is Jessie.

“Right now it’s enough where I can even put a little money away,” she said after her three-song set. “I know I won’t be doing this forever. At some point this part of my life will be over.”