Pittsburgh Public Schools administrators along Ninth Street.The strip club (originally the Edison Hotel, then Club Elite, currently Blush) proposes to expand beyond the dimensions it has occupied for decades.
Downtown's tuxedoed arbiters of taste object (perhaps because Blush survives without public money while the hospitality venues arranged by the Cultural Trust -- like those funded by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, Sports and Exhibition Authority, and other public agencies -- routinely fail despite massive subsidies).
The school district also objects, because a high school is situated within a block of the strip club (although not necessarily because the district regrets its dopey decision to place a high school for stage-struck girls within a block of a hiring office for strippers).
The strip club strives to dissipate any "we were here first" sympathy by selecting as its public spokesman the mouthpiece of choice among our community's nuisance bars and sketchy liquor license applicants (and, of course, the former partner of InsolvenCity's current solicitor).
The only sensible approach to this fight might be to root for each side to beat the hell out of the other.
Infytune: Patricia The Stripper, Chris De Burgh
9 comments:
whoever finds these songs is great
whoever finds these songs is great
Infy--
You bring up a great point -- That being, "Why the hell did the School District locate half a block from a strip club in the first place?". But you left out one even more important question: "Why, when the building in question to be used as an expanse of the strip club hit the market, didn't the school district make an offer for it?"
Seems to me that the subject property could have been purchased by the school district and then this expansion, clearly an anathema to the Board of Education, wouldn't even be in play?
Once the Rogers CAPA (middle-school) students were put there during the recent right-sizing, wouldn't that have only made sense? It's rather doubtful that the taxpayers, already on the hook for the capital the high school's construction expended, would have not seen the expenditure as the lesser of two evils.
Talk about dropped "balls."
You bring up a great point -- That being, "Why the hell did the School District locate half a block from a strip club in the first place?".
Perhaps it was the internship/work-study/externship prospects -- teenage girls who want to be on stage placed a half-block from the window that distributes job applications for new strippers.
What could go wrong?
Perhaps CAPA is located where it is because when construction was being considered there was a big piece of Downtown land available that happened to be located in the Cultural District--you know, the place where there are all those theaters and performance spaces featuring Broadway shows and plays and concerts and ballet and opera and stuff that stagestruck girls, and boys, might be interested in.
But what I really want to know is, why the hell did they build the Convention Center just one block from the Edison Hotel?! Oh, the humanity!
Blush's expansion was measured to be "exactly 25%" of its total prior area. Not "just barely under" 25%, but "exactly" 25%. That's truly remarkable. Do they measure down to the square inch? Do they round up or down, and to what sort of round number? Do they measure each room and then round each time, or do they add all the raw fine numbers together? And who is responsible for the measuring? Regardless, it came out "exactly" 25%, which is the legal cut-off for special exceptions. They must have been sweating bullets.
Perhaps CAPA is located where it is because when construction was being considered there was a big piece of Downtown land available that happened to be located in the Cultural District--you know, the place where there are all those theaters and performance spaces featuring Broadway shows and plays and concerts and ballet and opera and stuff that stagestruck girls, and boys, might be interested in.
Great plan, until one considers the strip club and bars within a block of the property. Then it becomes just another afternoon at InsolvenCity's planning desk.
Please, when you hear about a CAPA student dancing at Blush, let us know pronto then call 911. In the meantime, I'll keep a look out for high school students all around the city who might happen walk past a prostitute or massage parlor or drug dealer on their way to school and decide that that's the career for them.
Anon 11:18- with the exception of Brashear students, all Pittsburgh Public HS students who do not walk to school are issued monthly bus passes to get to school (Brashear is off of regular bus lines so those getting bus passes are from areas with too few students to send a school bus). Almost all of them come downtown to catch connecting busses and thus all of them walk past hookers, massage parlors, and drug dealers.
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