The Dirty, Dirty Abandoned Strip Club

The Dirty Strip Club is the second abandoned strip club we’ve hit in recent years, though it definitely wins the ‘more disgusting’ award.

“The Dirty” had a flavor all it’s own. Abandoned for a few years, this was, in the 1990s, a popular spot. Strangely enough there would be men lined up around the corner and down an alley waiting to get in. This generally confused the hell out of me, since down that alley was a sweet abandoned spot that real women loved to visit and paint graffiti at. It was a bit of pure comedy really – I’d walk out of the abandoned spot with a smoking hot girl carrying my paint, and she’d see someone she knew in the line, point and say hey man what’s up?! That dude’s face went red fast.

And that’s why I never understood strip clubs. What’s the point? To throw money at ugly junkie women and not get laid? I suppose the long line was testament to horrible social skills of the guys standing in said line.

History
Originally called the “30-30 club” (named after its address – 30-30 Northern Blvd), this once happening strip club was one of the first to operate in the Queens Plaza area. After NYC Mayor Ghooliani (1990s) started kicking strip clubs out of Times Square in order to turn it into a tourist mecca, many of the clubs opened in LIC under different names. The club occupied the front half of the ground floor within the ‘Apple Tag and Label’ building.

Illegal Rodeo = Raging Bull Shootout
On June 20th, 1999 – the ‘parking lot’ on the north side of the club was rented out for an illegal rodeo. The rodeo featured a large bull named “Roughrider”. When the police ordered the lot vacated, Roughrider decided he wasn’t going back in the trailer he had just been transported all the way from North Carolina in, and instead fled through the streets of western Queens. He was cornered in a housing project parking lot nearly a mile away and gunned down Amadou Diallo style in a hail of NYPD bullets. While the NY Times only reported that cops fired on Roughrider in the parking lot, other NYC tabloids and neighborhood gossip was that cops were driving alongside of the bull unloading their guns as he ran through the streets.

By the late 90s and early 00’s, the club was catering towards a more ghetto clientele. The club closed sometime in the mid to late 00s’. We broke in soon thereafter, revisiting several times until serious gut renovation work began in 2012. Inside the strip club we found some nasty, disgusting ‘private rooms’ in the back with sticky floors, used condoms and leftover stripper underwear tossed about. Definitely one of the more vile places I’ve come across in my years of exploring.

(Revised, Jan 12. 2014)