Fantasies Made Fresh

Brooklyn, Illinois, has one of the densest clusters of strip clubs and rubdown parlors anywhere in the country, drawing patrons from nearby St. Louis and its suburbs. Inside the clubs with the dancers, a strip-club scholar, the mayor, and the regulars whose dollars keep the depressed local economy afloat.

MAISONNEUVE / DEC 2004

At the Diamond Cabaret, the Platinum Club, the Jewel Box and the Crystal Palace; at Roxy’s, Miss Kitty’s, Dollie’s Playhouse and PT’s; at the Chameleon Club, the Pink Slip, the S&L Rub and C-Mowes; at all the strip clubs and massage parlours that do business in the communities that ring East St. Louis like a noose, people gather by the thousands in the wee hours of a weekend morning. They come from the farm towns of downstate Illinois and from the anonymous bedroom cities that cluster to the north along the Mississippi River. They come from the Ozark hinterlands of interior Missouri and from the riverine industrial zones south on Interstate 55. But mostly they arrive from St. Louis and St. Louis County, from the gateway metropolis that masses two million strong just across the river to the west. Customers and staff alike, they come speeding in their automobiles on Interstate 64-40, up over the Poplar Street Bridge, and down from Missouri into Illinois. Often they will couple their visits to the strip clubs with stops of varying duration at the billiard-green gaming tables of the Casino Queen, a gambling emporium housed in a fake riverboat. The Casino Queen floats in “port” along the Illinois side of the river, and from the perspective of a car high atop the Poplar Street Bridge, it resembles a giant red-neon cyst. Billboards along the highway announce the bawdry:

Fantasies Made Fresh Daily
Roxy’s
Platinum Club USA
Route 3 North to Brooklyn


And their abundance turns other highway signs into messages that are vaguely obscene. “The French Dip—New at Hardee’s.” “Dungeon Halloween Costumes.” “Our Lady of the Snows.” Even the sign at the state line, “The People of Illinois Welcome You,” becomes, somehow, a lurid enticement….

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