The men behind NY venues The Smile and Jane Ballroom have decided to open a strip club for a certain type of NYC crowd. The Westway is the renamed Westside Gentleman’s Club, located off the Westside Highway in Manhattan. The Westway differs from the former, seedier, Gentleman’s club because it’s an exclusive part-time strip club—for hipsters. It seems that impresarios Matt Kleigman and Carlos Quirarte’s have opened a strip club for themselves. “We’re not strip joint owners. We’re not strip-joint guys.” Which is why they’ve opened a strip club.
The topless party is only on Monday, with male go-go dancers on Sunday; other nights of the week are fair game. It’s an original take on an unoriginal idea; an elite strip club for NY’s alternative elite. Would an art hipster with cash to burn feel comfortable walking into Scores? Probably not. Would he go to the Westway on a Monday? Maybe, if his friends were into it. Keep in mind; this is not an easy crowd to impress. Mike Nouveau (socialite hipster male) attended an early Westway party and then tweeted: “It’s ok. Strippers.”
Matt and Carlos seem to have bigger things in mind for the sexual liberation of the sometimes repressed (have you seen the ankle length skirts at American Apparel?) hipster. “If people see how we’re using it on the Sunday and Monday, maybe on the Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays, they’ll feel more comfortable getting up there, having seen someone already do it.” Do Kliegman and Quirarte expect that because the stripper poles are there, that someone is bound to use them? I think this is what the “not strip-joint guys” are fantasying about. They don’t want to open a strip-club; they want to open a club where people decide to strip. The Kliegman and Quirarte hope seems eerily like an MTV fantasy where every bedroom has a stripper pole. It certainly is optimistic to imagine those poles in Williamsburg.
Image Credit: Guestofaguest.com
