Sleaziness Is Losing Its Lease -- Downtown Cleaning Up Adult Entertainment

People pushing dope, pushing God and pushing quarters into X-rated videos - it's all at First and Pike downtown, a historically rowdy place where sleaziness is about to collide with civility.

The Deja Vu strip joint and its companion store, Fantasy Unlimited, will lose their lease next year, eliminating yet another venue of adult entertainment in the continuing sanitization of downtown Seattle.

The combined forces of development and city ordinances have made it nearly impossible to site erotic dance clubs downtown, leaving only the Lusty Lady at 1315 First Ave. and Razz Ma Tazz ("girls, girls, girls!") to the north on Denny Way.

Moreover, the Apple Theatre, which has shown "XXX movies" at 1508 Boren Ave. for 26 years, might be torn down. Never mind that many of the patrons now are transients who willingly pay the $7 admission for a safe, if not titillating, place to crash; the Apple is considered by some to be a neighborhood landmark.

But property owners Richard and Diane Foreman want to replace the old brick building with a hotel. Will they incorporate the Apple into the project? "No, no, it's going to be gone," said Richard Foreman, former mayor of Bellevue, who has owned the property since the 1970s.

Back then, adult entertainment peppered this port city's landscape. There were at least 11 theaters in Seattle showing sexually explicit movies and 14 "panoram" arcades downtown showing porn flicks in booths, compared with only four today. First Avenue was a magnet for pawnshops, flophouses and topless dancers.

In fact, the strip was so bawdy that it was selected in 1973 as a location for the film "Cinderella Liberty," a movie about romance between a prostitute and sailor.

But where would a lonely sailor go in Seattle today?

The Samis Land Co. recently announced its intention to redevelop the Deja Vu and Fantasy Unlimited property. The late Sam Israel bought the property in 1980 and declined to improve or sell it, despite the site's prime location directly across from the Pike Place Market.

His estate, however, is now being managed with profit in mind, and that means the Deja Vu must go. It's located in a worn-out two-story building that will most likely be replaced with luxury condos or apartments.

Deja Vu is one of at least eight nude-dance clubs operated in Washington by an organization called Consolidated Bookkeeping. When queried about its lease loss and what it will mean for the club, representative Paul Bern politely declined to comment and then hung up.

Around the corner at the Champ Arcade "Adult Super Store," the patrons can choose among skin magazines, videos and a theater that's playing "Black and Bootyfull" this week. It also includes live performers on a shower stage but is not a dance club like Deja Vu.

The difference is important. In Seattle, there is a moratorium on issuing permits for new topless-dancing places until next June, and the ban probably will be extended. It was enacted in 1988 to stop strip clubs from moving into Seattle neighborhoods - an exodus triggered by downtown zoning restrictions that limited most adult entertainment to areas its providers could least afford and were least wanted, in the office and retail core.

The ban halted clubs in Seattle neighborhoods, but not before Rick's Nightclub got a foothold in Lake City and Ballard became host to the Sands Plaza and Centerfolds.

Anyway, this all means that Deja Deja Vu can't relocate unless it finds a site with an existing permit for nude dancing.