Goodbye Strip Clubs, Hello to Some More Shitty Apartments

It was the essential adolescent pilgrimage. When the clock struck 16, you and seven of your mates put on your best SMP button-up shirt and cargo pants, and boarded the train to Kings Cross. Around the corner you'd find the strip joints where, with a bum-fluffed face and a weird wetsuit tan around your neck, you'd experience something akin to adulthood, sort of.

It was here I witnessed a friend's virginity merrily plucked from him by an emaciated 40-year-old smack-head with green dreadlocks. I saw another friend almost get a platform shoe put through his teeth for sending a text message (the stripper thought he was taking photos). Yet another friend was stripped to his underpants and ridden down the aisle like a dog.

Yet it was amidst these neon lights and gruff bikers that I came to understand the concept of sexual desire and perversion, and what a powerful hallucinogen it could be. Those experiences were formative and I wouldn't be the person I am today without them. But the coming generation will have to look elsewhere. In what looks to be the final dagger in a drawn out campaign to clean up the iconically seedy Kings Cross district, two of its most famous strip clubs, Bada Bing and DreamGirls, have been ordered to close.

The decision came after police raids revealed the clubs were harbouring illicit drug use and other, general forms of scumbaggery. The Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority revealed the fate of the popular night spots in a recent media release, stating they're "satisfied that serious breaches of the Act have occurred, including prohibited drug supply, breaches of CCTV requirements and licence conditions designed to prevent strippers from being physically assaulted by patrons, and that members of outlaw motorcycle gangs have been given access to the premises in breach of Kings Cross requirements."

While this may all be true you'll struggle to find anyone in the Cross, or even Sydney more broadly, who supports the closures. "No one's happy about it, least of all us," says Sav Aristidis, the 44-year-old owner of the 5 Boroughs wine bar—a delightfully rustic throwback to the Cross's bohemia of yore, just two doors down from DreamGirls.

Aristidis relies on foot traffic for business and while he concedes the strippers were magnets for persons and activities of ill-repute, they also pulled in high-end types who'd just as often cross the road to drink at his bar. "(The Cross) has the seedy end but it also has classy establishments like this. It's not just scumbags around. You get everything. That's the beauty of it, right?"

Kings Cross has always been a colourful place. As a Rest and Recuperation (R&R) port during the Vietnam War, it became Sydney's receiving point for heroin, smuggled in by troops from the Golden Triangle. Drug culture and poverty kept the rent low, and in turn allowed creatives to move in. This is how such institutions as the Yellow House gallery came to flourish, home to the likes of Brett Whiteley.

Several well known criminals have also called the Cross home, as well as Abe Saffron, who we won't call a criminal because his family might sue us. In the 1960s and 70s Abe ran a series of clubs and bars, some of which have since burned down amidst various insurance controversies. The Cross was also the last place local journalist Juanita Nielsen was seen before she disappeared, believed to have been murdered for taking aim at corrupt development on the Cross.

Despite it all, the strip is has remained as big a part of Sydney's cultural fabric as the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. "It was a vibrant, energetic, happy place. There were so many happy people here. You couldn't drive from the Coca Cola sign to the other side in less than half an hour," says Sav Aristidis, who first turned out at the Bourbon and Beefsteak as a teenager.

But memories like these are fading. Since the one punch deaths of Thomas Kelly and Daniel Christie back in 2012 and 2013 respectively, the government has been on tear to clean the area up. So 42 bars, clubs and small business have closed and the once booming night time economy decimated somewhere between 40 and 75 percent. The government's main weapon have been the controversial lockout laws, which dictate 1.30am lockouts and last drinks at 3am, among a host of other regulations.

As the clubs have closed, the developers have moved in. Kings Cross is situated adjacent to the CBD and Sydney Harbour making it some of the most valuable real estate in the world right now. Both Kelly and Christie were killed before 10:30pm, meaning the new lockout laws likely wouldn't have prevented their deaths. The heavy handed response has given rise to a popular theory that local governments are just looking to cash in on inner-city Sydney's unprecedented property boom.

According to Aristidis, the notion that this is all fueled by a land grab is becoming less and less speculative. "The developers and councils are in because they don't want it to be late trading, they want it to become residential. Well lo-and-behold, the Goldfish has closed down the road here and it's been sold off and it's gonna be floors and floors of residences," Aristidis says. "So yeah, it looks like our conspiracy theory is coming to fruition."

"It's a tragedy what happened (to Christie and Kelly) but no matter where you go in the world it's gonna happen," he says. "Wherever you've got people, you've got incidents."

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