City aims to demolish another strip joint

    After one Montreal landmark stripclub successfully fended off a city-engineered attempt at having it shuttered and demolished, downtown's Cleopatra Cafe has passed the baton to the Chez Mado in Montreal North as the strip club that city officials consider to be in the way of urban advancement.
     It seems that the Montreal North borough would like to see the Mado shut down and demolished, something which an official from the mayor's office did not deny in a phone interview with Coolopolis.
    Chez Mado sits on the east side of the six lanes of Pie IX and seems to be a successful business on a commercial-industrial (non-residential, ie: no residents to bug) boulevard.
    I have been told the the club does good business as cars often fill the parking lots under the local landmarkish throwback sign.
    More importantly, the club has a spotless record with the liquor authorities.
     Since the liquor board started putting its records on line in 1999, Chez Mado (not to be confused with an unrelated transvestite namesake in the Gay Village) has not been cited with a single infraction, rare for any type of bar.
   That means that they haven't been bothering neighbours, or caught employing underage performers. Police haven't been frequently called to the place for melees, and so forth.
   Nevertheless Montreal North is pushing for it to be repurposed on the latest one of those eternal redevelopments that keep city planners busy.
   Now this begs the question as to whether a strip club away from a residential zone is, by definition, a blight.
   I don't know of evidence supports that notion. For five years I lived above a downtown parking lot where healthy young showgirls from three adjacent clubs would park their cars every night, thousands of comings-and-goings without incident.
   Young male tourists from Boston would load up the clubs and pour the tourist bucks into the city.
   The strip joints kept the area lively, adding to the lively glitzy commercial mosaic, and possibly an important grapplepoint in the tourist climbing wall, bringing solid wads of cash to young women, many with otherwise low earning potential.
   Bureaucratic meddling bothers me not just because it offends my preference for organic change, but also because I have been made personally familiar with the schemes of borough bureaucrats and the pressure that can bear on property owners they disapprove of.
    Five years ago I owned a residential-commercial building which a city councillor living next door didn't like the looks of. I found myself subject to fines and inspections over minor things, including having a planter sticking out half an inch too far out into the sidewalk.  (In fairness, so too were many other nearby commerces, constantly harassed and needlessly ticketed by the Verdun inspectors.)
    Montreal North's onslaught on risque culture is another worrisome harbinger of the hush-hush social engineering project quarterbacked by the electorally-dominant boomer demographic; a group that had its good times and now has no shame in brazenly trying to turn the city into one big old age home.