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A strip and sex club that opened in 2013 next to a Chicago convent has been told to close.
Stone Park suburb’s mayor and liquor commissioner Beniamino Mazzulla ruled on the two-year battle between Club Allure’s owners and the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo.
The convent includes a retirement home for 15 sisters in their 80s and 90s, a school for novices and a home for working members.
It also has three chapels.
The sisters argued the chapels were churches under the Liquor Act. The Act bans selling alcohol within 100 feet (about 30 metres) of a church, school or home for the aged.
Mazzulla agreed the chapels match the Act’s description of churches. Masses are celebrated there daily, the Eucharist is always reserved there and the public is admitted.
Therefore, he ruled the Club was breaking the law and would have to close.
The Sisters had to work hard for their victory, facing several hearings. They often failed on technicalities.
For example, their nuisance complaint against the club as a house of prostitution failed because it was too vaguely worded.
Besides the alcohol laws, they pointed out State laws for keeping adult entertainment away from retirement homes and schools.
However, the sisters’ retirement home did not qualify under the act because it did not “hold itself out” as such.
The novitiate wasn’t a school because the novices’ went elsewhere for their academicwork.
They also outlined some of the Club’s visitors’ behaviour.
These included “public violence, drunkenness, and litter including empty whiskey and beer bottles, discarded contraceptive packages and products, and even used condoms evidencing illicit sexual misbehavior either in the club or about its environs …”
It also included “… cigarette and cigar butts, used syringes, as well as loud and often unruly late-night pedestrian and vehicle traffic up and down their nearby residential streets and sidewalks.”
The Club’s lawyer says the owners will appeal the ruling.
They plan to go to the state Liquor Control Commission and, if necessary, to the courts.
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