If the city doesn’t immediately act, someone, anyone, can come into Lynn, secure themselves a location with a liquor and entertainment license, and open up shop as a strip club almost overnight.
The city would then be forced to issue cease and desist orders – the club owner would immediately seek relief in Superior Court – and we’d be in for a big and costly fight.
In the end, the city would probably lose – as our neighbors in Revere lost many, many years ago.
In that city, the Squire Club operates almost without notice on Squire Road, right across from the National Amusements theater complex.
The city didn’t collapse or implode. The grandeur of the society that has come to be in Revere during the past 300 years has not been compromised. If you didn’t know where it was, you wouldn’t even know it was there.
So much for the effect of a strip club if it suddenly opened in Lynn.
That being said, this is an instance when the mayor in concert with the city council, the legal department and the police need to act and immediately.
So far, only Council President Tim Phelan has spoken out officially and strongly.
To many, many people in this city Phelan is acting more like a mayor than the mayor herself.
There is presently no zoning on the records here against such a thing happening, ergo, such a thing could happen and then public officials would be fighting a lost cause instead of emplacing zoning guards against such a scenario.
The key to all this is that it must be on the books and legal before someone comes in and opens a strip club – and it certainly sounds like someone is ready to take the leap.
There is a constitutional law of the land that does not allow for ex post facto litigation of this kind.
In other words, you can’t set up the zoning after the place has taken hold.
It must be done before such a scenario unfolds or the city would likely be sued, as Revere was sued when it tried to rid itself of a dirty book store on the American Legion Highway after it had been there for a decade by enacting new zoning that put it out of business.
That lawsuit brought by the dirty book store owner cost the city $1 million and this is the exact direction Lynn is heading in if it doesn’t have the mayor at the top of the political and leadership pile calling the shots and letting everyone know: Lynn is not the place to come if you’re thinking about a strip club.
On the other hand, perhaps the city, which seems not to care very much at all about the horrific odors emanating from a half dozen businesses off the Lynnway – trash transfer station with no ventilation, Garelick Farms, with an open milk sludge pit, the Lynn Water and Sewer treatment plant and a fat rendering company (what’s next?) ought to consider allowing the strip club and locating it right in the middle of all that stench off the Lynnway.
When you think about it, who would complain, and why would it matter?
In the end, a strip club in the midst of all that filth and stink, would fit right in.