10/13/03  Taking it the Street

Saturday, a group of citizens showed up in front of a sports bar and let it be known that we do not want another sex club on Walnut Hill Ln.  We come from neighborhoods north and south of Walnut Hill just east of Brockbank.  Some of the people demonstrating have lived in the area over 30 years.  Some of us are newcomers who have just purchased homes and don't want to see our investments go down the tubes because a bunch of perverts want another outlet.

The sports bar behind us was to be converted to a men's club.  Like there aren't two of those places right across Walnut Hill down Composite (out to be called Compost)!  The difference is that you can drive down Walnut Hill to or from Stemmons and not know that Texas Show Girls and Cabaret Royale are down Composite -- or you can pretend not to know.  The Pugsley's Library site is an entirely different issue.  You not only can see it from Stemmons, you cannot miss it from Walnut Hill.

We have families living in our neighborhoods -- not to mention the hundreds of children living in over-crowded apartment complexes that City Hall has no intention of ever monitoring or trying to regulate.  Our residents (adults or children) do not deserve to have sex clubs signs thrust in their faces whenever they are on an outing.

The pictures below were taken early in the morning.  Other people were there later in the day.  A couple and their two daughters joined us to demonstrate before the girls went to their soccer game.  One young Hispanic father was there after lunch.  His wife was home with their two little girls.  It was a very mixed group -- just like our neighborhoods.

I have to tell you, the day was a lot of fun.  Most of the people who carried signs had never done something like that -- never, ever.  We had two men park their cars and come demonstrate with us because they believed in what we were doing.  Several people pulled over to thank us.  A few pulled over to say something else.
 

We know where we live.  We know it is not the Park Cities.  We like our mixed community.  We have retirees, young families and lots of us in between.  We have good stores to buy groceries and other stuff.  We have great (and affordable) places to eat like The Wild Turkey.  We have the Parker Chiropractic College.  We have Miller Electric and many other responsible and respectable businesses.  It's a convenient and great place to live.
5 television stations covered our gathering of Geezers against Perverts.  We were happy to be there because the response we got from the passing cars was overwhelmingly supportive.  As one man said, so far it's 10 thumbs to 1 finger.  That was the ratio much of the day.  Of course, Ch. 8 was there when two women drove up who claimed to be dancers at Cabaret Royale and tried to convince us that there's no sexual activity in their sexually oriented businesses.  Neither one looked up to the standards the sex clubs promote on their billboards.
Until just a few months ago, we had a major prostitution problem on Walnut Hill Ln.  The night I rode with the police officers, this area in front of Pugsley's and Composite just West of the Burger King were pretty much Ground Zero for the hookers negotiating their deals.  Their pimps were positioned over at the gas stations, and it was pretty dreadful.
Barbara and Carolyn have lived in their respective neighborhoods a long time.  Both are active in their crime watch groups.  This is a crime prevention issue for us.  Granted, we are concerned about a sex club's negative impact on our residential neighborhoods and legitimate businesses we want on Walnut Hill.  However, the aesthetics and economics of having a sex club near our neighborhoods is not as important as the crime we know will follow.  It always does.  The guys who leave these sex clubs are usually a bit tipsy and have cash in their pockets.  The bad guys see them as easy pickings.
The man in the pink shirt is an area businessman who came back to help us on his day off because he knows a sex club on Walnut Hill would be a killer for his business.

We had much more success than we could have dreamed.  Supposedly, the applicants have withdrawn their purchase offer for the land and the signs announcing the proposed application for a sex club have been removed.  The applicants will have to start over if they want to do this bad thing at this location again.

One reason most of us oppose the Mayor's idea for a Red Light district is we have several big, fancy whore houses near Stemmons already.  Told you about Cabaret Royale and Texas Show Girls, but Baby Dolls is still in our area just further West on NW Highway.  Then there's La Bare and several other whore houses on NW Highway just west of Stemmons.  None of them are going to move to another area to be part of a "Red Light district".  It would not surprise us to hear some call for designating the area between Harry Hines and Stemmons between LBJ and NW Highway as party central for perverts.

Of course, some council members are looking at the Naval Base for a Red Light District.  That is stupid!

The real solution is to shut them down with restrictions that make it impossible for these houses of prostitution to do the stuff that makes them so much money.  The City Atty is finally coming forward with some recommendations that we have begged to see.  She wants that 6-foot separation between dancers and their patrons.  No direct tipping and no touching.  The dancers and their patrons will be required to in full view of the manager.  That means no touching, no private dancing, no lap dancing.

Couple those restrictions with the new laws out of Austin regarding private clubs that are fronts for sex clubs, and we have a fighting chance of having less of these sex clubs in our city limits.

It's time for our City Atty to be bold.  It's time for her to be proactive. 

She needs to learn to say "No" to these sex clubs and just let them sue us.  We get sued all the time anyway.  When our City Atty stands up for our rights, she usually wins.

This time our neighborhoods won.  The men and women and children who walked that stretch of Walnut Hill Saturday morning are neighbors and Dallas taxpayers.  It's time that they come first at City Hall.

Let's do this again at some other location -- as  many times as it takes to tell the perverts to get a girlfriend or stay home,