Best of 2025: What Makes a Strip Club?

Title: Best of 2025: What Makes a Strip Club?

Janae Pierre: From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Janae Pierre. As we wrap up the year, the NYC Now team is revisiting some of our favorite and most talked-about stories of 2025, including one we didn't originally cover here on the podcast, but that definitely caused a stir in one East Harlem community. It starts with a place called Bodega Paradise. From the outside, it advertised juice, breakfast, and music like a typical New York City corner store. Inside though, neighbors were whispering that something else might be going on.

Complaints started coming in about a potentially illegal strip club hiding in plain sight. Back in the middle of July, WNYC reporter Charles Lane decided to see for himself and walked through the door. Months later, in November, the State Liquor Authority essentially shut the place down. Our producer Iru Ekpunobi is here to walk through this reporting and tell us how it all unfolded. Iru, where does this story start?

Iru Ekpunobi: Bodega Paradise first opened back in May of 2025 on the corner of 116th Street and Park Avenue. Just like its name suggests, it looked like an actual corner store or bodega. The outside had this really colorful yellow and red painted awning and some pretty cool graffiti art. The owner, Alex Meskouris, touted the business as a combination of a breakfast spot and a sports bar. Here's audio of Meskouris at a community board meeting before the opening, discussing the bar's operating hours.

[clip plays]

Alex Meskouris: The bar closes at, say, four o'clock, people stop drinking. Last drink served at four o'clock. The bar gets cleaned up, mopped. Now, when we say we're going to open at 6:00 AM, that's the food part.

[clip ends]

Janae Pierre: Okay, let me get this straight. The owner pitched this as a breakfast spot that opens at 6:00 AM that transforms into a sports bar at night, but it looks like a bodega?

Iru Ekpunobi: Yes, exactly. That's it.

Janae Pierre: I just have to say that 6:00 AM to 4:00 AM are some crazy hours.

Iru Ekpunobi: It made it a weird sell to the community board, and they ultimately declined to recommend Bodega Paradise for a liquor license.

Janae Pierre: Essentially a death sentence for this kind of business, right?

Iru Ekpunobi: Right, because what's a bar without a liquor license?

Janae Pierre: A juice bar.

[laughter]

Iru Ekpunobi: Seriously though, no liquor license means it's going to be pretty hard to make money. Fast forward to March 2025, the State Liquor Authority granted Meskouris a temporary retail permit, which carries many of the same privileges as a full liquor license. The most important one being--

Janae Pierre: The ability to serve alcohol.

Iru Ekpunobi: Exactly. With that news, Meskouris opens Bodega Paradise in May of 2025.

Janae Pierre: Okay, up until this point, Meskouris seemed to be selling this as some weird corner store sports bar combo. When exactly did the strip club talk come in?

Iru Ekpunobi: According to some locals, it started operating as a strip club right after it opened.

[clip plays]

Kioka Jackson: We're going to address one more topic, and I'm going to allow the person to be anonymous, and it's only information-based and--

[clip ends]

Iru Ekpunobi: That's Kioka Jackson, and she's the president of the 25th Precinct Community Council. In this recording of a 25th Precinct meeting, Kioka is saying that someone has told her that there is a strip club in the neighborhood and it's operating under the radar.

[clip plays]

Kioka Jackson: According to the individual, they attended, and it was in fact a strip club. Do we have any information about it?

[clip ends]

Iru Ekpunobi: What's more interesting is that when Bodega Paradise opened, it was being promoted on this Instagram account called "kingofstripclubs." When the owner was asked about it, he said that was one employee who he fired later on, but while the Instagram was still up, there were videos of women with captions like "Gentlemen's Club" and "Hottest Women in the Industry." City councilmember Diana Ayala's district office was right across the street from Bodega Paradise. She had been pressing the city for months to investigate the club, but says the city wasn't very helpful.

[clip plays]

Councilmember Diana Ayala: It was just very much in defense of this establishment and trying to gaslight me into believing that what I was seeing with my own eyes was not happening. I thought it was really weird.

[clip ends]

Iru Ekpunobi: Eric Carrasquillo, the 25th Precinct Captain, had said that he had been inside Bodega Paradise but that a strip club is in the eye of its beholder.

[clip plays]

Eric Carrasquillo: You can see that back room, the design of it, by appearance, does it look like a strip club?

Female Speaker: Maybe not.

Eric Carrasquillo: Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what you consider.

[clip ends]

Janae Pierre: Oh, all depends on what you consider a strip club, huh? I don't know. Were there chandeliers in there? Iru, what do you consider a strip club?

Iru Ekpunobi: Money raining down. I don't know.

[laughter]

Janae Pierre: Up next, will bands make her dance? Is Bodega Paradise really a strip club? That's after the break.

[music]

Janae Pierre: We're back recapping our favorite stories of 2025. This time around, we're talking about Bodega Paradise, a sports bar/corner store in East Harlem that community members seem to believe was a strip club, but even the local police found nothing suspicious at the venue. All right, Iru, what more did officials need to see to shut this down. I mean, it's all on social media.

Iru Ekpunobi: That's what WNYC reporter Charles Lane was trying to figure out. He took a trip to Bodega Paradise to see for himself.

[clip plays]

Charles Lane: When you walk in there, it just looks like a very quiet diner type bar, but then there's a big metal freezer door on the back wall right next to the sign that says, "Girls, Girls, Girls."

Giulia Heyward: So it's like an establishment inside an establishment?

[clip ends]

Iru Ekpunobi: That's Giulia Heyward, a Breaking News Reporter here at WNYC. She went with Charles to Bodega Paradise.

[clip plays]

Giulia Heyward: I was getting dinner with another reporter who mentioned that you were going, and--

Charles Lane: Oh, and then you called me on the phone?

Giulia Heyward: I called Charles and I go, "Charles, I'm going with you." [laughs] It was very dramatic.

[clip ends]

Iru Ekpunobi: When Charles and Giulia get inside the back room of Bodega Paradise, they see a bar staffed all by young women. These women are matching. They're wearing cutout bodysuits with six-inch Pleaser heels, Giulia says, and Pleaser heels are those big transparent heels that exotic dancers usually wear.

?Janae Pierre: When you peer down, you see dollar bills all around the floor, like the girls are walking on top of the dollar bills. It was giving adult establishment-- It definitely sounds like an adult establishment. I mean, cutout bodysuits still in all though, that doesn't mean it's a strip club, right, Iru?

Iru Ekpunobi: I asked Charles and Giulia that question because it's an important one and gets to the heart of their reporting.

[clip plays]

Iru Ekpunobi: What does New York City define as an adult establishment?

Charles Lane: It was an adult establishment in that it met the definition of fondling. Patrons aren't allowed to fondle employees, and you're not allowed to show the derrière. Those two definitions meet the definition of an adult establishment.

Iru Ekpunobi: New York City zoning laws define an adult establishment as any commercial establishment which features the depiction, description, or display of "specified anatomical areas" or "specified sexual activities."

Charles Lane: But in terms of a strip club, what we normally think of a strip club, with men and women going up on stage and taking off their clothes. The clothes stayed on for the most part, from what we could see, unless you had enough money to get them to take them off. There was transactions being proposed while we were there.

[clip ends]

Iru Ekpunobi: In one of those transactions, Charles told me he witnessed a guy sitting next to him asking bartenders how much money it would take to see them naked. He says one of the bartenders asked for $200, but the man could only come up with $125. Despite this, Charles says the bartender agreed, and patrons started throwing money and fondling the bartenders, which definitely falls under the display of anatomical areas, one of the criteria that makes something an adult establishment.

?Janae Pierre: It was never zoned as an adult entertainment establishment. What happened next?

Iru Ekpunobi: Well, after visiting Bodega Paradise and seeing for themselves, Charles and Giulia published their reporting. Bodega Paradise was still operating on a temporary liquor license at the time, and Charles went to the State Liquor Authority to figure out what was going to happen with their license.

[clip plays]

Charles Lane: The board members on the State Liquor Authority, they were disgusted, they were revolted by what the club owner thought he could get away with.

[clip ends]

Iru Ekpunobi: Commissioner Edgar De Leon cited a long list of issues with Bodega Paradise, including women dressed in fishnet jumper suits, he called them, with various parts of their body being exposed. He also cited men placing money in women's bikini strings and a neon sign that said, "Girls, Girls, Girls." He said, "I think I've said enough. I cannot approve an application with that kind of record."

Janae Pierre: Wow.

Iru Ekpunobi: Yes. Pretty explicitly, the State Liquor Authority was not happy with what they had found at Bodega Paradise or what had been reported by WNYC, so they pulled Bodega Paradise's liquor license. Remember, no liquor license makes a bar--

Janae Pierre: A juice bar. [chuckles]

Iru Ekpunobi: Exactly. Kioka Jackson, community member we heard from earlier, said that even though the state had stepped in and not the city, she was happy that the community stood together.

[clip plays]

Kioka Jackson: I think that sometimes it takes everybody to step in. I don't care who stepped in, as long as it got done. Do we want more out of the city? Yes, but there's times that we need more out of the state as well. If the state stepped in and did it, kudos to them.

[clip ends]

[music]

Janae Pierre: The reporting on Bodega Paradise was done by WNYC's Charles Lane, with help from Giulia Heyward. Iru, thanks so much for hopping on the mic and helping highlight this story.

Iru Ekpunobi: My pleasure.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre. Happy New Year. We'll be back tomorrow.

[music]

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