When folks leave the Rev. Milton Seymore’s Energized Baptist Church on Seventh Street Road, they look about 500 feet to the south and can see Body Language – a strip joint on what was once the most infamous road in Kentucky.
A church? Next to a strip joint?
Seymore says he’s blessed.
When he bought the four acres for his church in 1993, Seymore said there were 13 adult entertainment establishments along the 1.1 mile stretch of road, and the “Derby City Strip” had a reputation far worse than today.
Now there are only five strip joints and a couple of adult bookstores remaining. And while the strip is seen as sleazy, it’s not nearly as bad as it once was.
There are some reputable businesses around, like Stuart Bauer Pools next door. And the flea market across the street, "It's a nice place," Seymore said.
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But 40 years ago and a decade before Seymore opened his church, Seventh Street Road was the vice capital of Kentucky.
“Anything marketable is offered for sale on Seventh Street,” an undercover Jefferson County police officer identified only as Johnny told The Courier Journal in 1982. “Anything you can’t get elsewhere – guns, drugs, women, all kinds of stolen property, automobiles.”
“Seventh Street will sate any bizarre appetite known to man. I mean that literally. It will,” the officer said.
That road – particularly the Shively side of it – was awash in crime.
Teenage girls as young as 16 told investigators they were serving drinks, dancing in the clubs and taking men to the seedy back rooms and having sex for money. Club managers, they said, avoided issues with Shively police by providing teenage girls to have sex with officers.
The city’s police chief at the time, Michael Donio, was also extorting the club owners for cash in exchange for providing protection for them. He ended up pleading guilty to federal corruption charges.
Shively, as they used to say, was wide open.
One teenage girl who worked in one of the clubs told the newspaper in 1982 that girls wouldn’t be arrested as long as they stayed in Shively.
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“The rule was, don’t go across the street into Louisville.” The bar’s manager “told us that if we were in Shively, we didn’t have to worry about being busted.”
By comparison, the Seventh Street strip is, well, er … well, it’s not as bad.
Many of the old clubs like the Domino Lounge, the Silver Slipper and the Club New Orleans are now gone. Some of them have been replaced with new strip joints in the same buildings – the notorious Red Garter Lounge, for instance, is now the Body Language.
Some of the old buildings sit empty.
“When I drive past (the strip clubs), I don’t see many cars,” Seymore said. “They look pretty empty.
On a recent weeknight around eight o’clock, the lot at the Thorobred Lounge had close to a dozen cars parked behind it. Down the road, the Blue Diamond had just a few cars parked outside it.
A couple of old clubs − Fantasy’s Island and Xclusive − are closed and empty
Frank Mascagni, a lawyer who represented strip club for years, said it’s a surprise as many clubs have lasted there after a Louisville Metro Council ordinance ended all-nude dancing, required dancers to stay 6 feet away from patrons and prohibited alcohol from being served where women were dancing in as little as pasties and g-strings.
“They tried to govern us and run us out of business and they succeeded,” Mascagni said.
Kathryn Bauer, whose family owns Stuart Bauer Pools next door to the church, said she rarely sees cars at the strip joints … but she arrives at work early in the morning and leaves late afternoon and so she said “I’m not around when they do whatever they do.”
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She said when her clients find out where the pool company is located they often ask, “Why don’t you move.”
“We own the property and the building. Do you know how expensive it would be to move?” she asked.
People ask Seymore why he built the church there to begin with.
He believes it was God’s will.
He was looking for property where he could build a church after retiring from the Ford Motor Company and was considering a few inexpensive tracts on Louisville’s south side. His realtor urged him to not even consider Seventh Street because of the strip clubs and the reputation.
And he had just about made up his mind to buy property off Manslick Road when a woman with three kids stopped him and asked him for a ride home. He loaded them into his convertible and headed for the Taylor Berry neighborhood where they lived.
In no time, he said, he found himself in front of the property he ended up buying and said he saw it as a sign.
I said, “This is it. This is where he wants me to be.”
Before the pandemic hit, Seymore said his church sometimes helped ministries from other churches that do outreach to women who work in strip clubs.
One group sometimes held dinners for the women and another went into the strip clubs and handed out roses to them.
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Seymore said he hopes his church may have had something to do with the decreasing number of strip clubs as well.
He imagines there’s occasionally someone who drives past his church on the way to a strip joint and starts thinking about God and just keeps driving – all the way home.
“I think we’ve had an impact,” he said.
But he admits, “I don’t know how many souls we’ve saved."
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.
The Courier Journal is in Shively
As part of its new mobile newsroom, The Courier Journal has a team of reporters and editors working from the Shively branch library/City Council Chambers each weekday from July 5-29. Metro columnist Joe Gerth is working in Shively this week. Come out and see us and tell us what's on your mind.
Our next stop: Starting Aug. 1, The Courier Journal mobile newsroom will move to the historic Western Library in the Russell neighborhood.
