I am not really a strip club kinda guy. I have nothing against them; I just don’t really understand them. But there is always that one time after a couple of cocktails when you just wander in. Kind of like the deep-fried Twinkies and Oreos sold Downtown—you think it will be funny, and somehow different from the last time you tried it, but you just end up feeling a little gross when it’s all over.
However, when I was told the Glitter Gulch invested $3.5 million into remodeling, I had to see it. For starters, it was one of the few nudie bars I had actually been to before, but it’s also right next door to Mermaids, the place that sells deep-fried Twinkies and Oreos, and I thought it would be funny to try once again.
The Gulch used to stink. No, really, it smelled like a public urinal. Maybe that’s why I only stayed a minute or two on my first visit about six months ago. It just wasn’t pleasant. The stench was partly due to the place being slapped together practically overnight about two decades ago, but more because the sewage system was so old that it had to be pumped up and over the bar. But I have to say, you take out the tits (and the weirdos on Fremont) and the revamped Girls of Glitter Gulch sparkles like some of our trendy new nightclubs. However, on my trip to the new and improved cavalcade of cleavage, I discovered much more than just how a state-of-the-art lighting system can make any dancer look 22. No, I got a history lesson.
As the story goes, Glitter Gulch and the neighboring Golden Goose (sign still there) used to be a pair of casinos that squeezed onto Fremont in the early ’70s. They were kind of like two hallways jammed with slot machines, a breed of claustrophobic gaming that still exists across the street (visit Le Bayou to understand). Herb Pastor was the owner, and in December 1991 he started to get the itch to change things up. He joked with the general manager at the time, James Gish, about turning the two casinos into a topless club. The joke started to grow some legs when they were miraculously awarded a sexually oriented business license for the first, oldest and still sole strip club on the Fremont Street Experience.
With a ticket for topless and no real plans, they demolished the wall between the two casinos, gutted the place, turned the snack bar into a DJ booth, put up a stage and opened the doors. The inaugural show only had one dancer—the same dancer—all day and night. She was on for a 14-hour shift the next day, as well. The doorman was Scot Behr, a manager from Main Street Station coaxed by Pastor to stand up front on his day off as a favor. Behr would roam over a little too often, even when it wasn’t his day off, eventually being named the GM when Gish stepped down.
Needless to say, things didn’t really change much over the next decade, except for the girls multiplying with the potency of the odor. Yet the place remained busy, the walk-in value off Fremont making it into a Sin City landmark.
Seeing the value in location, Pastor’s son Steve Burnstine bought out his father last year, striving for that oxymoron of a nice strip club. And after a couple million, the miasma has evaporated, and dare I say the club is actually nice. The renovation took all of 70 days, and Glitter Gulch was reopened in February. The floor was ripped out down to the dirt, the interior furniture all redesigned, new lighting and sound was installed, the bartender has a bowtie; they even redid the bathrooms with mosaic red tile.
“Things are lot better,” Behr said while picking up a piece of dirt off the floor. “We have about 80 percent new dancers, and more keep showing up everyday. Plus it just smells nice.”
Great, time for a Twinkie.