For the past decade, Chicago’s Irving Park neighborhood, with its turn-of-the-century Victorian, Italianate and Queen Anne homes, has been one of the city’s hidden gems, attracting young, upwardly mobile families from pricey Lincoln Park and other upscale areas.
The gentrification of this Northwest Side neighborhood near the Kennedy Expressway also has made it attractive to an Arlington Heights businessman.
He plans to open an enterprise on New Year’s Day that, depending on one’s perspective, will provide the area with a fresh form of entertainment or a decidedly prurient sheen.
What Richard H. Korber calls a carwash/detailing shop at 4118 N. Pulaski Rd. also will feature scantily clad female attendants.
Korber’s vision has socially prominent men-athletes, celebrities, businessmen-rolling up to the Bikini Carwash, a sky-blue concrete building with a pink awning and neon lights.
At the entrance, the men will flash their “members only” cards, and valets will steer their luxury autos inside the secured building outfitted with a shark tank, plum trees and a 10,000-gallon waterfall.
After paying the cashier $20, the customers will stand behind a railing to watch about 10 women in neon pink bikinis drying their freshly cleaned vehicles.
“It’s a brand-new concept,” said Korber, 36, who owns a car accessories shop on nearby Irving Park Road. “It’s up-to-date and legitimate.”
In America, sex sells, but Irving Park residents are not buying it.
A generation after most big cities flicked the switch on red-light districts, massage parlors and adult bookstores to the outskirts or into oblivion, the carwash is one example of how soft erotica is returning in disguise and settling in middle-class residential neighborhoods, police and adult-entertainment experts said.
More brazen examples also are emerging: A carwash featuring nude attendants has opened in Jacksonville, Fla., and several carwashes with topless attendants are open in New York City, Ft. Lauderdale and Montreal.
“The trend seems to be legitimate, but many of the facilities are just a facade to conceal prostitution,” said Cmdr. John Frangella of the Chicago Police Department’s vice control section.
Residents of the neighborhood, parts of which are also known as “Old Irving” and “West Walker,” have launched an emotional protest, even as other residents have cheered Korber for renovating a dilapidated former truck shop that had long been a neighborhood eyesore.
For now, though, it appears that opponents may have to simply wait and see what comes out in the wash.
City officials said they can’t stop the doors of the Bikini Carwash from opening if the women keep their clothes on.
“They are not violating any zoning laws, so there is nothing we can do,” said Karen Fritchey, the director of special projects for the Department of Zoning.
“If we let this kind of junk come in, what will come next?” asked Deborah Sarasin, an eight-year resident of the area, who is the secretary of the West Walker Neighborhood Association.
Keith Kraus, a 39-year old resident, said, “I don’t want to see hookers strolling up and down the street.”
The latest incarnations of sexually oriented businesses-whether so-called “gentlemen’s clubs” or carwashes-cater to the same sort of people who frequented the Playboy clubs, officials say.
“It is big business,” said William Harland, the publisher of the Quincy-based “Complete Guide to Gentlemen’s Entertainment,” which includes a directory of more than 2,400 clubs in North America. “We think it is a $4 billion-a-year industry, just the gentlemen’s clubs.”
Harland and other industry experts predict that such arms of the sex business will grow another 10 percent within the next two years.
Increasingly, however, in the Chicago area and a number of communities around the nation, government officials are preempting such enterprises with special zoning laws to make it almost impossible for the businesses to find a home.
Many Chicago-area communities have passed ordinances banning nudity, partial nudity or any entertainment at all in a business where alcohol is served.
Harland said that explains why the Chicago area has only 23 gentlemen’s clubs, compared with 47 in the Dallas area.
“There is not much you can do about it if they change the rules before you get in there,” Harland said.
In Chicago, nude dancing in businesses is prohibited, Frangella said. Nevertheless, investigators have monitored many popular gentlemen’s clubs in town and cited them for violations, he said.
“They are operating under general release,” he said, explaining that the club owners have filed lawsuits whose lengthy resolution has prevented police from enforcing the law and the city from shutting them down.
Opponents of the Bikini Carwash are trying to take matters into their own hands.
On a recent cold night, about 300 people, some with their children in tow, gathered inside the Irving Park Lutheran Church gymnasium at 4059 N. Harding Ave. for a public forum on the business venture.
Standing before the group with a microphone, Korber maintained that he is the victim of a smear campaign, citing statements circulated by letter that the business is actually a front for a topless bar and a nude carwash.
“It’s not at all what you thought it would be,” Korber said.
He then attempted to sell the business concept on the gathering but was hit with a barrage of catcalls and protests.
“We don’t want it! We don’t want it!” shouted members of the audience, some holding signs reading “No Bikini Carwash,” before commandeering the mike.
“The only way we are going to stop this is to organize a committee and make it unprofitable for him to operate,” said William Rankin, a local school official.
Not every resident is opposed to the business in Irving Park, a racially mixed neighborhood of about 49,000 people bordered by the North Branch of the Chicago River and Cicero, Montrose and Belmont Avenues.
Supporters cited several reasons, including their distaste for yuppies trying to take over the area, the “Archie Bunker-type” old-timers who reject any change, and politicians who jumped on the bandwagon before next year’s municipal elections.
“Everybody is talking about putting it down. Why don’t they give him a chance?” said Carol Bogt, standing at the bar of Bill’s Pub on Pulaski, which she owned for 15 years.
“They forgot what the building was. It was rat-infested with gang signs all over it. The roof was caving in. . . .”
To prepare for the New Year’s Day grand opening, Korber is planning a bikini contest on Thursday, offering $1,000 to the winner.
“I think a pretty girl in a bikini is great,” he said with a laugh.
