Hustler Club

LARRY FLYNT promised us a classy joint down there on The Block, the Taj Mahal of strip clubs, a place where you could gawk at naked, gyrating women wrapped around dance poles and still feel good about yourself. Of course, bringing class to The Block is not just like putting lipstick on a pig, it's like slipping a nice string of pearls around the pig's neck, too. But ol' Larry, he said his new Hustler Club would be something special. No sleaze, he said. First-class operation, he said.

Larry Flynt, the man who made America safe for pornography, will open a new "gentleman's club" in Baltimore tonight with a promise to add some class to the seedy strip-joint center known as The Block. If nothing else, Larry Flynt's Hustler Club will bring a new architectural feature to the city's tenderloin, one block south of City Hall: a glass dance floor that allows patrons on a lower level to look up performers' skirts. Except they won't be wearing skirts. The club is all nude. "It's not a sleazy operation," the Hustler magazine publisher said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, a man both hailed as a free speech advocate and loathed as a smut peddler, is headed to Baltimore in a big way. Flynt is a partner in what will be the largest "gentleman's club" on The Block, the worn row of strip bars in the heart of downtown. A hot-pink neon sign on East Baltimore Street will blare the presence of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. The full-nudity show bar, originally to be called Deja Vu, is still months away from completion. Once finished, it will fill the upper two floors of the graceful old Gayety theater building, one block south of City Hall.