Viva Las Vegas: legendary K Rd strip club closes after 53 years
Friday, 25 September 2015
When Las Vegas strip club closes its doors on Saturday, so does a chapter in Auckland history. SIMON DAY delves into one the more colourful corners of K Rd.
As a small boy I would try to subtly sneak glances at the Las Vegas girl as my family drove down Karangahape Rd. The brunette, busty, wooden giant, perched above the shop fronts, stared me lasciviously in the eyes. I felt guilty and exhilarated. She has presided over Auckland's most infamous street for 53 years. Now she is losing her home.
The Las Vegas Striptease and Bar opened in 1962 and is the longest running strip club in New Zealand. Alongside the Pink Pussycat it was K Rd's pioneering strip club.
This weekend it will open its doors, and shed its lingerie for the last time. The lease is up and the owners want to refurbish the aging interior, and that means rent increases that the club can't afford. An icon on an iconic Auckland street is the latest victim of the city's gentrification.
But the Vegas girl will remain. Under agreement with the owners and new lessees, she will continue to be the poster girl for K Rd's seedy side, a grimy underbelly that is fading fast.
The current Vegas girl is in fact the club's second nude billboard. The original was a butch barbie doll, with too many vertebrae. In his book on Auckland, Keith 'Nobby' Clark described the first Vegas girl as a 'derided, admired Auckland masterpiece. Multi jointed, grotesquely misproportioned, and all of 12 feet long, she was better suited to advertising horror films.' She would change colour alarmingly as the sun passed across her naked body.
As her frame began to rot, locals complained that her fame became a rotten image for the street. She was replaced in 1988 by the current hand-painted wooden woman. Clark calls her boringly bland, a 'pneumatic lady' - her breasts full and fake.
The Vegas girl was a painting of one of the club's strippers who later died from cancer. Modelled on a photo the owner kept behind the bar, her giant bust is tribute to one of the first strippers in New Zealand to have breast implants. Now people send mail to the Vegas girl from all around the world.
Stretched naked above the street, her paint chipped and fading, the Vegas girl has branded K Rd as the heart of Auckland's red light district. However, even at the peak of the red light industry's residency, there were never more than three strip clubs - part of a total of 12 adult shops on the strip from Symonds St to Ponsonby Rd, and only about three per cent of the street's stores.
'It is an interesting thing of perception over reality. People see something like the Vegas girl and that is all they remember about K Rd. That is why the Vegas girl has that profile,' says local historian Edward Bennett.
Until the 1960s, K Rd was Auckland's busiest shopping street, home to the city's illustrious and biggest retail shops like Pascoes, Hugh Wrights, and the George Courts department store. Beneath Las Vegas' second floor lounge, there was a T&T childrenswear shop. A famous image by photographer Robin Morrison, shows a group of mothers waiting for the shop to open, standing with prams and infants beneath the neon lights of Vegas.
But when thousands of local residents were displaced by the construction of the motorway in the 60s, rents declined and the adult industry moved in. The western end of the street, which the Vegas girl looks over, gave the whole street a sordid and disreputable reputation. In the last ten years, and especially the last five, residential up-market development has filled the surrounding area with apartments, increased retail, cafes and bars. This has has put pressure on rent again. And now there are brothels and strip clubs all over the city, not just on K Rd.
Also, the role of the strip club has changed. When Vegas first opened you couldn't find naked women in a magazine and it was 40 years before the internet would monopolise pornography.
A visit to a striptease was an individual pursuit, Bennet said. Now a trip to the strip club is a night out with your crew. In the last 18 months Vegas has been run simultaneously as a live music venue in order to survive. Now it is being turned into a normal night club by Paul Franich and Lucien Law, hospitality moguls who have built a number of bars in Britomart.
'It's losing all its sexiness,' says one of the strippers.
John Nicholson - Johnny Nic to his many mates, took over the club in 1972 for a legendary run until his death in 2010. He defied many cliches of the industry – he was sharp, straight-edged, a conversationalist, a shrewd businessman, but caring of clients and staff. He didn't drink or smoke. He loved boxing and hunting. He was a fantastic tennis player and won the Auckland clay bird shooting title a number of times. He had a famous reputation with the ladies.
He was kind and generous. The women that worked for John respected and liked him hugely, many who worked there over long periods of time. Each morning he would drop them home in his VW after they had finished dancing and the club had closed.
Married once, but with no children of his own, he became a father figure to many. After he died, a homeless local came looking for Nicholson - the pair would go out for a coffee and a pie on cold mornings. The man was distraught to learn of his death.
In the 1990s artists began to colonise K Rd. Verona was the local lounge, Calibre was playing great music, Teststrip was in full swing, and photographer Ann Shelton was shooting Redeye, remembers filmmaker Kirsty Cameron.
'You didn't need to venture far off K Road for anything,' she says.
Late at night they were drawn to Las Vegas.
'We were enamoured with the layers of a life which seemed secretive, and John's character and intelligence. Las Vegas became somewhat of a home and it felt a privilege to get to be able to climb up into [the DJ] booth, to hang out in the back rooms with the strippers and to have long conversations with John, the sparkly eyed raconteur.'
The club has constantly caught the eye of photographers and filmmakers. After months of persuasion, slipping notes under the front door, art and fashion photographer Karen Inderbitzen-Waller convinced Nicholson to let her shoot the interior of the club. She has shot red light districts around the world and was obsessed by Las Vegas.
The two became very close and she ended up having her wedding reception at the strip club.
'He was like a surrogate granddad to me. I can't believe he has been gone for five years. I can still hear his voice. Even though he ran what some people would deem an underbelly of a business he cared for people who worked for him,' she says.
Her Auckland photography is dedicated to capturing pieces of the city before they are gone, the bits of history hanging on at street corners. The faded grandeur, before it gets knocked down for medium density housing.
'I've documented a lot of strip clubs around the world. There is nothing else like [Las Vegas]. Nothing has changed in there since 1972. It is an amazing legacy of the man. His whole life was that place. I can't think of anyone who resided over Auckland history for so long.'
Past the doorman and the brass 'Las Vegas' sign on the street facade, up the torn carpet bearing the club's name, you hit the smell of sex and cigarettes. It has the charm that sterile modern strip club franchises can't be bothered with. The original ornate red wallpaper runs down the hallways. Gold framed antique mirrors hang on the faded velvet curtains with golden tassels.
Behind the old levered till, the nook where the bar was is where the cops would sit - Policeman's Corner. Las Vegas became a regular haunt for young officers working the K Rd strip in the 70s and 80s. And it was here that Nicholson met officer John Fraser.
Fraser was another who laid claim to being Nicholson's surrogate son. The pair became close friends and spent many hours hunting together. At Nicholson's funeral he left two pheasants he had shot with Nicholson's gun on the coffin.
Months after Nicholson died without a will and his sister was made administrator of his estate, Fraser filed court documents claiming he should be sole beneficiary of the estate. Fraser said Nicholson had promised to pay him an inheritance. But after an arduous legal battle, the club was given to Nicholson's nephew who has been running it for the last five years.
For 39 years and one month Adrian Churn has worked as Las Vegas' sound and light man, a living part of the club's history. He's clean shaven with smooth old skin contoured with deep creases like the toe of well worn leather shoe. He wears a cap that says 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.'
He started as a customer but then in 1976 John Nicholson hired him to run the music and lights for the striptease. He doesn't like being called a DJ, it's too simple, too common to describe what he does. He is an entertainer, a vital part of the striptease. Perched in a brick-walled booth he announces the girls on stage in a deep voice.
'People might accuse me of being old and dirty, no, I am an entertainer. I entertain the masses. I love it,' he says.
On Thursday evening, the first of the three-night celebration for the club's closing, Churn sits on a step outside the strippers' changing room. With a clipboard on his knee he runs through the girls' sets.
Four young women adjust their suspenders and straighten their hair in the mirror. Three of them live together. Belle has endless legs and tiny breasts. Mia's hair is blue, her arms tattooed, and she can't find her shoes. Dylan has a giant bosom and olive skin, and wears a bowler hat. They know they are beautiful as they flaunt in front of the mirror together.
They are heartbroken the club is closing. Las Vegas has become their nocturnal family for the last two years. They're don't want to work in a commercial club where they feel commoditised; Las Vegas's tiredness shouldn't be mistaken for sleaze.
'We were crushed when we found out. It's like a time capsule. It has so much more character,' says Belle.
The club's glory days were dependent on Nicholson and Churn says he was devastated when the proprietor died.
'It was damn hard. John was like a father to me. On his hospital bed, looking eye to eye, he said, 'keep this place going'. And I said, eye to eye, hand on his hand, 'I will'. It makes me sad.'
Five years later, Las Vegas is closing. Churn has been given a job in the new club. But it won't be the same. He resents the gentrification of K Rd. He feels the street's grimy characters and clubs like Las Vegas are being swept up and thrown away.
'We cater for low lifes, mid lifes, and high lifes. A lot of people can't understand that versatility.'
But the legacy of the club will live in the Vegas Girl, watching over her famous end of K Rd, forever there for young men to marvel.
Viva Las Vegas.