The Scalabrinian Sisters and the skanky strippers
WHAT A HEEL: Robert Itzkow wants to open a ginormous $3 million strip joint – to be named “Get It” – right next door to the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo's retirement home in the blue-collar Chicago suburb of Stone Park. The proposed “gentleman’s club,” which is juxtaposing “two competing visions of femininity,” also abuts a private home that has a swing set in the back yard just feet from the facility, The Washington Times reports:
"When you come out of the back of the chapel, you can see the facility," said Peter Breen, executive director of the Thomas More Society. "When they have given their entire lives to teach those children of Stone Park – after a lifetime of service to their faith – these sisters' reward in their retirement years is to be in constant view of the large pornographic palace." …
According to its owner, Get It will be more than a beer-shots-and-pole establishment, instead offering professional-level topless dancing in a high-tech environment comparable to the famous burlesques of Paris. …
[H]e also plans to landscape the rear of the building, which is nearest the nuns' home, with 20-foot-high trees that will shield the two establishments from each other's view.
Itzkow has called the retired nuns his "non-taxpaying neighbors" and accused them of imposing their religious beliefs on others. For their part, the nuns say that the facility was originally described to them as a restaurant.
Breen thinks that a state law mandating a "buffer zone" between adult entertainment facilities and "places of worship" may put the kibosh on the club. However, when town officials settled a lawsuit brought by Itzkow in 2010, local ordinances requiring such a buffer-zone between adult entertainment establishments and schools, parks, churches, and residential areas, were voided.
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