Some nights, the dancers outnumber the customers. The women perform pole-dance moves with evocative names—the Genie, the Hot Cherry, the Boomerang, the Hello Boys, the Static Chopper—to thin, scattered applause. There are no windows. Instead, the mood is mostly funereal. I grew up here, and the Manor is a local landmark, a source of both notoriety and wry civic pride. The club, once a stately Queen Anne-style mansion, is stranded in a bleak expanse of parking lot, bordered by the slash of the highway, on one side, and a residential neighbourhood, on the other.
Above the front door looms a giant, glowing M, gripped by a suggestively silhouetted woman in high heels. Attached to the club is a complex of apartments called the Manor Motel, whose tenants tend to be precariously employed, receiving government assistance, or struggling with addiction.
The Manor has had many lives. It was built, in , as the residence of local politician and beer baron George Sleeman, complete with vermiculated amber limestone, stone cornices, stained-glass windows, verandas, fish ponds, and a footpath made from the bottoms of glass bottles.
But, now, strip clubs everywhere are dying. For people who prefer a more personal touch than porn offers, there are always webcam performers; for those who trawl strip clubs looking for sex, escort websites allow for a more straightforward transaction. Meanwhile, as downtown real estate booms and low-income neighbourhoods gentrify, municipal governments are making life difficult for strip-club owners. In Guelph, local bylaws forbid any other adult-entertainment facilities. If the Manor closes its doors for good and becomes, say, a condo development, the city will never see another strip club.
In , it underwent its strangest iteration yet: every Sunday, a church service started meeting in the club, pole and all. O ne dancer at the Manor performs only to new country. On the television screens behind her, the Red Sox were walloping the Blue Jays. That evening, a woman in black lingerie hunched at the bar, picking at a plate of nachos, waiting for the night to get going. Another wondered loudly about scoring some coke. A vinyl poster of Jesus half-covered the glass shower stall where, normally, strippers would bathe before audiences of leering customers.
