NYC NOW - Best of 2025: What Makes a Strip Club?

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

In November, Bodega Paradise, an X rated bar in East Harlem, had its liquor license revoked and was forced to shut down. WNYC producer Iru Ekpunobi walks us through what happened, based on reporting by Charles Lane, and explains how New York City defines adult entertainment and enforces those rules.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. As we wrap up the year, the NYC Now team is revisiting some of our favorite and most talked about stories of 2025, including one we didn't originally cover here on the podcast, but that definitely caused a stir in one East Harlem community. It starts with a place called Bodega Paradise. From the outside, it advertised juice, breakfast. and music, like a typical New York City Corner Store. Inside, though, neighbors were whispering

that something else might be going on. Complaints started coming in about a potentially illegal strip club hiding in plain sight. Back in the middle of July, WNYC reporter Charles Lane decided to see for himself and walk through the door. Months later, in November, the state liquor authority essentially shut the place down. Our producer, Iru Ekpanobi, is here to walk through this reporting and tell us how it all unfolded. So, Iru, where does this story start? So Bodega Paradise first opened back in May of 2025 on the corner of 116th Street and Park Avenue. And just like its name suggests, it looked like an actual corner store, or Bordeca. The outside had this really colorful yellow and red painted awning and some pretty cool

graffiti art. The owner, Alex Mascaris, touted the business as a combination of a breakfast spot and a sports bar. Here's audio of mescarus at a community board meeting before the opening, discussing the bar's operating hours. So the bar closes at, say, 4 o'clock, right? People stop drinking, last drink served at 4 o'clock. The bar gets cleaned up, mopped. Now, when we say we're going to open at 6 a.m., that's the food part.

Okay, so let me get this straight. The owner pitched this as a breakfast spot that opens at 6 a.m. that transforms into a sports bar at night, but it looks like a bodega? Yes, exactly, that's it. I just have to say that 6 a.m. to 4 a.m. are some crazy hours. It made it a weird sell to the community board, and they ultimately declined to recommend Bodega Paradise for a liquor license.

Essentially a death sentence for this kind of business, right? Right, because what's a bar without a liquor license? A juice bar. Seriously, though. No, no liquor license means it's going to be pretty hard to make money. Right. So fast forward to March 2025, the state liquor authority granted Meskiris a temporary retail permit, which carries many of the same privileges as a full liquor license.

The most important one being... The ability to serve alcohol. Exactly. So with that news, Meskris opens Bodega Paradise in May of 2025. Okay, so up until this point, Meskiris seemed to be selling this as some weird corner store sports bar combo. So when exactly did the strip club talk come in? According to some locals, it started operating as a strip club right after it opened. We're going to address one more topic, and I'm going to allow the person to be anonymous, and it's only information base. So that's

Keoka Jackson, and she's the president of the 25th precincts Community Council. In this recording of a 25th precinct meeting, Keoka is saying that someone's told her that there's a strip club in the neighborhood, and it's operating under the radar. And according to the individual, they attended, and it was in staff a strip club. So do we have any information about it? And what's more interesting is that when Bodega Paradise opened, it was being promoted on this Instagram account called King of Strip Clubs. When the owner was asked about it, he said, that was one employee who he fired later on.

But while the Instagram was still up, there were videos of women with captions, like gentlemen's club and hottest women in the industry. City Councilmember Diana Ayala's district office was right across the street from Bodega Paradise. She had been pressing the city for months to investigate the club, but says the city wasn't very helpful. It was just very, very much in the defense of this establishment and trying to gaslight me into believing that what I was seeing with my own eyes

was not happening. and I thought it was really weird. Eric Carasquillo, the 25th precinct captain, had said that he had been inside Bodega Paradise, but that a strip club is in the eye of its beholder. You can see that back room, the design of it, by appearance. Does it look like a strip club? Maybe, maybe not.

It all depends on what you consider. Oh, all depends on what you consider a strip club, huh? I don't know, were there chandeliers in there? Like, Iru, what do you consider a strip club? Money raining down? I don't know. Up next, will bands make her dance? Is Bodega Paradise really a strip club?

That's after the break. We're back recapping our favorite stories of 2025. This time around, we're talking about Bodega Paradise, a sports bar slash corner store in East Harlem that community members seemed to believe was a strip club. But even the local police found nothing suspicious at the venue. All right, Eru, so what more did officials need to see to shut this down? I mean, it's all on social media.

That's what WNYC reporter Charles Lane was trying to figure out. So he took a trip to Bodega Paradise to see for himself. So when you walk in there, it just looks like a very quiet, diner-type bar, but then there's a big metal freezer door on the back wall right next to the sign that says, girls, girls, girls. So it's like an establishment inside an establishment. That's Julia Hayward, a breaking news reporter here at WNYC. She went with Charles to Bodega Paradise.

I was getting dinner with another reporter who mentioned that you were going. Oh, and then you called me on the phone. I called Charles and I go, Charles, I'm going with you. It was very dramatic. So when Charles and Julia get inside the backroom of Bodega Paradise, they see a bar staffed all by young women. And these women are matching. They're wearing cut-out body suits with six-inch pleaser heels, Julia says. And pleaser heels are those big transparent heels that exotic dancers usually wear.

And when you peer down, you see like dollar bills, like all around the floor. Like the girls are walking on top of the dollar bills. And it was giving adult establishment. It definitely sounds like an adult establishment. I mean, cut out body suits. Still and all, though, that doesn't mean it's a strip club, right, Eru? I asked Charles and Julia that question, because it's an important one and gets to the heart of their reporting.

What does New York City define as an adult establishment? It was an adult establishment in that it met the definition of fondling. Patrons are allowed to fondle employees, and you're not allowed to show the derrier. And so those two definitions. meet the definition of an adult establishment. New York City's zoning laws define an adult establishment as any commercial establishment, which features the depiction, description, or display of, quote, specified anatomical areas or specified sexual activities.

But in terms of a strip club, like what we normally think of a strip club, with men or women going up on stage and taking off their clothes, the clothes stayed on, for the most part, from what we could see, unless you had enough money to get them to take them off. and there was transactions being proposed while we were there. In one of those transactions, Charles told me he witnessed a guy sitting next to him asking bartenders how much money it would take to see them naked. He says one of the bartenders asked for $200,

but the man could only come up with $125. Despite this, Charles says the bartender agreed, and patrons started throwing money and fondling the bartenders, which definitely falls under the display of anatomical areas. one of the criteria that makes something an adult establishment. It was never zoned as an adult entertainment establishment. So what happened next? Well, after visiting Bodega Paradise and seeing for themselves,

Charles and Julia published their reporting. Bodega Paradise was still operating on a temporary liquor license at the time, and Charles went to the State Liquor Authority to figure out what was going to happen with their license. The board members on the State Liquor Authority just, they were disgusted. They were revolted by what the club owner thought. he could get away with. Commissioner Edgar de Leon cited a long list of issues with Bodega Paradise,

including women dressed in fishnet jumper suits, he called them, with various parts of their body being exposed. He also cited men placing money in women's bikini strings and a neon sign that said, girls, girls, girls. He said, quote, I think I've said enough. I cannot approve an application with that kind of record, end quote. Wow. Yeah.

Pretty explicitly, the state liquor thore was not happy with what they had found at Bodega Paradise or what had been reported by WNYC. So they pulled Bodega Paradise's liquor license. And remember, no liquor license makes a bar... A juice bar. Exactly. Keoka Jackson, community member we heard from earlier,

said that even though the state had stepped in and not the city, she was happy that the community stood together. I think that sometimes it takes everybody to step in. I don't care who stepped in as long as it got done, right? Do we want more out of the city? Yeah, but there's times that we need more out of the state as well. So if the state stepped in and they did it, kudos to them.

The reporting on Bodega Paradise was done by WNYC's Charles Lane with help from Julia Hayward. Iru, thanks so much for hopping on the mic and helping highlight this story. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC. I'm Junae Pierre. Happy New Year. We'll be back tomorrow.