A boom of new residents is transforming the North Loop, Minneapolis' X-rated district. By Sharyn Jackson. There's his year-old daughter, then cakes from his side business as a baker β a tiered baby-shower cake, all blue ribbons and bows, a red Elmo from "Sesame Street. Lane spins a dial and Duran Duran's "Planet Earth" gets louder, although the club's shiny black stage is empty. Above his head, security cameras show a desolate front entrance, a vacant parking lot and the black-and-white feed from a VIP room where a dancer grinds atop a seated customer, the only one in the house.
To call it ironic that Lane beams with pride over his family and cutesy cake designs while DJing at one of Minneapolis' fully nude strip clubs would be an understatement. It's the story of the North Loop, the city's hottest neighborhood, which is undergoing a residential renaissance while living out its days as a zoned adult entertainment district.
What might seem to be a tense brew of high-paying condo dwellers and the city's titillation industry hasn't boiled over. Instead, the two worlds seem content to share the same streets β so far. Lane, general manager at Choice for nine years, has worked in adult entertainment venues all over the country, and nowhere has he seen what he sees here: a residential neighborhood and an adult district not just butting up against each other but cohabitating.
Over the nasal "da ba dees" of Eiffel 65's "Blue," he said, "the neighborhood grew into us. But the high-end needs of a fast-growing, upscale residential community could strangle out what's left of the adult industry.
One mainstay, Sex World, recently announced a major downsizing. Some of the downtown clubs that make up Minneapolis' slice of the nation's adult entertainment industry have been folded into large corporations in recent years. The population has exploded since , rising three times the rate of the metro area as a whole. And the young professionals who move here tend to stay put after they have kids, a reversal of decades of suburban flight by new parents.
