Pure Platinum gentleman’s stripped in auction club
Pure Platinum, the defiant Oakland Park strip club where dancers bared all despite the city’s decadeslong fight against adult entertainment venues, is now naked.
It was stripped of all accoutrements, right down to its glittering disco ball — which fetched $50 during an auction Saturday morning inside the shuttered gentleman’s club.
Rafael Mawardi bought the ball as well as two stripper poles for $20. He was one of about 15 people who attended the everything-must-go auction.
The club fought the city in the courts, refusing to scale back its salaciousness even after the city had enacted an adult entertainment ordinance in 2004. But it capitulated earlier this year after the city won decisively in federal appeals court in March. By June, Pure Platinum and its sister club, Solid Gold, packed up and left for Pompano Beach.
The cavernous building, at 3411 Federal Highway, will soon be bulldozed to make way for residential and commercial space.
There was much left behind — the club on Saturday looked as if it had been swiftly vacated.
There were dozens of saucy stilettos, piles of exotic dancewear and numerous hair curling irons remaining in the massive locker room area. Those items were not for sale.
Dated sound and lighting equipment was everywhere. The owners spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on those systems over the years; two chandeliers alone cost more than $40,000 each, said Scott Grasso, with the Hollywoodbased J. Sugarman Auction Corporation. He said everything together would likely fetch between $5000 and $10,000 at the auction.
“A lot of it is passe,” said.
Many of the items seemed to go for under $50, bulky equipment not for household use.
One man bought four widescreen televisions, two of them Samsungs, for $55 each.
And there were plenty of jokes about onetime patrons with VIP cards, returning to grab a bit of nostalgia.
But there were no frequent Grasso visitors among the group that showed up at the auction. Or at least no one who admitted it. Those who showed up said they attend auctions as a profitable hobby and were looking to resale items at a hefty markup.
Mawardi said he hadn’t stepped foot inside the club since it opened more than three decades ago. And he had a plausible excuse for wanting those stripper poles, which were attached to prop pianos that provided a stage for the strippers. Mawardi said his son will soon open a dance club, of the non-stripping variety, in Orlando and he wanted to buy the equipment to warehouse in case his son’s club needs replacement parts.
“Just to have,” he said. “I would like to take those stripping poles and put them on real pianos — because they do have real pianos in the club.”
bballou@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4188