On the television screens behind her, the Red Sox were walloping the Blue Jays. “Let me put some country in you,” the song went one night, a couple of years back, as she swung around the pole like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. O ne dancer at the Manor performs only to new country. “But hopefully it stays, because I honestly love this place.” “I don’t think it’s going to last,” one dancer admitted to me. It isn’t just a strip club to them-the Manor is a sanctuary. In the years since, I’ve come to know the remarkable community of outcasts who, in one way or another, call the Manor home. When I first heard about Church at the Manor, it seemed so literal-sin and salvation, the sacred and the profane, side by side-that I decided I had to see it for myself. In 2014, it underwent its strangest iteration yet: every Sunday, a church service started meeting in the club, pole and all. But the Manor, ever the chameleon, isn’t finished changing. If the Manor closes its doors for good and becomes, say, a condo development, the city will never see another strip club. In Guelph, local bylaws forbid any other adult-entertainment facilities. And COVID-19, of course, has decimated a business whose entire model is anathema to social distancing. Meanwhile, as downtown real estate booms and low-income neighbourhoods gentrify, municipal governments are making life difficult for strip-club owners. 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.
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With unlimited hours of free pornography online, there isn’t much incentive to shell out hundreds of dollars on lap dances. Three decades later, a man named Roger Cohen bought the building for $725,000 and turned it into a strip club.īut, now, strip clubs everywhere are dying. In 1957, when the last of the Sleemans moved out, the Manor became a hotel and a family restaurant, then a honky-tonk. According to Historic Guelph: The Royal City, the fallen clan was permitted to continue living there in exchange for a dollar a year in rent. By the 1920s, after a failed investment in electric streetcars and the passage of the Ontario Temperance Act, the Sleeman family fortune disappeared, and the Bank of Montreal seized the house. It was built, in 1891, 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. 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. Ugly concrete additions extend around the old house like the reclining corpus of a sphinx neo-Gothic towers erupt incongruously heavenward.
Above the front door looms a giant, glowing M, gripped by a suggestively silhouetted woman in high heels. 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. I grew up here, and the Manor is a local landmark, a source of both notoriety and wry civic pride. Guelph, population 150,000, is a suburban university town about an hour’s drive from Toronto. The Manor doesn’t feel like any of those things.
Maybe you think strip clubs are fun maybe you believe they’re degrading maybe you see them as just another workplace. The top forty that blasts from the speakers becomes a soundtrack of almost unfathomable loneliness: “Nothing lasts forever / but wouldn’t it be nice to stay together for the night?” The ceiling is low and black, the lighting a gloomy throb of oranges and blues. 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. Some nights, the dancers outnumber the customers. For more audio from The Walrus, subscribe to AMI-audio podcasts on iTunes.Ī t the Manor Adult Entertainment Complex, the only strip club in Guelph, Ontario, you can feel the end coming.
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