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Kane teases whether he’ll drop striptease club bid

By Albert Amateau

An online report on Sept. 28 that Ivan Kane has decided not to open his Forty Deuce burlesque club at 19 Kenmare St. has proved to be premature, but it’s still a possibility that Kane may bail out.

Warren Pesetsky, Kane’s lawyer in the application for liquor licenses for a Manhattan version of the burlesque clubs he owns in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, said on Monday that he had just gotten off the phone with Kane, who said that no decision had been made.

Community Board 2, which had voted in April to recommend that a liquor license be granted for Forty Deuce, reversed itself on Sept. 20 after six months of opposition by neighbors who said they didn’t want a burlesque club in a residential neighborhood where more than 20 existing licensed premises are already within 500 feet of 19 Kenmare St.

“We’re still anticipating the eventual decision to drop Forty Deuce,” Brad Hoylman, C.B. 2 chairperson, said this week.

Kane’s original application to the State Liquor Authority was for licenses for three bars in the 4,500-square-foot space, which Charlie’s Clam Bar vacated early this year after 50 years at the location.

New York magazine’s online news service on Sept. 28 quoted a Kane spokesperson saying the plan had been dropped despite the fact that conversion of the Kenmare St. location into a burlesque theater was well underway. Kane had already spent more that $1 million on the project when C.B. 2 recommended that the S.L.A. reject the license application.

An S.L.A. spokesperson said on Tuesday that Forty Deuce’s license application had not been withdrawn. The S.L.A. was still waiting for drawings of Forty Deuce’s bar locations and had not yet submitted the application for a determination. The community board’s recommendation is strictly advisory, although during the past year the S.L.A. has been unusually responsive to such recommendations.