Clermont hotel shut down, strippers unaffected ( Atlanta )

An infamous Atlanta hotel known for its campy lounge with baby boomer strip dancers has been shut down.

The AJC was the first to report the Clermont Motor Hotel was ordered to close by Dec. 31 after a visit by Fulton County health inspectors uncovered a laundry list of violations, starting with, uh, the laundry.

"My friend says it's the only hotel in America that hookers can't get into,"Jeffress said Wednesday night as a group of women watched a lone stripper.

Back in the 70’s by dad and some partners owned the Southern Arms Hotel across the Street from the Clermont. I used to sit on the back fire escape with a 22 and a flashlight and shoot rats coming out of the Kudzu covered vacant lot in back. The Southern Arms Hotel was condemned by the state as part of its corridor for The Morningside expressway and it was torn down. The Morningside was a spur off a bigger plan for the Stone Mountain Expressway connecting Atlanta with the suburbs. Neither expressway was built as residents along the route sued GA DOT into giving up but a lot of houses were demolished leaving an ugly Kudzu covered scar parallel to Highland Avenue all the way from Dr King’s Church to near Ponce de Leon Avenue. The area rapidly went downhill. The Moonies bought two houses on Highland Ave using one for offices and the one next door as barracks. When they left my brother bought the properties including a vacant lot next to them. The 1996 comes along with the Olympics and the city has to clean up the mess. So they made a nice linear park out of it and put Jimmah Carter’s Center at one end and Atlanta University and the MLK Memorial is at the other end . Now my brother owned along with his partners three nice lots on a park. They made some good money on that. Well they still wanted to build the Stone Mountain Expressway but now were calling it a parkway and were going to limit the speed to 35 miles an hour. Carter wanted it too it seems so we started calling it the Ex Prez Way. That got stopped too. So the Clairmont is more or less around the corner from Carter Center. Kind of appropriate when you think of baby boomer politics and baby boomer strippers (and I use the term boomer advisedly in this case). The area is ripe for redevelopment, near downtown, and has fallen on hard times arguably because of government plans that went bad.

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