Jackson mayor wants strip club signs to come down
Published 12:26 am Friday, October 22, 2010
The mayor of Mississippi’s largest city is asking a topless bar to remove billboards in Jackson that depict a scantily clad woman and a suggestive caption about a stripper pole.
The billboards for Danny’s Downtown show a busty, blond woman in a pink bikini holding onto a stripper pole with a message that says: “Strippers love to climb our pole.”
At least two of the signs were put up along the city’s interstate corridor.
Mayor Harvey Johnson wrote a letter earlier this week asking an entertainment company to remove the signs because of an “immense amount of public outcry within the last couple of days regarding the explicit nature of the billboards.”
“Not withstanding First Amendment rights in considering my request, please take into account the public welfare of the citizens of our City,” Johnson wrote.
But the letter was accidentally sent to the wrong company, one which owns a different topless bar in Jackson, Christopher Mims, a city spokesman, said Thursday.
Mims said the letter will be sent to the correct owners of Danny’s. Mims also said city officials discussed the signs Wednesday with Danny’s attorneys and the owner of the billboard company, though no agreement was reached. Those discussions are expected to continue in coming days, Mims said.
No one answered the phone Thursday at number listed for Danny’s. Danny’s website describes the parent company, Danny’s Cabaret, as the oldest adult nightclub chain in Mississippi. The website says the Jackson location is the largest such establishment in the state.