That Works Out To $11.11 A Day

If you found yourself without power for, I don’t know, like nine days during the summer, know that you will be compensated at a rate significantly below that of jury duty:

Customers in western Queens can expect to receive about $100 each from Consolidated Edison as compensation for having to sweat through nine days without power in July 2006, according to officials who have been briefed on the settlement.

The approval of the settlement, which the utility proposed several weeks ago and which will total $17 million, was to be announced at a news conference on Thursday.

Customers will receive a credit on their monthly bill, which will also include a brief apology from the company.

I Don’t Know About You, But Describing A Strip Club’s Atmosphere As “Turgid” Just Gives Me The Willies . . .

Club Kalua goes on, despite the odds:

The club where Sean Bell spent the final moments of his life celebrating at his bachelor party still occupies a narrow plot at 143-08 94th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. Half-naked women still twirl on poles, trying to interest dollar-tossing patrons. The A.T.M. with the high surcharge still occupies a corner in the back.

But there is something very different these days about this place, the Club Kalua: The alcohol is gone.

No more watered-down $20 glasses of Champagne for strippers to push on patrons. No more $16 Long Island iced teas to keep the bartenders busy. No more drink menu on the wall.

The state stripped the Club Kalua of its liquor license more than two weeks ago, reducing the club, essentially, to a juice bar with strippers.

But what surely would have been a death knell for many other bars is, for this gritty dive, merely the latest chapter in its remarkable, and in many ways inexplicable, longevity. It remains open 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Nothing, it seems, can bring down the Club Kalua.

. . .

At midnight Wednesday, there were nine men and four strippers around Kalua’s main bar. The atmosphere was turgid.

One dancer approached the bar, sighed and said, “I need some liquor.”

Not too long ago, a stripper could make more than $500 a night working at the Club Kalua. Now, one is lucky to walk away with more than $100, a dancer said.

Regulars like Andre, 36, a music producer who goes by the nickname Boogie, are among the dancers’ biggest supporters. Andre, who refused to give his last name, said that he felt it was his civic duty to be there, despite the absence of alcohol.

“It’s about supporting the community,” he said, sucking on an unlit Black and Mild cigar and twirling a small plastic cup of water with his hands. “These girls, they’re part of the community. Some of them got children. It’s about giving back.”

All Press Is Good Press . . . And All English Press Is Totally Irrelevant, So Muckrake Away, Sucker!

So I guess Viva New York is chopped liver to this asshat:

The Flamingo is famed in its Queens neighborhood as a place for lonely men to dance with scantily clad beauties for just $2 a song.

But several former dancers at the Jackson Heights night club allege they were treated like virtual slaves — forced to work hundreds of hours a week without pay and to endure abuse and humiliation by the owners.

In a multimillion-dollar lawsuit expected to be filed today, several former dancers, bartenders and waiters contend dance hall owners Edith D’Angelo and her husband, Luis Ruiz, violated labor laws and treated them inhumanely, according to Make the Road New York, a community organization representing the employees.

“[Ruiz] would insult the women by calling us ‘whore’ or ‘prostitute,’ and he would throw drinks and alcohol on our bodies,” a former dancer said in an affidavit obtained by the Daily News.

The dancers also say they were:

Not allowed to sit down, eat or drink water during shifts of 10 or more hours.

Made to change in rooms that were under video surveillance.

Ordered to have bar managers inspect their toilets after each use to make sure they didn’t use too much toilet paper.

Forced to repeat humiliating statements about themselves during meetings, such as, “I am fat and ugly. I am the reason that Flamingo is losing business.”

. . .

Dancers at the Roosevelt Ave. hot spot have to pay the house to work there — $11 each night. They are fined $10 for each half-hour they’re late and are forced to pay $70 if they call in sick, former dancers said.

Each night, the young women dress in different outfits – sometimes only in bikinis or lacy pajamas — and offer to dance salsa, bachata or cumbia with men for $2 a song or $40 an hour.

. . .

Outside the club yesterday, bar manager Aridio Herrera was unapologetic.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Herrera, 29, said. “Our customers don’t speak any English, so we don’t care if it’s in the paper.”

We Are All Bridge And Tunnel Now

All your venues belong to us now that “Downtown has moved to Queens”:

Robert Prichard hopes to illuminate Long Island City with some emphatic Times Square-style signage.

“I’d like it to be visible from the 59th Street Bridge,” he said. “First, it flashes ‘Queens,’ then ‘Bridge,’ then ‘Theater,’ and then ‘Queensbridge Theater.’ And then maybe an arrow that lights up and points down to our loading dock.”

Mr. Prichard, 52, has long had a flair for the dramatic. This is the same guy, after all, who nearly a decade ago led a conga line up Avenue A in protest of the city’s antiquated cabaret laws.

Nowadays, he’s participating in a perhaps farther-reaching kind of procession — the ongoing exodus of artists, musicians and other creative types abandoning Manhattan in droves.

Adopting the slogan “Downtown Has Moved to Queens,” the former Lower East Side stalwart is partnering with developer Michael Waldman to open what he called a “rock ‘n’ roll supper club, similar to a Bowery Ballroom or a Mercury Lounge with a restaurant — a first for Long Island City, a first for Queens.”

Scheduled to open this summer, the 5,000-square-foot Queensbridge Theater, located at 37-31 10th Street, may be somewhat unique in concept. (After the nighttime entertainment ends at 4 a.m., the proprietors intend to open back up just three hours later for breakfast, with homemade bread baked fresh on the premises.)

Bwahahahaha!

Either That Or Expand The Definition Of “City” To Include Wakefield, Tottenville, Bayside And East New York So No One Feels Left Out

Better to decamp to Jackson, Prospect or even Morris Heights than whoring every detail of your life for clicks, according to the person who started it all (by portraying someone who started it all):

Budding Carrie Bradshaws better think about moving to Queens, says “Sex and the City” icon Sarah Jessica Parker.

Manhattan is bracing for another influx of Blahnik-wearing career girls after the film is released May 30. But New York is “a really hard city, and it’s very expensive and it’s not what it used to be,” Parker told me at the Cinema Society and Linda Wells’ screening of her new film, “Smart People.”

“That’s why the outer boroughs are so desirable,” she said. “The outer boroughs are pretty sexy. It’s just a matter of time before they have their own shows.”