You can bet the sleaze will ooze back in

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Sleaze is on the run in Honolulu. Sooner or later, though, it will find a place to land. It always does.

That's the way it is with sleaze. It can run, but it can also hide. Sleaze has staying power. From the back alleys of Tangier to the boulevards of Paris, sleaze endures. If it's not one place, it's another.

Personally, I prefer my sleaze out in the open where we can keep an eye on it. It's the sleaze you can't see that hurts you most.

That's why I think Mayor Harris' new push to "clean up" the area around the Convention Center is ill-advised.

People a lot more powerful than Harris have taken their best aim at striking out sleaze, but it always crawls back. Yes, New York cleaned up Times Square for the tourists, but just try walking around the corner with a gold chain on your neck. Sure, San Francisco pushed the panhandlers out of the Civic Center area; now, they're scattered all over town and across the bay, too.

You can't legislate morality, but that doesn't stop our politicians from trying to zone it.

Harris doesn't say so explicitly, but his $6 million plan to clean up the area around the Convention Center leaves little doubt that he sees this as a sleaze issue; his proposal to create a special district near the Convention Center specifically would ban strip clubs, hostess bars and other adult businesses.

I admit I've got some Club Rock Za/Femme Nu escapades in my long ago past, but that's not why I'm against this plan. I'd welcome a call to create a new gateway park across the street from the Convention Center, if I thought that was all there was to it. But when officials try to not-so-subtly re-engineer an entire city district simply because they don't approve of the type of legal business going on there, they are headed for trouble on a slippery slope.

First they try to chase the hookers out of Waikiki. Next they force the homeless out of 'A'ala park. Next they want to ban some long-standing businesses from a commercial area because they're incompatible with someone's idea of what tourist fun should be. (Like conventioneers don't go to hostess bars, too!)

What next? Tattoo parlors out of Kailua and Wahiawa? Car dealers barred from Nimitz Highway? ABC stores banned in Waikiki? Light industry driven from Kaka'ako?

There are people who think all of these things are inappropriate, maybe even a little cheesy, if not sleazy. But that doesn't mean we have the right to push them around like game pieces on a Monopoly board. Better we leave the sleaze we know in place than drive it underground, where it will surely reappear who knows where.

Mike Leidemann's columns appear in the Advertiser on Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.