Darryl Shaw wants strip club out of Ybor City property
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Feb 7, 2024

Developer Darryl Shaw has taken legal action to remove a strip club from one of his Ybor City properties.

An entity linked to Shaw filed complaints against the Players Club at 1620 E. Second Ave. in early February, seeking to remove the club from the 3,157-square-foot building.

Shaw says in court documents that he terminated the club’s lease in January 2023, giving it a 12-month notice to vacate the premises.

“After receiving complaints from neighbors about late-night partying in the streets and recognizing that a strip club does not fit our vision for a family-friendly district, we exercised the termination provision in the lease,” Shaw said in a statement. “The notice period has now expired.”

The club entered a lease with Shaw’s Ybor Land LLC in 2019. The initial term expires June 24. Shaw notified the club in January 2023 that he was ending its lease under a provision allowing him to terminate the lease after the first three years if he planned to demolish the building.

Shaw is among Ybor’s largest landowners and a partner in Gasworx, a mixed-use district under construction on the fringes of the Ybor historic district. He is also working to revitalize East Seventh Avenue, the main corridor of the historic district. The strip club is on Ybor’s outer edges, situated along Adamo Drive, but it is still representative of the conundrum Shaw faces in his redevelopment quest.

The current iteration of Seventh Avenue, Shaw has said, is too reliant on late-night bars and clubs. A few doors down from the strip club, an indoor pickleball facility has opened in a warehouse Shaw owns. But nightlife has long been the anchor of Ybor and represents hundreds of jobs.

“It’s too heavily weighted toward late-night alcohol, and it’s taken me a while to understand that,” Shaw told the Tampa Bay Business Journal in 2023. “It’s not looking at a specific business and saying they’re good or bad. It’s what does the public want when they come to Ybor? Or what’s stopping some of the public from coming to Ybor?”

On the weekend before Halloween 2023, a shooting in Ybor left two dead and more than a dozen others wounded.

“To be a healthy, vibrant neighborhood, Ybor City needs a greater balance of residences, restaurants, shops and other businesses that add to the unique character of the Latin Quarter,” Shaw said in October 2023. “But in the immediate future, hard conversations must take place that focus on curtailing an environment that fosters violence like Sunday’s shootings.”

A lawyer who previously represented the Players Club said he was looking into the matter on Wednesday. The club could not be reached for comment.