“Vegas” Strip Club Wins Approval

Peter Forchetti lost his voice and gained 40 pounds from stress — but ultimately won his final zoning approval Tuesday night needed to turn an abandoned Mill River warehouse into a ​“Las Vegas-style” strip club and adult complex called Project Venus.

The city’s Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) granted Forchetti all of the zoning relief he had requested for the new strip club project during its regular monthly meeting at the municipal building at 200 Orange St.

Forchetti pursued the plan after his previous strip club Scores was evicted from its Saint John Street location to make way for a new artist loft and affordable housing complex at the old clock factory on Hamilton Street. He pitched the board during its May meeting on the Project Venus ​“Vegas-style” entertainment venue he has planned for 203 Wallace St.

Project Venus, according to Forchetti will include strippers, magicians, ​“a steakhouse restaurant, a nightclub lounge, DJs, singers, actors, comedians, all under one roof.” It will be located a block south of Jocelyn Square Park and a block north of the Grand Avenue homeless shelter, near the Mill River Crossing (formerly Farnam Court) public-housing complex.

On Tuesday night, despite the City Plan Department Advisory Report’s recommended denials, the zoning board members unanimously approved a special exception permitting an adult cabaret with liquor service operating between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. and a variance to locate an adult cabaret 1,100 feet from another existing strip club where a minimum distance of 1,500 feet is required.

The commissioners, following the City Plan Commission’s recommendations, also voted unanimously to approve the project’s Coastal Site Plan.

“I’m so excited,” Forchetti said after the meeting. ​“I want to thank the board. I want to thank all of New Haven.” His next step, he said, is to close on the purchase of the 203 Wallace St. building, then submit site plans for the project to the City Plan Commission for technical review. That review process has no bearing on the building’s use as a strip club, which has now been cleared by the BZA.

Forchetti said the stress of spending months in housing court fighting the eviction lawsuit (which he lost) and then waiting with bated breath to see how the BZA would vote, led him to put on weight and lose his voice. He has moved some of his former Scores employees to another club he owns in New York and to a new club he recently purchased in Vernon, he said. For some of his more loyal staff, he has continued to pay their weekly salaries as they wait for this new Planet Venus project to get off the ground. ​“I can’t work without them,” he said.

During the board’s three minutes of deliberations before voting to grant Forchetti the necessary zoning relief for the project, BZA Chair Mildred Melendez and member Sarah Locke recalled the employees and customers who showed up to support Planet Venus during the May public hearing.

“i know it was a few months,” Locke said, ​“but I recall a lot of community support for this group. It makes a difference.”

Melendez also recalled that, although Project Venus will be less than 1,500 feet away from the Catwalk strip club, the previous Scores strip club that Forchetti owned at Saint John Street held a similar zoning nonconformity, with no apparent problems.

“The applicants testified to the lighting,” Melendez said, ​“the security, the police, interaction with the cabaret owner, making sure that it’s safe. We also had people testifying that, at their current location now, employees not only pick up trash on their side of the street, but on the very other side.”

With all of those matters taken under consideration, she said, she moved each of the zoning relief applications for approval. Her three fellow board members, Locke, Anne Stone, and Al Paollilo, Sr., all voted in favor too.

After the final vote, Forchetti and several of his supporters stood up and clapped in the nearly empty meeting room.

“Thank you,” Forchetti rasped from the front row. ​“Thank you so much.”