SHOW PALACE
Show Palace, at 670 8th Ave. was the gay all-male equivalent of the flagship store Show World, but on a smaller scale. Wedged between a Blarney Stone and a disgusting Bill’s Gyro and Souvalaki, the site was originally a massage parlor called the House of Paradise (to be historically accurate), before Richie bought it and christened the location Show Palace de Paris, which featured Live Nude Girls. However, with 8th Ave. rife with rough-trade hustlers, drag queens, go-go boys, and the proliferation of seedy all-nite male burlesk porno theaters owned by Chely Wilson, Richie naturally devised a cleaner alternative for a discerning gay male clientele. Show Palace featured a bookstore stocked with the usual array of hard-core smut, with glossy gay, straight, bi-sexual, and tri-sexual picture books for men for which reading is the very last thing on their mind; and (12) video peeps on the street level, where a sign on the entrance proclaimed ‘THROUGH THESE PORTALS WALK THE FINEST OF MEN.’ Show Palace also featured All-Male Live Shows on a Peep-A-Live stage housed on the second floor, with performances previewed with the insertion of a 25 cent token in the slot. Nevertheless, another type of insertion was taking place in the All-Male ‘One-on-One’ booths, for which (2) Private Booths were attached to each other and connected by a seemingly innocuous ‘glory hole; where a male on one side would insert his Woody Wood Pecker into the ‘glory hole’ for an anonymous sexual encounter with the occupant of the adjacent booth, likely of similar proclivity. Says manager Ralphie Borello: ‘ Glory holes were just as illegal as everything else that was going on at the time, but the cops usually let it go. That is until the health crisis (the AIDS epidemic). Once that became full-blown, the glory holes were immediately covered with plexi-glass.’ Upon leaving the premises one evening, and apparently smitten with penis envy, the actor James Mason noted: ‘They got a lot of big cocks in there.’