Delco’s iconic strip club is rebranding but keeping its Mother’s Day flower sale

Shockingly, Delaware County has only one strip club, Lou Turk’s in Tinicum Township. Not shockingly, it bills itself as “historic” and a “Delco icon.”

Over on Yelp, reviewers call it a “hallowed hall,” “better than expected,” and “the Cheers of the female entertainment industry in the Philly area.”

Now, folks can call Lou Turk’s something else: The Carousel Delco, though the odds that they will actually call it that are exactly zero. It’s as likely as Philadelphians calling The Gallery the Fashion District or anyone calling it Columbus Boulevard instead of Delaware Avenue.

A Delco institution for more than 50 years, Lou Turk’s announced it was rebranding via a statement on its social media pages last weekend, prompting comments like “April fools?” “Fake news?” and “This may go down as the biggest travesty to ever occur in Delco…and my god that’s saying something."

Along with the new name, the club released what appears to be new signage, with the word “CAROUSEL” spelled out using silhouettes of nude women. The establishment also announced recent renovations, new amenities, menu enhancements, and new management. Yeah, new management that did not return my requests for an interview about why this was done.

I have no idea what would inspire someone to name a strip club “The Carousel Delco,” aside from the fact that both have poles. The club’s statement seems to explain why the new name was chosen, but it actually doesn’t. Classic Delco.

“We are still a Delco bar — always have been, always will be,” it reads. “That legacy is exactly why this name was chosen.”

Wait, did Delco bars all used to have carousels inside? If so, I definitely missed this county’s Belle Époque.

When I saw the news, my biggest fear was that one of Delco’s most storied traditions could be in jeopardy — the annual Mother’s Day and Easter flower sales outside of the strip club. It’s been the subject of countless memes and something I’ve used in stories as shorthand to explain Delco culture.

Luckily, whoever wrote the club’s statement anticipated that concern and immediately assuaged all fears:

“…we look forward to many more awesome memes along the way…and we will still be selling flowers this Mother’s Day holiday.”

Whew! I mean you wouldn’t want to tell your mom you bought her flowers at the Acme, would you?

The establishment was purchased in the mid-1960s by the late Louis Saddic, who was better known as Lou Turk, a name he picked up as a kid in South Philly, according to a 1983 Inquirer article.

Located in the Essington section of Tinicum, just off of Route 291, the club is situated in between an Irish pub and a Wawa, because of course it is. It’s so close to the Philadelphia International Airport you can see the underbellies of planes flying low overhead, which historically made Lou Turk’s a popular layover spot for travelers. Being near the shipyard didn’t hurt either.

The building itself is a windowless parallelogram painted in a muddy brown, with LOU TURKS plastered in large white letters on a gray patch on the side and “LT’s Cabaret” written on the awning. As of Tuesday, both signs remained.

It’s unclear if the business was always a strip club, but it definitely was by 1973, when it started to receive citations by the PLCB for “lewd, immoral or improper entertainment,” according to our archives.

In 1983, the club was raided twice, the second time by 55 police officers who confiscated a whopping total of $19 from dancers they claimed had sexual contact with patrons. Turk, who was subsequently hit with prostitution and racketeering charges, vehemently denied the claims, as did five dancers and five other employees arrested in the raid.

William J. Davies, then-deputy district attorney for Delaware County, said at the time of Lou Turk’s, “It won’t reopen” and “We are not going to tolerate this sort of thing out in Delaware County.” Boy, was he off base.

The following year at trial one dancer testified she would “haul off and slug” any patron who tried to get handsy, which tracks for Delco. Investigators who testified used marshmallows and hand puppets to describe what they allegedly witnessed in the club, a Daily News report said.

Turk was represented at trial by the late high-profile attorney A. Charles Peruto Sr., who at one point, while questioning a PLCB agent’s testimony about interactions between a dancer and a patron, “assumed the dancer’s squatting position in front of the jury box and questioned the agent about the physical possibility of the act he had described,” according to an Inquirer article.

It’s unclear if the jurors threw Peruto tips, but what is becoming clear is how the club got its storied reputation in the annals of Delco history.

Turk’s case ended in a mistrial because prosecutors didn’t supply his attorney with the necessary discovery material before the case went to court. You can’t hide anything when prosecuting a strip club.

In 1990 a judge ordered the club to close for a year, after it had racked up a dozen citations between 1975 and 1990, “the longest history of state liquor code violations in the Philadelphia area for lewd entertainment,” The Inquirer wrote at the time.

During the shutdown, the bar operated a sandwich shop with a walk-up window for a few months, but it didn’t cut the mustard.

Lou Turk’s reopened on July 1, 1991, and The Inquirer was surprisingly there on opening day to see a dancer named Gail with palm tree pasties perform to the dulcet tones of 80s glam metal band RATT.

The establishment hasn’t made headlines since, according to our archives, aside from a report by unnamed sources that Ryan Howard visited the club in 2008, and several passing references to it in stories about Delco culture by yours truly.

I’m not sure when I first became aware of Lou Turk’s. As a nearly two-decade transplant, it’s just the stuff of legends that’s always been here and I’ve always heard talked about, like Wawa or the Lower Swedish Cabin.

Whenever someone asks for a suggestion for the best place to eat or visit on the Delco subreddit or on a local Facebook page, someone inevitably suggests Lou Turk’s, tongue-in-cheek, like they do Woody’s in Philly.

“I think I even got a Lou Turks answer to me asking about vets in the area for my cat lol I died,” one Redditor posted.

“Did the cat survive?” another asked.

“Yeah he got a lap dance and started feeling better.”

Several reviewers on Yelp attest that the club’s food is pretty good. Even Jim Pappas, who’s gained local notoriety for trying and cataloging more than 1,100 cheesesteaks in the tristate area on his Philadelphia Cheesesteak Adventure website and YouTube channel, gave the food a thumbs up.

“Holy mackerel! Who knew Lou Turk’s would have great food?” he says in his review.

One Yelp reviewer back in 2011 even used a cheesesteak analogy to describe the place.

“As far as quality of performers go, think of this place as a cheesesteak shop in comparison to LeBec Fin; you can get a very satisfying quality meal, but it’s not exactly something you’d be bragging about to everyone you meet,” they wrote.

Changing the name of anything is hard, especially around here, where change is as welcome as the Dallas Cowboys.

But it may be particularly difficult for Lou Turk’s, which is so engrained in local culture some folks call it Uncle Lou’s.

That’s the great thing about Delco. It doesn’t have famous tourist sites like Longwood Gardens or King of Prussia Mall, but what it has it owns to the bone, including its lone strip club.