Tulsa swingers club shut down by city before it could open

Blame it on the bureaucrats — and the city’s zoning code.

On Feb. 9, the city shut down Syn in Tulsa’s event space before it could open for business and pleasure on the southwest corner of 81st Street and Lewis Avenue.

Sexually explicit businesses are allowed within commercial- and industrial-zoned districts of the city, but they can’t just move in anywhere. And certainly not within 1,000 feet of a school, a public or private park, a church, or a residentially zoned district, to name a few protected areas.

In this case, Syn in Tulsa was working to convert a shuttered wedding store into an event space for the self-described “lifestyle club for couples and open minded adults” across the street from a private park owned by Oral Roberts University.

Though not for long: The Syn in Tulsa website later posted a message announcing that the organization was working on a new location outside the city limits. Then came posts promoting two events at a temporary location “while we work on a new Home For Heathens.”

“We all missed each other so let’s celebrate the Syn way,” the second announcement says. “By having sex with each other.”

Troy Hamilton, owner of Syn in Tulsa, said the south Tulsa location was a good fit for the club.

“If they would let us go in at 81st and Lewis, there is a restaurant there that is struggling that we would have brought 200 people to every Saturday night,” Hamilton said. “That would have made a huge difference.”

Syn in Tulsa was well received in other neighborhoods where it has operated, Hamilton said, because he kept up the properties.

“If we’re in a bad neighborhood, we clean up a bad area,” Hamilton said. “That place at 81st and Lewis is bad with homeless people, and we cleaned it up and it’s not a place where it is basically an abandoned crack house.”

Hamilton stressed that the club is for consenting adults only and that no alcohol is served.

“Our people aren’t there to cause problems,” he said. “You don’t go to a life-style club like that to fight. You are there to look nice, to basically date. It’s adults dating each other.”

Of course, not everyone loves the idea of having a swingers club in their neighborhood. Residents’ complaints are what led the city to shut down Syn in Tulsa’s southside location before it opened. And late last year, it was residents’ complaints that led the city to shut down a Syn in Tulsa event space near Marshall Elementary School on South Peoria Avenue.