Philly.com – By Amy S. Rosenberg – Inquirer Staff Writer
The grande dame of A.C.’s gay nightclub scene closes its doors.
Atlantic City – Mortimer Spreng is a redhead. Which you wouldn’t know if the only time you saw him was on stage at the legendary Studio Six, where he wore a wig and stilettos.
But the bigger surprise is that the stage door of the Mount Vernon Avenue nightclub, where Spreng’s celebrated stream-of-drag-queen cabaret show ran for decades, has been nailed permanently shut.
The demise early this month of the Studio Six megaclub and adjacent Brass Rail bar – the last gay venues in a town once teeming with them – reverberated widely. Studio Six, a place that shut down for the night at 11:30 the next morning, always drew a hetero crowd as well. The Brass Rail dates to 1902.