PROVIDENCE, R.I — [www.projo.com]- Some people live in the rooms at the Sportsman’s Inn, a refurbished 97-year-old building whose early years were associated with Providence’s religious life. And others just stay for the night.

It advertises at the state airport. But it is one of the first places where the police say they look when they are hunting a criminal who they believe is a transient.

And although the inn houses a “gentleman’s club” where dancers take off most of their clothes, it lacks the adult entertainment license carried by other strip clubs in the city.

These are among the contradictions in the saga of the Sportsman’s Inn, at 122 Fountain St., which is, especially for people of a certain age, one of downtown’s landmarks.

Early Tuesday morning, it added another slice of notoriety to its history. It became the scene of a triple shooting, after a fight between a manager and a customer, police said, who had spilled beer over the manager’s head. The customer left. About 15 minutes later, after the club closed and people were leaving, the man walked back into the front hallway carrying a handgun and opened fire on the crowd, police said.

A concrete strip that almost escapes notice on the building’s façade says, “Church House, erected A.D. 1912 –– To the Glory of God.” The Rev. Frank H. Decker, an Episcopal minister, was the founder of an organization called Church House, whose mission was to house, feed and counsel unemployed men.

When the organization moved away, the building became a bar and grille and a hotel. First it was the Rialto, where vaudevillians stayed, and then the Hotel Plaza. As recently as the early 1970s, it was the Pilgrim Inn.

The businesses inside gave the location an unsavory air. In the World War II era, for example, the First Naval District declared it off-limits. Over the years it frequently was the scene of arrests for prostitution and, from time to time, violence.

In 1971, when it was the Pilgrim Inn and the police had denounced it as a den of iniquity, a District Court judge fined a bartender there for illegal possession of a blackjack. The bartender said that he used it to crush ice.

In the mid-1970s it was renamed the Civic View Inn –– a name that stuck in the public mind due to its notoriety and longevity. But the location shed its shabby reputation from 1988 to 1994, when it was remade as a European-style bed and breakfast called the Church House Inn and also became a popular live-rock music venue for the college crowd.

“Exotic dancing” made its comeback when new owners took over in the mid-1990s, changed its décor again and opened the Sportsman’s Inn. Harkening back to its incarnation as the Civic View, the inn has a sign at the rear of the building that boasts “GO-GO Dancing.” In those days, the Civic View staged what it called “semi-topless” entertainment.

Currently, a local bar or nightclub with an adult entertainment license may have nude entertainers, but the Sportsman’s Inn does not have that liberty. Its dancers must wear bikinis because the club lost a prolonged legal battle for an adult entertainment license.

Among those who have been guests of the Sportsman’s Inn is Victor Cortes, who is serving 40 years in prison for the murder of Yodit Kaleab 25, an East African immigrant who lived in the city. According to state prosecutors, Cortes strangled Kaleab in a minivan in Smith Hill in 2005, using a length of cord cut from a window shade at the Sportsman’s Inn, where he had been staying with his girlfriend.