Adult Movie Theatres in Allentown

Pennsylvania · last checked 21 October 2026

Two places in the Lehigh Valley have booths and both of them want ten dollars or a handful of tokens. The city itself has a shop on Hamilton Street and nothing behind it. Hamilton Street is also where a cinema reopened as a porn house in July 1986 and was shut down by the city about a month later, which is the shortest run anywhere in this directory.

What is still open

Adult World

Booth arcade

880 South West End Boulevard, Quakertown, PA 18951

From Allentown: About 15 miles south
Entry: $10 for the arcade
Has: Video booths, two of them with gloryholes
Hours: 9am to midnight
Phone: (215) 538-1522

The best-documented arcade in eastern Pennsylvania and the most recently confirmed. A traveller who stops in when passing wrote on 14 October 2026 that the arcade is clean and worth the visit. Ten dollars gets you in. There are two booths with holes, and regulars say that otherwise you wait for somebody to leave a door ajar.

Couples shop here and say so. A woman who came with her husband in June 2023 found the staff unpushy and safety-minded, and said they would drive the distance again.

One account to read before you go. On 9 September 2026 a man found the back room being cleaned, with only the gloryhole booths open, and another customer would not take no for an answer and kept pressing him through the hole. He told the owners on the way out and said he would not be back. Nothing else here reads like that, and the fact he reported it at the counter says something about the place as well.

Last checked 21 October 2026 · Arcade called clean in a review dated 14 October 2026

Adult Playtime Boutique

Booth arcade

1226 MacArthur Road, Whitehall, PA 18052

From Allentown: About 4 miles north
Booths: Token-operated, bought at the counter
Hours: 10am to 10pm
Phone: (610) 432-6536

Out on the MacArthur Road retail strip. You buy tokens at the till for the video booths, which is the original arrangement and is getting rare. A visitor in July 2024 described a quiet night back there, one man he did not want to talk to, and otherwise a perfectly ordinary visit.

Somebody has been spending money on it. In September 2025 a regular reported the outside repainted, the inside looking more like a boutique than a bookshop, and contactless payment at the counter. That is a business investing in the front of house, which is not what a dying one does.

Last checked 21 October 2026 · Booths and tokens described on 2 July 2024; shop refurbished by September 2025

Not counted. Hamilton Books & Video at 1051 Hamilton Street, (610) 439-4114, is the only adult business left in Allentown proper. It trades noon to 8pm, it is crammed with stock, reviewers from 2018 to 2022 praise the range, and not one of them mentions a room. There is a third Adult Playtime Boutique in Allentown and an Adult World in Whitehall described as small and run down, and neither has a room anybody has written about. Exotic Dreams in Bethlehem is a shop.

Sixty miles north there are two more venues, including a proper open-floor adult cinema. They have their own page.

One month on Hamilton Street

The Capri shut as an ordinary cinema in 1985. Somebody bought it and reopened it in July 1986 showing pornography. About a month later the city ordered it closed as a public nuisance, and it closed for good in October.

Four months from reopening to final closure, and roughly thirty days from opening to the order. Set that against the rest of this directory. Syracuse spent years failing to convict one owner and ended up buying his building. Toledo lost its burlesque ban in federal court. Allentown used a nuisance order and was done inside a month.

We would like to tell you the ordinance, the hearing and the docket number. We do not have them. This account comes from a user-compiled list with no sources on it, and the next place to look is the Morning Call archive and the Lehigh County Historical Society.

What actually killed them

Four cinemas in this city showed adult films and the list is worth looking at as a shape.

Towne1963 to 1978
Jeanette, formerly the Franklin1963 to 1992
Rialto1971 to 1979
Capri, on Hamilton StreetJuly to October 1986

Four adult cinemas in one small city. The dates come from a user-compiled list with no sources attached, so treat them as approximate.

The Jeanette is the one that matters. It was the Franklin, and its owner turned it into the Jeanette Art Theater to show the imported European films the big chains would not touch. By 1965 it was showing nothing but pornography, three years before the X rating existed to describe it. It kept going until July 1992.

Twenty-seven years, and no ordinance ended it. Home video did. By 1992 anybody could watch the same films at home for less than the price of a ticket, and the building stopped making sense.

That sequence, art house to adult house to nothing, is on almost every page of this site. Lexington had a Downtown Cinema showing foreign films on its way to pornography. Hartford and Pittsburgh both had an Art Cinema. The respectable name came first and the programme changed under it.

And then look at what is open today in the two entries above. Not cinemas. A token machine and a ten dollar door, on a retail strip and a boulevard, fifteen miles apart. The format that survived home video is the one that never depended on the film.

Sources

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