Adult Movie Theatres in Anchorage

What is still open

Nothing that this directory counts. Castle Megastore at 1851 East 5th Avenue, (907) 272-1185, is the only adult business listed in the city. Thirty-five reviews across several years, and not one of them mentions a booth, an arcade or a theatre. It is a shop.

Nothing elsewhere in Alaska either, as far as any published listing shows. If you know otherwise, the directory is wrong and we would rather be told.

The whole life of it, with dates

1969: the state took the films and lost

On 10 October 1969 Alaska State Troopers walked into the Billiken drive-in and seized two films, The Pleasure Machines and Love Camp 7. The troopers said the films contained scenes glorifying lustful conduct and human brutality. The warrant offered no evidence for it.

The owner, Ed Hanby, was convicted on five counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. In December 1970 the Alaska Supreme Court dismissed the conviction and ordered the films returned.

That is worth sitting with, because it is rare in this directory. Compare Omaha, where a jury convicted a shop owner over videotapes and he served nine months. Same country, roughly the same argument, opposite result. Alaska in 1970 decided the state had overreached, and the trade that followed was legal, open and taxed.

Oil money and Spenard

The pattern elsewhere in America is a wartime port or a downtown that went bad. Anchorage is the only city in this directory where the trade arrived on the back of an oil field. The Arctic Slope discovery brought thousands of young, well-paid workers into the city, coming off long stretches in isolated construction camps with money and nowhere to spend it.

Bars, adult theatres, strip clubs, massage parlours and brothels spread across the Anchorage bowl, and Spenard became the centre of it. It had the airport on one side and the city on the other. Downtown took a different route: during the pipeline years the city cleared Fourth Avenue by bulldozing dozens of buildings, which moved the problem rather than ending it.

The Pussycat came north

On 2 June 1978 a Pussycat Theatre opened at 826 West International Airport Road. The chain is the same one that ran the houses on the San Diego page, and this was about as far from Los Angeles as it ever got.

It later became the third of the Gold Dust adult theatres in the city. Gold Dust II was at 2617 Spenard Road. Three adult cinemas running at once in a city of under three hundred thousand people is a lot, and it is the clearest measure of how much money was moving through Anchorage in those years. All of them are closed and the listings give no closing dates.

It ended in a bookshop

The last one standing was a grey building on Spenard Road near McRae Road, with a single sign outside that said Adults Only. Coin-operated monitors in private booths, the last of them in the city. An Anchorage police captain, Bill Miller, said plainly what they had also been used for: prostitutes met clients there.

In December 2015 it was announced that the building would come down in the spring and that The Writer’s Block Bookstore and Cafe would open on the site that autumn, run by Vered Mares and Kathy McCue with others from the city’s writing community. Coffee, beer, wine, poetry readings.

Miller put the decline down to the internet and to gentrification, and in that order he is almost certainly right. The booths did not get raided out of Anchorage. They stopped being the only way to watch something privately, and then the land they sat on became worth more than they were.