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Adult Movie Theatres in Baltimore

Maryland · last checked 24 September 2026

Baltimore still has the thing every other city in this directory lost: a red-light district you can walk down. The Block, on East Baltimore Street, has been where it is since 1904, and there is an adult shop with an arcade upstairs trading on it until two in the morning.

What is open right now

The Big Top

Booth arcade

429 East Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Booths
Video arcade upstairs, shop below
Hours
9am to 2am, seven days
Phone
(410) 332-4004

On the Block itself, in the 400 block, which makes it one of the very few venues in this directory still trading inside a historic red-light district rather than in whatever industrial strip a city pushed the business out to. It calls itself Baltimore’s biggest adult toy store and video arcade, and the arcade is up the stairs.

Last checked 24 September 2026 · Listing refreshed August 2026

A hundred and twenty years in the same place

The 400 block of East Baltimore Street in 2019, with signs for Lust, Crazy John's and the 2 O'Clock Club along the right-hand side, and two empty shopfronts on the left papered over with commercial letting boards.
The 400 block in 2019. Lust, Crazy John's and the 2 O'Clock Club still trading on the right. On the left, two units papered over with letting boards. Photo Eli Pousson, Baltimore Heritage, CC0.

The Block became Baltimore’s red-light district after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, which is to say it has outlived Times Square, the Combat Zone, the Tenderloin’s cinemas and every other strip on this site. After the Second World War the arcades, adult bookshops, peep shows and show bars arrived and pushed it from burlesque towards what it is now.

The scale it once ran at is easy to underestimate. A 1951 investigation counted twenty-one night clubs on the Block in which sex workers were working.

East Baltimore Street, then and nowThenCharles StreetGay StreetNowSouth StreetGay Street
The Block never closed. It contracted, from a strip running most of the way to Charles Street down to about two blocks.

The anchor was the Gayety Theatre at 405 East Baltimore Street, which opened in 1906 and ran comedians before it ran strippers: Abbott and Costello played it in the twenties, Gypsy Rose Lee and Blaze Starr after the war. A five-alarm fire on 6 December 2010 heavily damaged four buildings on the Block, including the one that had housed it.

What is left is several strip clubs, sex shops and adult merchants in about two blocks between South Street and Gay Street. Look at the photograph again: the right-hand side is still working, and the left-hand side is two papered-over units with a commercial agent’s board on them. That is how this district has been ending for forty years, a unit at a time, and it is still not finished.

Sources

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