Adult Movie Theatres in Charleston

What is open right now

The city that invented this whole argument

Every page on this site is about a rule that says what may stand where. Houston’s 1,500 feet. New Jersey’s school bus stops. Los Angeles dispersing by 1,000 feet and Charlotte doing the same thing three years earlier. Forty cities and almost all of it is zoning, pointed at one trade.

Charleston is where an important half of that idea was born, and not for this reason at all.

South Carolina had passed enabling legislation in 1924 letting its municipalities set up planning and zoning commissions. Charleston used it to do something nobody in the country had done: draw a line around the old part of the city and put a board in charge of what happened to the buildings inside it. Not what the buildings were used for, which is ordinary zoning, but what they looked like and whether they could be altered or pulled down at all.

That is the tool this directory is built on, invented in a city trying to stop its eighteenth century houses being sold for their panelling. The same instrument, three decades later, is what emptied Boston’s Washington Street and Washington’s Fourteenth Street and kept the adult trade a measured distance from every school in America.

Which is why the venue is in another city

Charleston proper is one of the most tightly governed built environments in the country, by ninety-five years of practice. North Charleston was incorporated separately in 1972, it is bigger in area, and Dorchester Road is a highway strip of car dealerships and light industry. A windowless building with a twenty-four seat auditorium inside it is unremarkable there and unthinkable eight miles south.

This site keeps finding the same shape in different clothes. St. Louis pushed it across a state line into a company town of 141 people. Louisville kept its own and watched the town over the river spend fifty years killing one cinema. Honolulu moved it out of the historic district and into the tourist end. Here the line is a city boundary and eight miles of road, and the effect is the same. The trade does not leave. It relocates to wherever the rules were written by people with something else on their minds.