Adult Movie Theatres in Charlotte

What is open right now

The Just For Pleasure shops on Old Pineville Road and Hankins Road are retail only, and close on Sundays. The Green Room Arcade on East Independence is a slot machine room, not this kind of arcade at all.

One person per booth, by state law

North Carolina does not leave booth occupancy to the cities. State law prohibits any viewing booth in an adult mini motion picture theatre from being occupied by more than one person at any time, and that applies across the whole state.

It is worth putting beside Birmingham, where one of the two venues advertises two large buddy booths at the back: two seats behind one door. That is legal in Alabama and a criminal matter in North Carolina, and the two shops are otherwise the same kind of business.

Charlotte added its own layer on 18 January 1994, when the city enacted section 12.518 and required any building housing an adult bookstore or adult mini motion picture theatre to sit at least 1,500 feet from a residential district, a school, a church, a child care centre, a park or a playground. That is the same figure Houston arrived at three years later, and it does the same thing: it clears the map.

The shop that tried to outvote its own shelves

All of that machinery only bites on a business that meets the definition, and in North Carolina the definition turns on whether a shop carries a preponderance of sexually explicit material. One Charlotte adult bookstore looked at that word and saw a loophole worth trying.

You have to admire the shape of it. If the test is which sort of stock you have most of, then the answer is to acquire a great deal of the other sort, and the cheapest bulk inventory in America is second-hand paperbacks. Putting boxing on in the booths is the same move applied to the part of the shop that has no shelves.

It did not work, and the reason is the useful part. The test was never arithmetic. A shop does not stop being an adult bookstore by buying a pallet of thrillers, and the word in the ordinance was doing more work than the person reading it had assumed.

Why this one is worth a page

Because almost every other city in this directory fought about where a business could stand or what it could do inside. Charlotte fought about whether the business was the thing the rule named at all, and that argument comes first. A 1,500-foot buffer is worth nothing against a shop that is not an adult bookstore by the ordinance’s own definition.

The same instinct shows up all over this site. Dallas licenses and publishes a register, so there is nothing to argue about. Charlotte left a word in the ordinance doing the heavy lifting, and somebody went and bought a lot of paperbacks.