Adult Movie Theatres in Cleveland

What is open right now

AdultMart runs two shops in the city, at 3101 Berea Road and 5141 Pearl Road, and a third on West Ninth Street has closed. They sell what adult shops sell. Asked directly about viewing booths, the business says it no longer has them, which takes Cleveland out of this directory: no screen, no booths, nothing to sit down in.

The nearest one open is in Detroit

The man who put a booth in every city

Reuben Sturman was born in Cleveland to Russian immigrants and started out selling second-hand comic books from the boot of his car. He took a business degree at Western Reserve University’s Cleveland College in 1948 and went into magazine distribution.

In the late 1960s he standardised the coin-operated peep-show booth: a private cubicle running a few minutes of 8mm film for a coin, which he is widely credited with inventing outright. It worked in both directions. The booths made money, and the booths created a demand for short film loops that drove the boom in American pornographic film production.

He put them everywhere. By the 1970s the business was generating an estimated $2 billion, run through more than two hundred companies and directed from a fortified warehouse in Cleveland. It has been called the largest corporate empire the city had seen since Standard Oil was broken up in 1911.

It ended with the tax man rather than the vice squad. He was arrested in Louisiana in 1985 on sixteen counts of tax evasion, with bail set at $3 million. In 1989 a federal court in Cleveland convicted him of conspiring to obstruct the Internal Revenue Service; investigators put the evasion at as much as $40 million across the seventies and eighties. He was sentenced to ten years and died in prison in 1997.

Read back through this directory and count how many entries are a shop with a room of booths at the back: Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, Seattle, Portland, Dallas, New York, Baltimore. That is Cleveland’s export, still running in other people’s cities, and gone from its own.