Adult Movie Theatres in Dayton

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts, and we went looking four separate ways. The booth search had left Montgomery County by its second result. The gloryhole search returned two businesses, both in Columbus, seventy miles away. The fourth search, worded for arcades and viewing booths, came back with a pinball bar, two bowling alleys and a drive-in.

AdultMart at 6388 N Dixie Drive, (937) 454-9999, is the one that matters and it is the subject of the next section. Ten in the morning to ten at night, to eleven on Friday and Saturday. It is a good shop by its reviews and it has no arcade. The listing also appears under an older name, Total Xposure, at the same address and the same telephone number.

Cirilla’s, in business since 1992, trades until midnight and is a chain novelty shop in a strip next to a dollar store. Hustler Hollywood at Monroe and Adam & Eve at Piqua are chains. Lion’s Den, an Ohio company trading since 1971, is filed under Dayton by some directories but the address is Jeffersonville, forty-five miles east on the interstate.

One listing we cannot resolve. Annex at 446 E 5th Street in the Oregon District has a telephone number, no hours at all, and a single review written in September 2010 calling it a mom and pop bookstore and complaining about drinkers shouting from the balcony of the bar opposite. We found no trace of it in the local press, closing or opening. We are not going to tell you it is open and we are not going to tell you it is shut.

An arcade closing, in three reviews

Almost every page on this site reconstructs a closure from the outside: a demolition date, a planning file, a photograph of a boarded front. This one did not have to be reconstructed. It is sitting on a shopping listing in public, written by three people who had no idea they were recording anything.

Two dollars. That is the cheapest door in this directory by a distance. Chattanooga charges eighteen, Hollywood, Florida charges twenty, Bakersfield charges eight for the booths. Dayton charged two and still could not make it worth the floor space.

And it was not empty. That is the part that stays with you. The 2019 visitor went on a weekday afternoon and found plenty going on, which matches what the manager of a twenty-four hour arcade in Pompano Beach told a customer about her busiest hours: eight in the morning to seven at night. These rooms were daytime businesses. They were not dying of no customers. The square footage was simply worth more with lingerie on it.

The explanation in the middle review is his, not ours. He is a stranger passing through who formed a view about internet shopping and wrote it under a three star rating, and he may be right. What we can say without him is that the arcade was there in April 2019 and gone by June 2021, and that whatever happened to it happened quietly enough that no newspaper in Ohio appears to have noticed.

Nobody needed a law here

Ohio has a statewide rule that shuts these rooms at midnight, and three other pages on this site are built on it. Akron, Toledo and Columbus all turn on the same statute and what it does to a trading day.

Dayton is the Ohio city where none of that was needed. We found no prosecution, no licence refusal, no council fight and no nuisance action aimed at the arcade on North Dixie Drive. The law sat there unused while the thing it was written for closed itself and put shelving in.

That is worth saying plainly, because this site spends most of its length showing you rules that shut rooms, and it would be easy to leave you with the impression that the rules are what did it. In Dayton they are not. Here it was arithmetic.

1924 Wayne Avenue, four times over

There is one plot in this city that has now killed four different ways of selling the same thing.

It opened on 8 May 1942 as the V Theatre, two hundred and fifty seats. On 9 April 1949 it reopened as the Art Theatre with Hamlet on a hard ticket. It joined a chain. In 1972 it went over to adult films full time, and on 22 December 1978 it was twinned into Art Cinemas 1 and 2.

In the 1980s it was where you went for Rocky Horror, according to somebody who was there, with the rest of the programme still adult and a short called Blazing Zippers running before it. The same building had housed a coffee house called the Yellow Bird, whose bands were loud enough through the wall that the cinema had to turn the film’s sound off.

It came down around 2004. A Family Video went up on the site. Family Video was the last video rental chain in America, and it outlived Blockbuster by a decade. On 6 January 2021 it took its last rental and closed all two hundred and fifty remaining stores at once. We do not know what is in that building today.

Hard ticket art house, adult cinema, video rental, and whatever came after. Four businesses that all existed because watching something required going somewhere, stacked on one address off Wayne Avenue, each one outlived by the ground.

The other one is downtown and simpler. 144 S Jefferson Street opened as the Globe in 1910, became the New Globe in 1917 and the Ohio in 1928, and on 6 April 1962 reopened as the Ohio Follies under an adult policy. Three hundred and thirty-five seats. The first film was called Unashamed, which for 1962 took some nerve. It closed on 6 July 1969 and the site is now a parking garage for the convention centre.

The Ohio company that made it a business model

The Bakersfield page says that the art house that turned into a porn house is the single most common story on this site, and it is. Dayton is where you find out that it was not always a drift. For a while it was a company.

The Art Theatre at 1924 Wayne Avenue belonged to the Art Theatre Guild, started by Louis K. Sher in Bexley, Ohio in 1954, which came to own dozens of cinemas across the United States. In 1965 Sher added a distribution arm, Sherpix, which ran until 1974 and dealt in art house cinema and American pornography out of the same office.

Read that last sentence again. Not a respectable chain that gradually slipped. One company, by design, handling both halves of the thing this directory is about, from an address in suburban Columbus.

It got them prosecuted twice over. In the Sixth Circuit the Guild and Sherpix were fighting an indictment for shipping a film to Memphis by common carrier. In the District of Columbia, Sher and his company were tried over conduct in late 1972: the first jury hung, the second convicted on every count, and Sher was given a suspended sentence and three years on probation while the company was fined six thousand dollars. The Court of Appeals threw it out in 1975 because the trial judge had instructed the jury on the wrong test for obscenity.

Sher kept a conviction for about two years and then did not. The chain he built is gone, the distributor stopped in 1974, and the Dayton house he put films into came down in 2004. Whatever the law was trying to do to that company in 1972, it was not what finished it.