Adult Movie Theatres in Denver

Colorado · last checked 25 September 2026

Denver still has a proper booth arcade, on West Colfax, ten dollars for as long as you like and eight if you are over fifty-five. Colfax itself is the most mythologised adult strip in America, and the line everybody quotes about it appears to have been made up.

What is open right now

Pleasures

Booth arcade

3490 West Colfax Avenue, Denver, CO 80204

Arcade: $10 unlimited viewing, $8 for over-55s
Hours: 9am to midnight, seven days
Entry: 18 or over with valid ID
Phone: (303) 825-6505

A large arcade rather than a few booths behind a counter, and one of the only venues in this directory with a concessionary rate. Ten dollars buys you unlimited viewing; the over-fifty-fives pay eight.

Last checked 25 September 2026 · Listing refreshed April 2026, 16 reviews

The other Pleasures is shut

There was a second shop under the same name out at 8216 East Colfax Avenue. Its listing, updated in July 2026, says closed. West Colfax is the one that is trading.

The quote that nobody can find

Everyone who writes about Colfax Avenue reaches for the same line: in the 1970s, Playboy called it the longest, wickedest street in America. It is in guidebooks and newspaper features and on the plaques of businesses along the road.

In 2017 the Denver news site Denverite went looking for the original and could not find it. Neither can anyone else. The magazine’s archive has no trace of the sentence.

“the longest, wickedest street in America”
Playboy magazine, on Colfax Avenue
No trace of it anywhere in the magazine’s archive.
Printed with that attribution on Visit Denver and on the Colfax Avenue Business Improvement District’s own site.
What the magazine did print, in 1961, was about Denver’s Holladay Street, and called it one of the wildest enclaves of the old West.

A quotation with a source attached, repeated for fifty years, reproduced by the city that benefits from it, and apparently invented.

What makes it worth a section on this site rather than a footnote is where the citation still appears. Not on a forum or a fan page: on Visit Denver, the city’s official tourism body, and on the website of the business improvement district that represents Colfax Avenue itself. Both print the quote and both credit Playboy.

This directory exists because almost nothing written about adult venues has ever been checked. Denver is the clearest case we have found: a fact about a red-light district that is repeated by the organisations responsible for that district, sourced to a magazine that does not appear to have said it.

Boarded up, then restored

The Bluebird Theater at 3317 East Colfax Avenue in Denver, a restored brick and terracotta facade with a large vertical neon sign reading Bluebird. — The Bluebird on East Colfax, photographed in 2015. The brickwork and terracotta were boarded over during its years as an adult house and uncovered again in the restoration. Photo Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, public domain.

The Bluebird at 3317 East Colfax was designed by Harry W. J. Edbrooke and built in 1913 and 1914, opening on 11 September 1915 as the Thompson Theater. It had taken the Bluebird name by 1941, and by 1977 it was showing X-rated films.

You could see the change from the pavement. The brick and terracotta front was covered over with wood and most of the windows were boarded, which is what a building looks like when it stops wanting to be seen into.

Preservationists and neighbourhood groups got it restored to the original frontage and it reopened in 1994 as a music venue, which it still is. It went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

Sources

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