Adult Movie Theatres in Fort Wayne

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts. We searched three ways. The search worded for booths returned two businesses, one eighty miles west and one across the Michigan line. The search worded for an arcade or a gloryhole returned nothing at all.

The city has shops and some of them are well liked. Cirilla’s has been trading since 1992 and runs until nine. Boudoir Noir has a mission statement about enlightening and empowering people and gets written up for its staff. Neither has a room in it, and neither pretends to.

The nearest rooms are a long drive in two directions. There is one in South Bend, about eighty miles west, and a Lion’s Den up at Coldwater in Michigan, about seventy miles north, which a customer describes as being better than its truck-stop sign suggests.

No hardcore, only the European ones

The Indiana Theatre had shown family pictures on Broadway for thirty-five years when it closed in the autumn of 1969. The last film was The Hellfighters, with John Wayne putting out oil well fires.

It was dark for a matter of weeks. At Christmas it reopened as Theatre A, under a new owner whose surname was Aiken, and he said what the programme was going to be. He would avoid hardcore pornography. He would show some European award-winning films.

He meant it, as far as anybody can tell. That was a real business in 1969 and there were real films to show. The trouble is that it is also, word for word, the sentence this trade has said in about forty cities, and our Bakersfield page calls the art house that turns into a porn house the single most common story on this site.

The difference here is that somebody said it out loud first, on the record, in advance. And then the programme moved. Foreign films, then adult films among them, and on 25 April 1978 the place was renamed Cinema Blue and stopped arguing about it.

Nobody on this site has ever told us why a promise like that fails, and we are not going to pretend to know either. The cheapest answer is that the European award winners did not sell enough tickets to keep a six hundred seat house open on Broadway, and the other films did.

Seven names at 2441 Broadway

Dig out the start of it and the whole run is remarkable. A local architect called Henry W. Meyer drew it, they began digging in April 1923, and it opened on 5 November 1923 for stage shows and films both. The advertisement the day before boasted about two Powers projectors, a gold fibre screen, a Fotoplayer to accompany the silent pictures, and seats laid out on terraces.

Cinema Blue closed on 29 October 1985, after a plea agreement with prosecutors. Not home video, not a zoning board, not a landlord. Somebody was charged with something and the deal that settled it shut the cinema.

We want to be straight about how thin that is. It comes from a contributor who went through the Fort Wayne papers and wrote a summary on a theatre enthusiasts’ site. We could not find the charges, the prosecutor’s office, or a single contemporary news report, and two pages on that same site give the closing date four days apart. If somebody in Allen County can put a court file number to it, we would like to hear from you.

And then look at what happened to the room. Twelve years empty, and in 1997 some Fort Wayne businessmen restored it and opened a gourmet restaurant in it. That ran until 2009. Then a jazz club. Then its present name, the Chateau on Broadway, which hires the room out for live theatre and events.

Almost every building on this site ends as a car park, a church, a chemist or a hole in the ground. Worcester’s came down for a beer garden. This one went pornographic, got prosecuted, sat empty for over a decade, and is now a hall where people put on plays, about forty feet from where the Fotoplayer stood in 1923.

Three years, and now a dentist

The other one barely got started. A cinema opened at 122 West Washington Boulevard on 31 March 1971, with a Jackie Gleason picture called How Do I Love Thee?

It was renamed the ABC Cinema 1, went over to adult films, and closed in 1974. Three years from a Jackie Gleason comedy to shut. There is a dental clinic in the building now.

Between them the two addresses cover the whole arc this directory keeps finding. One opened in 1923 to do a bit of everything and has outlived the pornography by forty years. The other opened in 1971 purely to catch a wave and did not survive the first trough. The room that was built to be flexible is still working. The room that was built for one thing is a waiting area.