Adult Movie Theatres in Grand Rapids

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts. Three separate searches were run and every candidate opened. Classic at 1350 Plainfield Avenue NE, (616) 459-2959, trades 10am to 10pm and is the only adult business left inside the city. It is an unclaimed listing with a single review on it, from October 2025, about the toy selection. No room, no booths, nothing anybody has mentioned.

Nice & Naughty in Grandville and Cirilla’s on the south side are both shops.

The nearest room is fifty-five miles away

The Deja Vu Love Boutique on West Jolly Road in Lansing, sixty-five miles east, keeps its doors open until two in the morning and its own website mentions a theatre. Not one customer has ever described a room there, so we are not counting it. Hold that name, though, because it is the whole second half of this page.

The industry was built an hour from here

Every city in this directory is a story about the trade arriving and then leaving. Grand Rapids is a story about the trade being invented next door and never settling here at all.

Harry Mohney took a job in the projection box of a failing drive-in in Durand, a town of a few thousand people east of Lansing. He put adult films on the whole marquee. People around there called it the Durand Dirties.

Two things on that list matter more than the rest. The go-go bars in 1971 are generally credited as the beginning of the strip club as it now exists, and the first Deja Vu in 1985 became a chain that today runs something like a hundred and thirty-two clubs in the United States and five other countries. A class action brought by more than twenty-eight thousand dancers against the company settled for six and a half million dollars.

And the man who stopped him was not a vice officer. It was the Internal Revenue Service. The prosecutor’s description was that Mohney used scores of corporate entities to hide himself, and the distribution business largely ended with the tax case rather than with any obscenity charge.

Compare Syracuse, where the city could not convict one cinema owner and bought his building instead, or Toledo, where it took a raid to shorten some booth doors. Michigan’s biggest operator was brought down by a tax return.

30 March 1973

Grand Rapids did have adult screens, and two of them arrived on the same day.

The rest went the same way. Fifi’s Adult Theater at 453 South Division opened on 19 November 1976 and stopped advertising the next year; the building later held a church, a Buddhist temple and a tropical fish shop, which is the strangest sequence of tenants on this site. The Cinema on Michigan Street NE was an art house that went to adult films from 1967 and closed on 19 June 1971. And the Division Drive-In at 5566 South Division in Kentwood, the first drive-in in the area, from 1948, became the Stardust in 1962, showed adult films from 1964, shut in the 1970s and is an RV dealership now. Its owner was Floyd Bloss.

That last one closes the circle. The drive-in below Grand Rapids and the drive-in at Durand were run by partners, and between them they are where this whole business started. Neither is standing. Nothing in Grand Rapids replaced them.

Most of the dates in this section come from a community-edited cinema record and its contributors disagree with each other in places, so treat them as close rather than certain. We have not seen a newspaper archive or a court file for any of it.