Adult Movie Theatres in Lancaster

What is still open

Nothing. We searched three ways and not one Lancaster County business came back. A search bounded to the county returned escape rooms, a tobacco shop and a cinema hire company.

One listing we will mention only so nobody else wastes an evening on it. A bare entry called Harb-Adult appears under Lancaster with no category, no hours, no telephone number and no reviews, and the site’s own suggested searches alongside it are about tea rooms. Our guess, and it is a guess, is that it is an adult day services provider, which is what the same kind of stub turned out to be when we hit it in Springfield. It is not a venue.

The real answer is that this county is a hole in a ring, which is the next section.

A hole in a ring

Lancaster is not isolated. It is surrounded. Everything within half an hour of the county line has something, and the county itself has none of it.

The nearest room worth the drive is Hobbeze at Lebanon, twenty-five minutes up the road, and we have already written it up on the Harrisburg page, so it is counted there and not here. Two lounges, a straight side and a gay side, twelve dollars, and the only live dancer peep booth we have found anywhere in this part of the country.

There is no county rulebook. There are sixty.

On most pages of this site we go and read the county’s adult business ordinance. Greenville County specifies the sightlines to within six inches. Brevard County licenses every adult bookstore in it.

There is no equivalent here to read, and the reason is structural. Pennsylvania does not zone at county level. Land use sits with the municipality. Lancaster County’s own figures give it sixty municipalities: forty-one townships, eighteen boroughs and the City of Lancaster. The county planning commission advises and writes comprehensive plans, and cannot overrule a township’s zoning decision.

So there is no single door to get through here. There are sixty. Anybody wanting to open a room in this county has to find one township out of forty-one, or one borough out of eighteen, whose own rulebook lets them in, and each of those sixty has been free to write that rulebook as tight as it likes, independently, for decades.

That is a different kind of obstacle from a thousand-foot setback or a door removal rule, and it is much harder to photograph. Nobody passed a county ban. Sixty separate bodies each made their own arrangements, and the arithmetic of that is a county with nothing in it.

What we could not establish, which is most of it

We would rather hand you the gaps than fill them in, and on this page the gaps are the bulk of the work.

No history. We found no record of an adult cinema in Lancaster, ever. The King shut on 2 May 1982 with a Disney picture on one screen and a Chuck Norris on the other. The Eden went on 30 May 1998. The UA Pacific 4 closed in July 2000. None of them is listed as having shown adult films, and no contributor mentions one. Either it never happened here or it is in the Lancaster newspaper archive and not anywhere we can reach.

No ordinance. A search result pointed us at a provision making it illegal for an exhibitor to let anyone under seventeen watch a film rated X, with a duty to check ages where in doubt. It would have been a good find, because it turns a trade body’s rating label into law. We could not confirm it belongs to this Lancaster rather than one of the other Lancasters, the code site is behind a bot wall, and the follow-up searches came back with nothing. So it is not on this page. If somebody can give us the article number, we will put it back.

And the thing everybody will think of. This is Pennsylvania Dutch country. The oldest Amish settlement in the world is here, the Plain communities are a large and visible part of county life, and several million people a year come to look at them.

We are not going to draw a line between those two facts. Not one source connects them, the Plain communities do not sit on township zoning boards, and the same emptiness turns up on this site in places with no such population at all. What we can say is that Lancaster County is one of the most visited places in Pennsylvania, that it has sixty separate planning authorities, and that there is no room in any of them.