Adult Movie Theatres in New York

What is open right now

The last cinema was in Queens

The Fair Theatre at 90-18 Astoria Boulevard in East Elmhurst outlasted every adult house in Manhattan. It opened in 1939 and took its name from the World’s Fair out at Flushing Meadows: 599 seats, later carved into five screens.

It ran adult films for decades, long after Times Square had given up on them, and around 2006 the main screen went over to Bollywood and kung fu while the adult programme moved into smaller rooms built out of former retail space. A cinema in Queens showing Hindi features at the front and pornography at the back is the last shape this trade took in New York.

The Deuce

The block of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was already being called the worst in town by the New York Times in 1960. By the seventies it was solid marquees, kung fu and pornography side by side, and it is where a great deal of the American porn business actually got its money: Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones played those houses.

These were not purpose-built porn houses. They were the grand Broadway theatres of West 42nd Street, which lost their audiences to the suburbs, turned to films, got subdivided, and ended up here. The Rialto Report has walked the former sites of thirty-four of them.

A rule about distance

In 1995 the City Council amended the Zoning Resolution. It did not name Times Square. It said an adult business could not operate within 500 feet of a school, a house of worship, or another adult business, and could not operate in a residential district at all. In a city built at that density, the rule was close to a ban.

Enforcement started in 1997, and on 24 February 1998 the Court of Appeals held that the city had lawfully rezoned Times Square. Rudolph Giuliani said the law would leave no more than five adult stores there, and added that in his opinion one was too many. What survived did so by arithmetic: shops reorganised their stock so that most of it was not adult, and traded on as hybrids.

One correction to the story as it is usually told. By the time the police began closing businesses in 1997, most of the Times Square theatres had already gone. Rising rents, the collapse of the grindhouse audience and home video had done the work, and lawmakers and urban planners have said since that the cleanup was decades of effort that predated the mayor who gets the credit.