Adult Movie Theatres in Newark

What is open right now

Nothing in the city. Newark holds roughly three hundred thousand people and sits ten miles from Times Square, and it has neither an adult cinema nor a booth arcade.

The Cameo on Elizabeth Avenue is sometimes named as Newark’s adult house and was not: it closed in 1972 as a Spanish-language cinema and is a Baptist church today. The porn house people are remembering was the former Treat theatre on Orange Street.

The rule that moves

Almost everything in this directory is municipal. Charlotte wrote its own 1,500-foot ordinance, Houston wrote its own, and where a state gets involved it is usually about conduct rather than geography. New Jersey did the geography itself, for every town at once, in 1995.

Eight of those are fixed. A church stays where it is, a hospital does not move, a residential zone is drawn on a map. The ninth is a school bus stop, and a school bus stop is wherever the district decides to stop the bus. Nothing has to be built and no boundary has to be redrawn.

On top of the distance, the statute requires the premises to be ringed by a 50-foot buffer, planted or fenced sufficiently to impede any view of the inside. That is not a screen on a window. It is fifty feet of land the business has to own and then not use.

And being there first does not help

The usual protection for a business caught by a new rule is that a pre-existing use carries on. That is how Los Angeles and most of the cities here work, and it is why so many of the survivors in this directory are old.

On 29 June 2001 the New Jersey Supreme Court decided Do Wop Corp. v. City of Rahway, about a business trading as the Razzle Dazzle Fantasy Runway. The court held that the protection given to a pre-existing nonconforming use only protects it from a zoning ordinance. The 1,000-foot rule is a state statute, not a zoning ordinance, so the protection does not reach it.

Put the three together and New Jersey is the hardest state in this directory to trade in. The buffer is statewide rather than one council’s idea. One of its triggers can be created at will. And the oldest defence in land use law does not apply. Newark lost its last adult cinema in 2018 and nothing took its place, which given all of that is less of a mystery than it first looks.