Adult Movie Theatres in Norfolk

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts. Got It Video at 6600 East Virginia Beach Boulevard, (757) 461-1773, trades from 10am to midnight and is a shop: videos, toys, lingerie. Its own website describes no booths and no reviewer mentions any. There are further branches in Portsmouth and across Hampton Roads, all the same thing.

Nothing in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth or Suffolk either, as far as any published listing shows. For the region that holds the largest naval base in the world, that is a striking answer, and the rest of this page is why.

The largest block of beer joints in the world

East Main Street ran from Commercial Place to Church Street, now St. Paul’s Boulevard. During the war it called itself the largest, most solid block of beer joints in the world, and the city called it the sin strip.

The Krazy Kat and the Red Rooster pulled sailors in with hamburgers, music and cheap beer. Coleman’s tattoo parlour on that street was famous well beyond Virginia. There were shooting galleries, the Silver Bullet among them, and there was burlesque. This was the shore leave economy of the largest naval base on earth, concentrated into a few blocks.

It also had a tolerated brothel district, which the city policed rather than closed. That ended on 1 January 1941, when the federal government and the Navy told Norfolk to shut the brothels on East Main or face prosecution. The bars stayed. The street carried on for another twenty years.

Where the method was invented

The Housing Act of 1949 created federal money for slum clearance, and Norfolk was the first city in the United States to receive it. Ground was broken on Project One in late 1951, the first urban renewal project in the country.

Project Two followed in 1956 under Mayor William Fred Duckworth, and East Main Street was in it.

The last taverns on East Main closed in 1961. The street was turned into Main Plaza East, a covered pedestrian mall, and was not reopened to traffic until 1987. It runs through the Waterside district now: Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, restaurants, offices, and almost nobody living there.

Who actually paid for it

It would be easy to write this page as a story about sailors losing their bars, and that would be dishonest. Clearing East Main was one part of a programme that displaced around twenty thousand people in Norfolk, close to a tenth of the city, and the people displaced between 1950 and 1970 were mostly Black.

The sin strip gave the programme its public justification. A street full of drunk sailors and burlesque houses is an easy thing for a city to point at when it wants federal money for clearance. The clearance did not stop at that street, and the neighbourhoods that went with it were not vice districts at all.

That pattern shows up again and again in this directory, in Boston, in Anchorage, in Buffalo. Norfolk is where it started, and it is worth saying that the adult trade was the excuse rather than the target.