Adult Movie Theatres in Phoenix

What is open right now

Six years of argument about a fairground

Phoenix has a rule that an adult business may not sit within 500 feet of a residential zoning district. In 1980 a company called Book-Cellar ran The Owl Bookstore on Grand Avenue and wanted to move it to a different address on the other side of the same street. Both the old site and the new one were zoned C-3, the city’s heaviest commercial category. The move was a few hundred feet.

The new site was within 500 feet of land zoned residential. On 10 July 1980 the bookstore asked the city zoning administrator to look at what was actually on that land.

The zoning administrator agreed with the bookstore and ruled the 500-foot rule did not apply. The city appealed to the Board of Adjustment, and the board reversed him: for the purposes of this ordinance, the State Fairgrounds was a residential district. The bookstore went to the Superior Court, which dismissed the petition without reaching the question, and then to the Arizona Court of Appeals, which decided the case on 7 May 1986, almost six years after the original request.

Nothing about the fairground changed in those six years. What was being argued was whether the map or the ground wins when they disagree, and every distance rule in this directory has the same crack running through it. Los Angeles measured buildings, Tampa measured people, Houston drew 1,500-foot circles. Phoenix measured to a 14,870-seat arena and called it a neighbourhood.

Why there is no play space here

On 9 December 1998 the Phoenix city council adopted ordinance G-4145, which declared any business existing to let people take part in or watch live sex acts a disorderly house and a public nuisance in itself. Not a licensing matter, not a distance question: prohibited outright. A week later the council added an exemption for non-obscene plays, dramas and ballets performed in theatres and concert halls.

The clubs sued. In 1999 Judge Roslyn Silver of the federal district court found for the city, holding they had not shown that what went on in their premises was protected expression, and the litigation ran on into the 2000s from there.

Which is why Phoenix reads the way it does on this page. Atlanta and San Francisco both kept play spaces going. Phoenix has four venues, more screens than anywhere else here, and nothing of that kind at all. The city left the films alone and went after the room.

The bookstore is still open

Book-Cellar never did get to the other side of Grand Avenue. It is still trading in Phoenix, forty-six years after it asked the question, under the name Pleasure World on East Washington Street, and the listings still carry both names on the same address. It has a theatre, booths, and a programme that changes every day.

Almost every city on this site is a list of places that are gone. This one has the plaintiff still open for business.