Adult Movie Theatres in Pittsburgh

What is open right now

The downtown shop no longer has booths

AdultMart still trades on Smithfield Street downtown, but staff there say head office decided to close the booths and back rooms across its shops around 2019. It is a shop and nothing more now.

That is the same chain, and the same decision, that left Cleveland without a single booth in the city where the booth was invented.

Bought, not raided

Through the 1970s and 1980s Liberty Avenue ran strip clubs, gay bars, adult novelty shops and cinemas showing X-rated films, and the strip had a nickname: Lady Liberty. It came in two kinds, which is a pattern across this whole directory. Some were grand old movie palaces that had lost their audience and turned to adult programming. Some were shopfronts converted into small porn houses.

In 1984 the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust was founded as a non-profit, with a remit to regenerate fourteen blocks of downtown. It did not lobby for an ordinance or push the police. It raised money and bought property, including buying out the porn shops that were still there.

No other city in this directory did it that way. Los Angeles wrote a dispersal rule and went to the Supreme Court; Dallas licensed and lost; New York measured distances; Washington stopped issuing permits. Pittsburgh wrote cheques.

One building, three lives

It was built as the Art Cinema and was the first place in Pittsburgh to show nothing but art films. In the 1960s, with Liberty Avenue what it was, it showed adult films instead. The Cultural Trust bought and renovated it, and it reopened on 9 November 1995 as the Harris, named for John P. Harris, a co-founder of the Nickelodeon and a state senator, with money from the Buhl Foundation.

Two hundred seats, one screen, independent and foreign films. Of all the buildings in this directory that stopped showing pornography, it is the only one that went back to exactly what it had been before.