Adult Movie Theatres in Portland

What is still open

Nothing, and we mean something wider than usual by that. We searched Portland three ways and the results came back from New Hampshire. Then we ran a search for adult video booths or an arcade across the whole state of Maine and it returned no businesses at all.

Portland has good shops and no rooms. Nomia in the Old Port has thirty-three reviews and a reputation for being the most comfortable adult shop its customers have been in. Amazing Intimate Essentials in the Arts District trades until nine. Neither has a booth and neither claims to.

The nearest booths are in another state. Leather & Lace at Seabrook, New Hampshire, about fifty-five miles down the coast, where a customer notes the video booths in the back are kept clean. Forbidden Fruit at Manchester, about ninety-five miles inland. From Portland that is the closest you can get to a room, and you have to leave Maine to do it.

Three doors on Congress Street

Portland put its cinemas in a row. Within thirty feet of each other on Congress Street stood three of them, and what happened to each one makes the point of this page better than any argument we could write.

The two that spent decades showing pornography are both still there, both restored, both full of people most weekends. The respectable one, which opened in 1928 advertising itself as the safest theatre in the world, is gone.

The pornography is why it is still standing

The State opened at 609 Congress Street on 8 November 1929, three weeks after the crash, with Gloria Swanson’s first talking picture. Herbert W. Rhodes designed it and it seated two thousand three hundred.

It ran for decades under a manager called Edith Francis. When she died the building was facing demolition, and what happened instead is the thing this page is about. It was leased as an adult venue. The American Theater Corporation took it on and showed pornography in it, and that is what kept a 1929 picture palace standing through the years when nobody in Portland wanted a two thousand seat cinema.

They were not kind to it. The company let the place fall into horrible disrepair, and a great deal of what was original to the building was lost or stolen in those years. The porn run ended in 1990.

Then Nick and Lola Kampf bought it, hired a local architect called Scott Simmons, and put it back together. It reopened as a music venue on 20 November 1993. It has not been simple since either: the nonprofit running it went bankrupt in 1997, it closed again in 2006 in a row about repair bills, and it took about a million and a half dollars and a New York promoter to reopen it in 2010. It holds one thousand eight hundred and seventy people now.

Hold those two facts together. In Worcester a 1926 atmospheric palace ran adult films and was demolished for a beer garden because saving it cost forty-two times what razing it did. In Springfield a 1916 house went adult and ended up a Walgreens. Here the adult lease is the only reason there is a building left to restore.

Nobody involved meant to preserve anything. A company wanted a cheap room with a big screen and a landlord wanted rent. But the roof stayed on, and because the roof stayed on, Portland still has the best room in Maine to see a band in.

Two Fine Arts, one operator

Eighteen numbers up the street at 627 was a cinema that had been the Casco and then the Capitol, and in 1956 was renamed the Fine Arts. It was run at that time by E.M. Loew’s Theaters, a Boston circuit that had been in the business since 1917 and which a Massachusetts court in 1924 had to formally distinguish from the other, more famous Loew’s.

Through the 1970s and 1980s the Fine Arts in Portland was primarily an X-rated house. The second screen went dark on 23 May 1997 and the building became a music club called the Skinny in 1999, and then Geno’s, which Portland people will tell you about at length.

Now compare that with Asheville. The cinema at 36 Biltmore Avenue, which we wrote up earlier today, was operated at various times by E.M. Loew’s Theaters, was renamed the Fine Arts in 1962, went XXX in the early 1970s, closed in 1986 and is a live venue today.

Two houses a thousand miles apart, the same Boston operator, the same new name in the same decade, the same turn to pornography in the same decade after that, and both of them standing today with a stage in them. We are not going to tell you that was a plan. We have found no document suggesting E.M. Loew had a strategy with that name on it, and two is not a pattern. It is a thing we noticed and could not stop looking at.

1942, which is the earliest we have found anywhere

Everything else in this directory starts in the 1960s. The Studio III opened in Corpus Christi in 1968. Bakersfield’s Paris turned in 1963. The whole trade as we have been describing it is a thing that happens after the war.

Portland had a go at it during the war.

In 1942 and 1943 the Colonial Theatre, in Congress Hall, flirted with adult films and exotic stage shows. The phrase in the local record is that the resulting scandal and law violations closed the operation down by 1946.

That is one sentence and we have not been able to get behind it. We do not know what was shown, who was charged, or what the violations were. What we can tell you is that a theatre in Maine was running adult films and live acts while the shipyards down the road were building Liberty ships, twenty-five years before anybody called it porno chic, and it ended in a scandal nobody has written down properly since.