Adult Movie Theatres in Rochester

What is still open

Show World at 1765 Mount Read Boulevard, (585) 254-0600, open 24 hours. A reviewer described private viewing booths there, but that was in 2010 and nobody has mentioned them since, including the most recent reviewer in February 2025. Too old to count.

Show World Adult Video’s at 1167 Brighton Henrietta Town Line Road, (585) 424-2580, also open 24 hours. This one had an arcade at the back. See below.

Ontario Video & News, 1380 Route 104, twenty miles east in Ontario, open till midnight. No reviewer mentions booths and the last review is from 2019. Not counted.

The ending nobody recorded

Everything in this directory that died has a story attached. Urban renewal in Norfolk, twelve lawsuits in San Antonio, the midnight rule in Columbus. Rochester has the one nobody bothered to write down.

Somebody asked, on the shop’s own listing, whether the arcade at the back was open yet. The answer came from somebody who plainly knew the place: it was still closed because of Covid, and they did not know whether it would open up again. That exchange is about three years old. Nobody has mentioned the arcade since.

A booth arcade is a room full of small enclosed spaces that strangers use one after another. In March 2020 every one of them in the country shut, and a lot of them were already running on thin margins against the internet. Reopening meant spending money on a business that had been dying for twenty years. Plenty of owners looked at that and kept the shop and dropped the room.

There is no article about it and no ordinance to point at. It simply happened, quietly, in a lot of cities at once, and it is probably the single largest cause of death in this directory after the internet itself.

Three neighbourhood houses

The front wall of the Monroe

The Monroe opened at 585 Monroe Avenue in 1927 with 1,180 seats. The Schine circuit had it by 1941. In the early 1960s it was a Cinerama house, which is about as far from what came next as a cinema can get.

It showed its last ordinary film in 1970, by which point it was the last neighbourhood theatre left in Rochester, and then it showed pornography until 1995. Twenty-five years.

In September 2008 the auditorium was knocked down and the facade and foyer were left standing. They are still there. The marquee was still up in 2021. Somebody proposed turning it into a comedy theatre in 2023 and the owner would not do a deal, and there was still a petition circulating about the building in December 2025.

So the front of a 1927 cinema that spent half its working life as a porn house is standing on Monroe Avenue with no auditorium behind it, and people are still arguing about what to do with it. That is the most honest monument this trade has anywhere in the directory.