Adult Movie Theatres in Seattle

What is open right now

Two addresses not to drive to

Taboo’s downtown branch at 1012 First Avenue is closed. Its listing was updated as recently as June 2026 and says so, but the address still circulates. If you want Taboo, it is the West Seattle shop above.

So is the Lusty Lady, at 1315 First Avenue. It closed in June 2010 and guides still list it, partly because it was famous enough that people assume it survived. It did not.

When First Avenue was porn row

That block is Pike Place Market’s South Arcade today. In 1972 it was news stands, bookshops and cinemas running adult films around the clock, a few minutes’ walk from the fish stalls.

The one that became a landmark

The Lusty Lady opened in the 1970s as the Amusement Center and moved to 1315 First Avenue in 1985, where it stayed for twenty-five years. It was a peep show, not a cinema: booths, a window, live dancers behind the glass.

What made it a Seattle institution was the sign. The marquee changed constantly and the puns were the whole point, and because it sat directly across First Avenue from the Seattle Art Museum, half the city read it on the way past. The museum’s own director called it a landmark. Its happy-face logo, captioned Have An Erotic Day!, is where Nirvana got the idea for theirs.

It closed in June 2010, killed by the recession and by internet pornography, which had made the trip downtown unnecessary. The buildings around it had emptied out first.

One thing worth separating, because it gets attached to the wrong city. The Lusty Lady that unionised was the San Francisco one, on Kearny Street: its dancers organised in 1997 as the first successfully unionised sex business in the United States, bought the place outright for $400,000 in 2003 and ran it as a worker cooperative until it closed in September 2013. Seattle’s was the original and the more famous sign, but the union was down the coast.