Adult Movie Theatres in Springfield

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts. Three searches returned ten results each and not one was in Springfield. We then bounded a search to the city’s own map and got back a museum, a brewery and a furniture shop.

We nearly got this wrong. Bookends at 44 Enfield Street, twelve miles south over the Connecticut line, carries a tag on its listing that says video booths, and it would have been easy to count it. The owner has answered that question himself. Asked five months ago whether there were video booths or a cinema, he wrote one word: no. A customer asked the same thing in 2010 and said she had never seen any. It is a shop, fifty years old, veteran owned, and the owner replies to every review on the page under his own name.

Live entertainment is a different story and not one we count. The X-Room on Dwight Street, which bills itself as the only nude male strip club in New England, moved into the old Center Stage building in 2023 after the family that ran Springfield’s clubs for years sold up and closed Mardi Gras. Nobody watches a film there.

The nearest rooms are twenty-five miles south in Hartford, which has three.

Springfield regulates the permission

Everywhere else on this site the rule is about the room. Ohio shuts the doors at midnight. Toledo cut them down to four feet. Greenville County specified the sightlines to within six inches. Madison measures what share of the floor is given over to it.

Springfield does something simpler. To show films at all you need an entertainment licence, and the licence is in the mayor’s gift.

Read I.2 again. Not a board, not a commission, not a formula. The mayor reserves the right to change or add to the terms and conditions of a licence. A distance rule is the same on Tuesday as it was on Monday. A licence is a decision, and decisions have a person at the end of them.

The last business day

Charles Ryan was mayor of Springfield twice, decades apart, and his second run ended at the start of 2008. On 4 January 2008 WAMC’s Pioneer Valley bureau chief, Paul Tuthill, reported what Ryan had done with the last working day of it.

He refused an entertainment licence for the viewing booths at an adult shop in the city. He did it in a decision running five pages, and the finding it turned on was that the shop had been running those booths for about two months without a valid licence.

Think about the timing. A man with hours of office left, about to hand the building over to Domenic Sarno, and the thing he chooses to spend them on is writing out, at length, why a row of booths in one shop cannot have a piece of paper. He did not have to. It would have sat on the next mayor’s desk perfectly well.

And here is what we do not know. The report does not name the shop, and we have not been able to work out which one it was. We also have no idea what happened next. Whether it appealed, whether it closed, whether the booths were pulled out or quietly went on running. There is a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people and one radio report, and after that the trail stops. If you were there, we would like to know.

Porn, then Monty Python, then Death Wish 3

At 499 Sumner Avenue there was a neighbourhood cinema called the Phillips. It opened in November 1916 and the trade yearbooks of the 1920s give it nine hundred and sixteen seats. Herman Rifkin Theaters ran it, one of a string of local houses.

On 13 November 1963 it reopened under a new name: Cinema-X. The programme was art films with softcore mixed through it, which was the standard dodge of that moment, and by the early 1970s it had dropped the pretence and was showing hardcore.

And then it changed its mind. It went back to art films. People who were there remember Chaplin re-releases, and first runs of The Groove Tube and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. By the mid 1980s it had settled into second-run pictures, with the 1920s plasterwork still up and the balcony shut off.

It closed on 14 December 1985. The last film was Death Wish 3. They knocked it down in the early 1990s and put up a Walgreens.

That order of events is the whole argument of this site in one building. Hardcore pornography and Monty Python and the Holy Grail played on the same screen within a few years of each other, under a name with an X in it, in a 1916 neighbourhood house in western Massachusetts. These were never pornographic buildings. They were buildings, and for a while pornography was what filled the seats.

Our Worcester page has the same shape fifty miles east: a 1926 palace that ran adult films upstairs, then showed Casablanca, then went back to adult films, then came down. Massachusetts has three cities bigger than two hundred thousand people and we have now written all three. Between them they have one room left, and it is in Boston.