Adult Movie Theatres in Washington

District of Columbia · last checked 24 September 2026

There is nothing left in the District. Washington had a porn district of its own on 14th Street, bigger in its day than most of the cities on this site, and it is entirely gone: the last two shops closed in 1989. The city did not raid it out of existence. It stopped issuing permits in 1977 and waited.

The nearest one open is in Baltimore

The Big Top

Booth arcade

429 East Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

From Washington: About 40 miles, an hour up the parkway
Booths: Video arcade upstairs, shop below
Hours: 9am to 2am, seven days
Phone: (410) 332-4004

It sits on the Block, Baltimore’s red-light strip, which unlike Washington’s has survived. There is a fuller account of it on the Baltimore page.

That is not an arbitrary suggestion, either. When the last adult bookstore on 14th Street closed in 1989, its manager told the Washington Post the business was moving to Baltimore.

Last checked 24 September 2026 · Listing refreshed August 2026

How 14th Street became a porn district

In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, riots tore through Washington’s commercial corridors, 14th Street among them. What followed was disinvestment: property values collapsed, landlords stopped spending, and a central street lost most of its legitimate tenants. What it had left was very cheap rent in a very central place.

By the early 1970s the empty storefronts were filling with peep shows, adult bookstores, massage parlours and strip clubs. The Casino Royal Adult Theatre anchored the corner of 14th and H Streets NW, and residents and police started calling the block between H and I the combat zone, borrowing the name Boston had given its own district.

The money followed. By 1978 Reuben Sturman, the largest distributor in American pornography, had taken eight downtown Washington locations. By the early 1980s the stretch of 14th Street between H and K held 22 of the roughly 30 adult bookstores in the whole city.

A freeze, not a crackdown

Washington’s answer was quieter than anyone else’s on this site. Zoning rules barred adult businesses from most of the city: nothing within 600 feet of a church, school, library or playground, and nothing within 300 feet of another one. Then came the part that actually finished it. From 1977 no new permits were issued, at all.

That is a different instrument from anything else in this directory. Los Angeles dispersed its venues and Dallas licensed them, and both ended up in court. New York measured distances and enforced them with police. Washington simply capped the number at whatever it happened to be and let the arithmetic run. A business that closed could not be replaced. A business that lost its lease could not move.

Some of it went faster than attrition. The shop at 1210 New York Avenue NW was deliberately set alight in 1981, causing $50,000 of damage. Most of it just ran out. The Washington Post covered the closing of the last two adult bookstores on 14th Street in 1989, and that was the end of a district that had held two thirds of the city’s trade a decade earlier.

The Georgetown branch at 3255 M Street NW, which opened in 1977 just as the shutters came down on new permits, is a Chipotle. Fourteenth Street is theatres, galleries and restaurants, and the Source Theatre, founded in 1977 by Bart Whiteman, usually gets some of the credit for turning it.

Sources

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