Adult Movie Theatres in Albuquerque

Open on Comanche Road and 2nd Street

Eight cinemas, and forty weeks of Deep Throat

A local history of the city’s zoning, working from the Albuquerque Journal, says that in 1975 Variety counted eight full-time hardcore theatres in Albuquerque. Among them were a porno-twin on Central and the Backdoor II, which ran twenty-four hours a day and played Deep Throat for forty consecutive weeks.

Central Avenue carried Route 66 through the city from 1937 until the road was decommissioned in 1985, and the adult trade gathered along it for the reason everything else did: it was where the traffic was.

What came next was an argument about crime. State Representative Bill Camp cited a police department study showing crime seven times higher in La Mesa, near two East Central porn shops, than in the neighbourhood next to it.

Dimmer neon, rear entrances

By the same local history, in 1986 a compromise brokered by the state senator Manny Aragon let eight X-rated bookstores in Albuquerque stay open while they challenged the city’s zoning code, if they made themselves less conspicuous. In 1988 Councilors Pete Dinelli and Hess Yntema moved to void it, calling it an administrative arrangement that neither the council nor the mayor had approved.

On 19 July 1989 the City Council voted unanimously to shut eight X-rated bookstores. The Albuquerque Journal’s report that July said the council’s resolution declared the 1986 deal “null and void from its inception”.

The phrase is the thing. A deal that is repealed was real until it was repealed, and anyone who kept their side of it kept it for something. Null and void from its inception says it was never worth anything, and that whatever neon was dimmed and whatever back doors were cut bought nothing at any point.

The 66 Drive-In and the 500-foot rule

The 66 Drive-In stood on Route 66 on the west side of Albuquerque. It opened on 30 August 1949, closed in 1956 and reopened on 24 July 1964, and by 1977 Commonwealth Theatres, Inc. ran it.

City Ordinance 26-1977 took effect on 11 May 1977. Under it an adult drive-in became a special use, on condition that it was not within 500 feet of the nearest residential zone. The 66 had shown some adult films before then. A city survey of adult businesses that did not conform ran in an Albuquerque paper on 2 October 1978 and named the 66, and Commonwealth said it would stop showing adult films.

Texas National Theatres, Inc. took a sublease in April 1980 and began showing them again. On 6 January 1982 the Supreme Court of New Mexico affirmed an injunction against adult films at the 66 until a special use permit was granted, and the City Council had already refused one. No adult film had played there from 1978 to 1980, longer than the one year the code allowed, so the 66 had lost its standing as an adult use that came before the rule. The ruling did not close the drive-in.

The court also held that the 500-foot rule was not too vague to enforce, though the ordinance never said how the distance was to be measured. It accepted the city’s practice of measuring from lot line to lot line. Albuquerque’s Integrated Development Ordinance now writes that down: the distance runs in a straight line from the nearest point on one lot line to the nearest point on the other, without regard to buildings, streets or the lie of the land between.