Adult Movie Theatres in Asheville

Two rooms open, neither in Asheville

One operator, two stores, one each side of the city, keeping the same hours.

Two shops in and around the city:

Hours as each shop publishes them, checked 28 October 2026. Ring before a late drive.

Where the city’s writ stops

North Carolina lets a city of Asheville’s size regulate development up to three miles past its own boundary. It makes one exception, and the exception swallows the rule here: no city may extend those powers into ground where the county has adopted and is enforcing its own zoning and subdivision rules. Buncombe adopted county-wide zoning on 1 December 2009. From that day the city’s writ ended at the city line, and Swannanoa and Candler have been somebody else’s jurisdiction.

Which would be a technicality if the two answered the same way. They do not.

Asheville started licensing this trade with a thirty-three section ordinance on 16 June 1990, amended it seven times over twenty-three years, and repealed it on 9 November 2021, along with the privilege licence tax it sat beside. Chapter 9 now mentions an adult establishment once, in the editor’s note that records the repeal. The county, which is the one with no downtown in it, still licenses, still charges and still asks the Sheriff’s Department first.

Same week, two clocks

Helene came through on 27 September 2024. What that did to a building’s standing under zoning depended on which side of the city line it stood, and nobody chose which side.

In unincorporated Buncombe County a nonconforming use damaged by fire, wind, flood or other causes may be repaired and used as before, on four conditions. Repairs have to start within twelve months of the damage and finish within two years, the space given to the use may not grow, the rebuilt structure may be no more nonconforming in its dimensions, and the use after the repair has to be the same nonconforming use as before. Behind all four sits a harder rule. Section 78-657 deems a nonconforming use discontinued two years after it stops, regardless of any substantial good faith efforts to re-establish it, and after that the building may be used only for a conforming use. A flood is not a decision, and the ordinance does not ask.

None of it reaches a use the district allows. Adult entertainment is a special use in Commercial Service, Employment and Open Use, so a business holding a county permit in one of those three is a conforming use, and the clock never starts.

Asheville’s nonconformities article has no discontinuance provision in it at all. In the city a damaged nonconforming use has twelve months to get a building permit, and then no deadline behind it and nothing that kills it by lapse of time.

The state’s Helene legislation does not close that gap. The one provision that overrides a local development ordinance for rebuilding applies to a nonconforming residential structure and requires the rebuilt structure to serve the same or similar residential use. The General Assembly wrote a rescue for houses.

Sixty-nine cases, not one from North Carolina

Buncombe adopted its first adult-business ordinance in 1995: a thousand dollars a year for a licence and no locational restrictions whatsoever, because the county had no zoning to hang them on. Three businesses were licensed under it in three years. One of those licences was issued in June 1998, and the county attorney told the commissioners there was no way to stop it.

On 18 August 1998 the commissioners sat in a standing-room-only hearing and imposed a moratorium on licensing the trade at all. A pastor speaking for the Council for Biblical Values asked that the new rules be retroactive and that the businesses have to move away from churches and schools. One speaker proposed setting the fee high enough to discourage anybody. A commissioner said they could put a bandage on the problem, but without zoning that was all they could do. The county attorney warned the following February that the draft was harsher than the courts would allow. It passed in 1999 much as drafted.

On 15 March 2002 shops in the county pooled their money, brought in a First Amendment specialist from Tampa, and asked the Superior Court to stop the county enforcing any of it. Their argument was that Buncombe had taken its wording from other people’s ordinances without ever tying the harm to anything in Buncombe. Judge James L. Baker Jr. observed that Onslow County ran a comprehensive study before it legislated, and asked whether Buncombe had done the same. The county attorney said it had not, and argued that it did not have to.

He refused the injunction on 28 March 2002, in six pages, holding that a county regulating only location and not content had done nothing the First Amendment forbids. He also noted that of the sixty-nine cases the challengers put in front of him, not one came from a North Carolina court, and said their counsel had skilfully attacked the ordinances anyway.

The Strand, the XXX years, and John Cram

The Strand opened at 36 Biltmore Avenue on 24 October 1946 with about eight hundred seats across the floor and the balcony. By the theatre’s own account, nonwhite patrons bought their tickets at a separate window and were allowed to sit only upstairs. It was renamed the Fine Arts on 8 June 1962.

What came next is also the theatre’s own account: a grindhouse through the sixties and seventies, an XXX house by the early seventies, shuttered in 1986 and mostly because of video cassettes. Then John Cram, who ran the gallery next door, bought the old adult cinema and reopened it on 13 December 1996.

The theatre says that in 2001 it restored the colored entrance box office window, and that the Center for Diversity Education at UNC Asheville uses it to teach people about the history of racism in Asheville. The segregated entrance itself is still in the frontage: a door to the left of the main doors, no knob on it, painted the colour of its alcove, serving now as the emergency exit.

Two screens now, and two hundred and fifty seats where there were eight hundred. In the week to 29 October 2026 it was showing four films, among them Ken Russell’s The Devils.