Adult Movie Theatres in Chicago

Open now, and only one has seats

One more arcade is further out, and it is a long way out. Adult World, 423 West Touhy Avenue, Des Plaines, (773) 694-0090, sits next to O’Hare seventeen or eighteen miles north-west of the Loop. It is open 24 hours and customers wrote about its arcade in January 2026. Checked 31 October 2026.

The permission sits with the address

Chicago does not license an adult business. It registers a building. Under the Chicago Adult Use Ordinance, Chapter 16-16 of the Municipal Code, the owner of the premises or whoever manages them registers with the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, and the first thing the form asks for is the address. The date the adult use started and the nature of it go on the same form, and if the premises are leased a copy of the lease is attached to it. Operating without a certificate of approved registration is unlawful.

Where a new one may stand is the part that bites. Under § 17-9-0101 an adult use may not be within a thousand feet of another adult use, within a thousand feet of any zoning district zoned for residential use, within a thousand feet of a pre-existing school or religious assembly, or inside a planned manufacturing district. The residential limb does the work. A thousand feet is a fifth of a mile, the line is drawn around the boundary of a residential zoning district rather than around anybody’s house, and Chicago lays residential districts against the commercial strips on most of its arterials.

The hearing is drawn the other way about, which is not what a reader expects of this city. An adult use needs special use approval from the Zoning Board of Appeals, and § 17-13-0905-D tells the Board it must approve the application unless substantial evidence is produced that it fails one of nine criteria, that those criteria are the only thing it may consider, and that it must apply them consistently with the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and with Sections 2 and 4 of Article I of the Illinois Constitution. If the Board has not decided within 120 days, the application is approved. The severity in Chicago is in the map, not in the room where it is heard.

What the ordinance regulates is the outside. There is no rule in Chapter 16-16 about booth doors, partitions or how many people may be in a booth; § 16-16-090 instead bars an adult use from being conducted so that the material can be observed from any public way or from any premises not registered as an adult use, through any display, decoration, sign, show window or other opening. That is why the frontages are blank. The definitions run the other way round from what most codes do, too: an adult bookstore is one with a substantial or significant portion of such stock, with no percentage given, or a segment or section of the shop given over to it, or one that holds itself out as a purveyor of it, and the presence of video preview or coin operated booths counts as evidence of what the place is.

The zoning code lets a use that was lawful when it started carry on where it stands, and § 17-15-0106 says who owns that right in one sentence: nonconforming status runs with the land and is not affected by changes of tenancy, ownership or management. It belongs to the ground. What it does not survive is a closure.

Eighteen continuous months shut ends an ordinary nonconforming use. Six ends a nonconforming adult use, and the only other thing on the short clock is open land. A season of dark windows is enough, and once the clock has run the use cannot be started again at that address.

A mile, outside the city line

Chicago is the easier half of this. Beyond the city limits, in the rest of Cook County, Illinois law bars a new adult entertainment facility within one mile of a school, a day care centre, a cemetery, a public park, a forest preserve, public housing or a place of worship anywhere in the county. A mile is five times the city’s radius, and schools, parks and churches stand within a mile of practically every built-up block in Cook County. Nothing new opens out there.

The statute, 65 ILCS 5/11-5-1.5, counts a striptease club or a pornographic movie theatre, and it counts a shop where a quarter or more of the stock in trade is sexually explicit. Illinois fixes a number where the city’s own definition fixes none.

The house on North Wells Street

The Bijou opened in 1971 at 1349 North Wells Street in Old Town and closed on 30 September 2015. It was a sex club as well as a cinema, and it showed gay films exclusively from 1978. Steven Toushin ran it.

It began as a single screen with seventy-seven seats, by its Cinema Treasures listing, and grew upward. By the end it traded around the clock: its last full twenty-four-hour day was 29 September 2015, and the doors shut at nine the next morning. For four or five years from about 2000 it also staged an erotic cabaret.

What ended it was the lease. Toushin said in September 2015 that it could not move, because its permission to operate was tied to that address. The lease on it had gone, and nothing about the arrangement was portable. The paperwork stayed with the building.

Clark Street, and two elsewhere

On North Clark between Chicago Avenue and Chestnut there were two more, a mile south of the Bijou. The Newberry at 856 North Clark was X rated by 1970 and closed in about 1976 or 1977, and it was demolished. Le Image at 750 North Clark ran gay films from the early to mid 1970s and closed in about 1980 or 1981, in a building that is still standing.

Two others stood on streets of their own. The Today Theater at 62 West Madison opened in 1941 as a newsreel house, was X rated at the end, and was razed in the early 1980s; 3 First National Plaza is on the site. The Rush Theatre at 874 North Wabash was a coach house converted to an adult cinema in 1972 and closed in 1974; the Sofitel Magnificent Mile opened there in 2002.

The Follies burned before the block went

South State Street below Congress was a burlesque strip from the 1920s, and by the 1970s it was the film and bookshop strip. It went a block at a time, and the first block went before the films did: the 600 block was cleared from the mid-1960s and Jones College Prep is there. The 500 block went to a condominium development. The 400 block went to the Harold Washington Library Center, whose site was chosen in 1986 and which was dedicated on 4 October 1991.

The Follies stood on that block, at 450 South State. It was a dime museum and a vaudeville house before it was a burlesque house, it took the Follies name by the early 1950s, it was running hard core film from 1972, and it was destroyed by fire on 4 January 1978. The library site was chosen eight years later.