Adult Movie Theatres in Houston

Open now, and what is behind the shop

Houston said no five times

Houston has no comprehensive zoning code. There is no map dividing it into residential and commercial and industrial, and no general rule about what may be built where. The question has been put to the city five times and the answer has come back no five times, twice from the council and three times from the voters.

Each ballot was closer than the one before it, and the answer did not change. Three years after the last of them the council adopted the sexually oriented business ordinance, which is the only rule the city has written about where this particular trade may stand.

Earlier ordinances had set distances too. The ones of December 1983 and March 1986 both left adult bookstores and adult movie theatres out, because the state statute of the day did not let the city reach those two kinds at all.

A question put to the planning department in 1996

In the autumn of 1996 a council committee took up a draft that would push those distances further out, and it asked the planning department how much of the map each of the distances under consideration would remove. Joseph Chow of the planning department answered the committee on 20 November 1996. The transcript of that meeting survives in a court record.

On 15 January 1997 the council adopted the largest distance it had asked about: 1,500 feet from any school, church, public park or licensed day-care centre, up from 750. Businesses already trading were given 180 days to find somewhere lawful. No referendum was held.

Around ninety adult businesses and a hundred or so individuals went to court over it. The distance rules survived, after ten years, a reversal and a remand, in August 2007.

Sixteen millimetre, and two long runs

Houston never had a row of downtown picture palaces that went over to adult film. What it had were small single-screen houses running 16mm prints, and they arrived almost together: most of them took out their first newspaper advertisement between March and September 1970, at 306 and 307 Main facing each other across the street, at 606 Travis, 711 Prairie and 1317 Congress, and in a line running south along Main at 2905, 2907, 4403 and 4816. On 7 October 1970 Houston and Harris County officers paid at the door of several of them, watched the films and arrested the people showing them. Most of the addresses had stopped advertising by the end of 1971. A second wave opened between 1975 and 1978 and it was suburban: Buffalo Speedway, Pech Road, Clarewood Drive out in Sharpstown, Telephone Road.

Two houses ran for a long time. The Capri at 743 South 75th Street had been the Avalon and then a foreign-language cinema before it reopened on 7 July 1965 showing adult films, and it was still showing them when its lease ran out on 29 July 1979. It was a church from February 1988, and it was gone by 2011. The French Quarter at 3201 Louisiana Street, on the corner of Elgin in Midtown, opened in 1975 and stopped advertising in December 1996. There is a 24-hour gym on the site now.