Adult Movie Theatres in Pittsburgh
Pennsylvania · last checked 20 October 2026
Downtown Pittsburgh had a porn strip on Liberty Avenue and it does not have one now, because an arts charity bought it. What survives in the area is out in McKeesport, twelve miles up the Monongahela: a shop with a proper token-operated booth arcade in the back.
What is open right now
Modern Adult 711
Booth arcade711 West Fifth Avenue, McKeesport, PA 15132
- From downtown
- About 12 miles south-east
- Booths
- Hallways of video booths, token-operated
- Phone
- (412) 267-7901
The arcade is a run of hallways off the shop with booths along them: drop a token in the slot and the film plays on a small recessed screen. That is the original arrangement, more or less unchanged, and it is getting rare.
Last checked 25 September 2026 · Listing refreshed May 2026, 11 reviews
One more, added 20 October 2026
Moon Twp. Adult Bookstore
Booth arcade9003 University Boulevard, Coraopolis, PA 15108
- Has
- Private viewing booths at the back
- Price
- $10 minimum, which buys a code for the booths
- Hours
- 11am to 11pm
- Phone
- (412) 269-1747
Out by the airport in Coraopolis, twelve miles west. Shop at the front, booths at the back, and an unusually clear account of how the money works: you pay at least ten dollars, you are handed a receipt with a code on it, and that code runs the film in any of the booths for something like fifteen minutes.
A regular described it as small and out of the way and said that places like this are hit and miss, which is the fairest summary anyone has written of this entire directory.
Last checked 20 October 2026 · Booths and pricing described in a review dated 22 January 2025
The downtown shop no longer has booths
AdultMart still trades on Smithfield Street downtown, but staff there say head office decided to close the booths and back rooms across its shops around 2019. It is a shop and nothing more now.
That is the same chain, and the same decision, that left Cleveland without a single booth in the city where the booth was invented.
Bought, not raided
Through the 1970s and 1980s Liberty Avenue ran strip clubs, gay bars, adult novelty shops and cinemas showing X-rated films, and the strip had a nickname: Lady Liberty. It came in two kinds, which is a pattern across this whole directory. Some were grand old movie palaces that had lost their audience and turned to adult programming. Some were shopfronts converted into small porn houses.
In 1984 the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust was founded as a non-profit, with a remit to regenerate fourteen blocks of downtown. It did not lobby for an ordinance or push the police. It raised money and bought property, including buying out the porn shops that were still there.
No other city in this directory did it that way. Los Angeles wrote a dispersal rule and went to the Supreme Court; Dallas licensed and lost; New York measured distances; Washington stopped issuing permits. Pittsburgh wrote cheques.
One building, three lives
It was built as the Art Cinema and was the first place in Pittsburgh to show nothing but art films. In the 1960s, with Liberty Avenue what it was, it showed adult films instead. The Cultural Trust bought and renovated it, and it reopened on 9 November 1995 as the Harris, named for John P. Harris, a co-founder of the Nickelodeon and a state senator, with money from the Buhl Foundation.
- 01OpenedThe Art Cinema, the first venue in Pittsburgh to show nothing but art films.
- 021960sAn adult house, when Liberty Avenue was the city's red-light district.
- 039 November 1995Reopened as the Harris, 200 seats, art house again, under the Cultural Trust.
Two hundred seats, one screen, independent and foreign films. Of all the buildings in this directory that stopped showing pornography, it is the only one that went back to exactly what it had been before.
Sources
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