Adult Movie Theatres in Portland

Open at the back of a shop

Three more adult shops trade in the city, all checked 30 October 2026. Taboo Video has a third branch at 2330 SE 82nd Avenue, (503) 206-4708, which the operator publishes as open 24 hours. Fantasyland, 5228 SE Foster Road, (503) 775-0094, is open 24 hours, and customers wrote about it on 4 September 2026. Fantasy for Adults Only is at 3137 NE Sandy Boulevard, (503) 239-6969, 10am to midnight, and on the chain’s own 2026 store list.

Why the zoning code has no word for it

In 1983 Portland passed Ordinance 155387 and wrote adult businesses into its zoning code. They had to keep a set distance from homes and schools and from one another. Adult arcades were named in it. The model was a Detroit ordinance that had survived in the United States Supreme Court.

Eighteen months before the city lost that ordinance, the state had already lost its obscenity statute. On 21 January 1987 the Oregon Supreme Court decided State v. Henry and struck the statute down under the state constitution. Article I, section 8 reads:

No law shall be passed restraining the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write, or print freely on any subject whatever; but every person shall be responsible for the abuse of this right.

The court read that as broader than the First Amendment: it covers any subject whatever, it contains no express exception for obscene communications, and it reaches films, pictures, paintings and sculpture as well as words. In the court’s own words: “In this state any person can write, print, read, say, show or sell anything to a consenting adult even though that expression may be generally or universally considered ‘obscene.’” No justice dissented. The prosecution had come from Redmond, in central Oregon, not from Portland.

That is not the same as no law. The court expressly left open regulation in the interests of unwilling viewers, captive audiences, minors and neighbours, and reasonable time, place and manner rules on the nuisance side. Oregon has no general obscenity offence; what is left is about minors, about advertising and about conduct, and those statutes are live.

The city’s ordinance went to court in the year it was written. In May 1983 Portland sued to close three adult bookstores as a public nuisance. It lost in the circuit court in 1984, lost an evenly divided Court of Appeals in 1987, and lost in the Oregon Supreme Court on 12 July 1988, in City of Portland v. Tidyman. The ordinance, the court held, “is flatly directed against one disfavored type of pictorial or verbal communication”, and it treated the merchandise rather than any effect of the shop as the nuisance. “Such lawmaking is what Article I, section 8, forbids.” The opinion also said why it was parting company with the federal line: “The foregoing explains why we depart from the direction taken by the United States Supreme Court under the First Amendment.”

Portland never wrote another. The obscenity sections of the state code have applied uniformly across every city and county in Oregon since 1971, so a council could not write its own obscenity rule, and after 1988 it could not write a zoning rule either. The planning code today has no adult category in it at all. A shop that sells films and rents a viewing booth is Retail Sales And Service, which is where the code files bowling alleys, ice rinks and game arcades, and cinemas go there too: “Theaters, including drive-in theaters, are classified as Retail Sales And Service.” No licence, no distance rule, no booth rule.

What the rulings did not save

The protection arrived as the cinemas were closing and it did not save one of them. Portland had about eighteen adult houses at the peak in 1974 and five by 1982.

The Oregon Theater at 3530 SE Division Street was built in 1925 as a vaudeville house and ran adult films from around 1970. By 2005 it had one screen, a large auditorium with couches instead of seats, and bicycle parking indoors. It closed in March 2020. On 3 November 2023 the building reopened with 250 seats as the Tomorrow Theater, run by PAM CUT, the film centre of the Portland Art Museum, which is what stands at the address today.

The ones before it. The Paris at 6 SW 3rd Avenue turned adult in 1963, came back to adult programming from 2007 to 2016, and has been a cabaret and dinner room since November 2025. The Jefferson at 1232 SW 12th Avenue was open around the clock in 2005 with two screens and an eight-dollar ticket good for twelve hours, and it closed in the summer of 2007. The Eros at 314 SW Taylor Street ran two screens of gay films from about 1970 to 1977. The Old Chelsea Tri Cinema at 512 NW 5th Avenue and the Tom Kat at 425 NW Glisan Street shared one building, which still stands and holds transitional housing and social services. The Lombard at 842 N Lombard Street closed in September 1972 and the old theatre building is a tyre shop.

What the rulings protected was the booth. The rooms in Portland today are at the back of a shop.