Adult Movie Theatres in San Diego

Seven places open, and none downtown

Two more adult shops trade in the city. Mercury Books, 8081 Balboa Avenue A in Kearny Mesa, and Hilite Books, 3203 Hancock Street in Midway. Both checked 30 October 2026; customers wrote about the shop floor at Mercury Books early in 2026 and at Hilite Books in about July and August 2026.

Closed on El Cajon and Balboa

Romantix at 4792 El Cajon Boulevard in City Heights is closed, and an insurance agency has the address. F Street Adult Video & Gifts at 7865 Balboa Avenue is closed too, with a car rental firm there now. Checked 30 October 2026.

Fifty seats, and a thousand feet

A peep show establishment runs on a police permit, issued by the Chief of Police after an investigation, with an application and fingerprints, under the chapter of the code headed Police Regulated Occupations and Businesses. Zoning is a separate instrument in a separate code, handled by Development Services under the Land Development Code. Two bodies, two sets of papers.

The zoning code sorts adult businesses into twelve kinds, and the lines between them are drawn on display space and seat count. An adult store gives more than fifteen per cent of its display space to adult stock. An adult mini-motion picture theatre seats more than five and fewer than fifty. An adult motion picture theatre seats fifty or more. Most of the definitions carry the same test of frequency: the material has to be shown on more than seven days in any fifty-six.

The thousand feet dates from 1979, when section 101.1810 kept adult businesses a thousand feet from any residential zone. An adult business sued the city over it and won. On 21 September 2006, eight years after the complaint and after a trip to the Ninth Circuit, the federal court for the Southern District of California held section 101.1810 unconstitutional for lack of reasonable alternative avenues of communication: the city had not shown that the sites it said were available met the demand.

Fourth Avenue went to the mall

The Pussycat opened at Fourth and F on 3 April 1968, on a double bill of The Girls on ‘F’ Street and Love Is Only a Word, and closed in 1981. Two much older houses a street away came into the chain afterwards: the Cabrillo at 319 Horton Plaza, open since 1 March 1915 and seating six hundred, and the Plaza next door to it, both run by Pussycat from the early 1970s.

What ended that corner of downtown was a shopping centre. In August 1979 the City Council approved the developer’s plans for the site, and those plans covered removing the Cabrillo, the Plaza, the Lyceum and the Horton Grand Hotel. The Cabrillo and the Plaza were demolished in 1982. Horton Plaza opened on 9 August 1985 over the ground they had stood on.

Four addresses on Fifth Avenue

One block east nothing was demolished, the buildings are all still standing, and the four adult houses there went separately.

The Casino, 643 Fifth, opened about 1913 with five hundred and fifty seats and was remodelled in Art Deco in the 1930s. Pussycat ran it in the early 1970s and kept the name. Its marquee was still carrying an X-rated bill in 1982.

The Foxy, 655 Fifth, stood between the Casino and the Aztec. Two screening rooms, about a hundred seats in the front one and twenty in the back, showing XXX from around 1977.

The Aztec, 665 Fifth, opened on 11 January 1920 as the California Theatre with six hundred and fifty-four seats, and closed in 1994.

The Lux, 728 Fifth, ran adult films from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, when the Gaslamp renovation began. An Italian restaurant has the ground floor.

The Gaslamp Quarter went on the National Register on 23 May 1980, and the city adopted it as a redevelopment project in July 1982.