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Born in 1914 as the New 14th Street Theater, this venue, located just east of Third Avenue, was a full-fledged movie theatre rather than just a nickelodeon, although its seating capacity was only a bit more than The Variety Photo Plays. It was renamed the Arrow in 1940, switched to a program of Spanish-language films in the early '50s and became The Metropolitan in the '60s.

Through it all the interior remained unaltered, and some claim it was never even painted, the walls covered by an ancient red damask. The original screen could still be observed hanging against the back wall while a newer and somewhat larger one had been installed a few feet in front of it. Up above was a sliding glass skylight that appeared to be a remnant of the original design.

If the theatre ever had any pretensions to class, you couldn't tell it by the '70s when it was relegated to the screening of XXX, its filthy battered marquee casting an evil shadow over the entire block. Oddly enough, there were also a number of fairly large trees in front of it (an extreme rarity in Manhattan), which made it an even more popular place to hang out and grab some shade or shelter when it rained. The entrance of The Met, as it was now known, drew every pervert, pick-pocket, bum, mark, out-patient and junkie on notorious 14th street like a giant magnet, and it was a curse to all the nearby shops.

The theater's twin balconies had long side ramps that extended almost down to the screen, and these were invariably crowded with old geezers and pervs leering down at the crowds below. "The sound of constant rustling so peculiar to The Variety's ambience is amplified here to an unbearable noise," noted Sleazoid Express writers Bill Landis and Jimmy McDonough after a visit to The Met in the mid-'80s, "like a million bats walking in a cave."7 While by this point the two were regulars at The Variety Photo Plays, it had taken them by their own admission years to work up the courage to venture into The Met. Its reputation preceded it. Old projectionists told hair-raising stories of having to fight off groping hands in dark stairwells on their way to the projection booth, while tales of muggings and violence abounded. However, according to Mike Black, a student of Metropolitan mystique, there was hardly any violence at all in the place.

Like many urban porn venues, the movies were heterosexual, but the quick and dirty sex action was of the other variety, and the theatre was soon everyone's worst AIDS nightmare come to life. As Black noted in his fanzine Gutter Trash, the toilets were a "filth addict's wet dream," reeking of piss, grunge and body odour." The urinals were perpetually flooded with rivers of piss, overflowing onto the floors to create a sea of green and orange slime." Black recalled witnessing sixteen-ounce beer cans standing in the urinals, filling up with piss. Then he witnesses a man shaking one to see if it was full yet and placing it back in the urinal.8

Sex was everywhere, especially in the two toilets. Black once observed two drunken bums dallying on one of the long benches in the lounge area that adjoined the bathroom, blowing each other. One after the other, two bottles of Thunderbird slipped from the folds of their drunken clinch and they immediately began to flight over who was the owner of the fuller bottle. On another occasion Black saw an obese fellow squatting his fat ass over a trash can and taking a dump. The horrid stench sent people fleeing for the exits and fresh air. (This might have been the Mad Shitter, a well-known deviant barred from every theatre in the city.)

The Met was closed in 1987, but its marquee continued to haunt the neighbourhood until the building was demolished some years later. Other stories have it that the structure was reconverted into a state home for the deaf. In any case, all traces of the building were eventually removed from the face of the earth. For well over a decade the site was left vacant, just a gaping space in the adjoining brownstone frontages, as if the very ground was cursed.

Further up Manhattan were the famed 42nd Street theatres between Seventh and Eight Avenues, a strip known as the Deuce. These once legit theatres had formed the core of "Movie Capital of the World." Built in the 1920s and '30s, they had undergone many booking policy changes over the decades, from old westerns playing 24 hours a day to musicals and first-run flicks, but as New York took a crash dive in the '70s managers started to book films with the kind of ghastly, lurid titles that confirmed all too well fears that the city was going straight to Hell. These theatres generally offered squalid but seemingly indestructible interiors and long ominous staircases that led down into subterranean toilets ideal for muggings.

Most of these venues struggled along on a diet of grisly grindhouse, not hardcore. An exception was The Harem, which, according to author Josh Alan Friedman, was not only the most depraved theatre on the strip but in all America. As he writes in his book Tales of Times Square from 1986:

It had a balcony roped off "for couples only." No one paid the slightest attention to this except voyeurs hoping to catch some second-hand hetero action. Approximately a decade later it was still going bad. "I was inside the Harem in 1994," comments a poster, "and almost had a very bad experience in the downstairs men's room. Luckily I ran out in time."10 No one can know what happened down in that toilet, but it must have been something since this fellow reported that every time he passed the theatre he felt a sense of extreme trepidation.

Many theatres that fell on hard times and ended up showing porn had epic histories, but The Harem had no history at all. It had been created out of retail space and had never been a theatre before, despite a full marquee that gave the impression it was cut from the same cloth as the neighboring venues. It closed at the end of the '90s and according to a feverish web posting "The Harem was a crackhouse in its last days! A transsexual named 'TABU' would sit in the front row and sell crack to the patrons! Poor TABU is now dead! A victim of AIDS!"11 Given all the extraneous activities that took place there, theater buffs argued online as to whether it was a theatre at all.

The Harem was fated to live on — in a TV commercial crafted by Rudy Giuliani's short-lived presidential campaign. Many saw evidence of racism at play in the spot. "They used to call it unmanageable, ungovernable," says a narrator's voice. Then a faded street scene appears picturing non-whites walking in slow motion — then a shot of the Harem theatre. Harem . . . Harlem? Did Giuliani perhaps mean to imply Harlem? Some thought so. "Does Giuliani mean to suggest the non-white population of the city is 'ungovernable' in the same way that porn theatres were?" wondered a poster.12

Exploitation films were notorious for changing titles to appeal to different markets at different times or just to rip off customers by getting them to go back and see what was essentially the same movie twice. But theatres also frequently changed their names over the years. The Adonis, which occupied two different locations, was just such a "shape-shifter."

It was built in 1921 on a lot at 839 Eighth Avenue, between 50th and 51st streets, and dubbed The Tivoli. It had an impressive Renaissance façade, and its large marquee became a distinctive fixture on the west border of the Theater District neighbourhood. It came complete with a grand lobby and a balcony flanked by solid two-story Ionic columns. With a seating capacity of 1,433 and an open-air "roof garden theatre" of 951 seats (which probably fell into disuse when the talkie era began), it was, as period advertising boasted, ideally suited for the presentation of "films, orchestra and grand opera soloists."13 It also came equipped with a Kimball organ. Like most theatres, it changed ownership and booking policy through the decades, including a stint in the early '60s as a showcase for Spanish-language films.

Chelly Wilson took over the place in the early/mid '60s and ran it as a grindhouse. On March 4, 1975 she rechristened it The Adonis and began exclusively programming gay porn, winning praise from the trade publication Variety, which pegged it as the largest and most lavish gay porn theatre in NYC. Wilson was one of the more colourful characters of Times Square, but she was also an ace businesswoman, and in 1968/69 added to her stable of smut cinemas by building The Capri and The Eros 1 from the ground up in what had been apartment buildings. These two classic mini-theaters, together with The Eros 2, which was later renamed The Venus, were clustered in the vicinity of Eighth Ave and 45th street. Titles like Virgin Flesh and Sex Deal adorned their marquees. The Eros was a gay venue and had the honor of screening Heavy Equipment, a 3-D homo classic featuring Jack Wrangler and The Christy Twins, while The Capri and The Venus were for straights, or at least played hetero porn. As for the latter venue, it was, as Landis reported in Sleazoid Express, "so pitch black you couldn't see your watch on your wrist" and "smelled of lavender mothballs."14

But The Adonis was Wilson's pride and joy. She opened it with a XXX gay feature called Sur that had been filmed in Northern California's Big Sur area. In the early days the place was neatly done up. Signs lettered in old-fashioned script proclaiming it to be "The male flagship theatre of the nation" were posted about the premises. It was clean and spacious. Comfortable wicker chairs and other tasteful appointments adorned the lounge areas and did the old theatre proud.

The house manager had a stake in the career of gay porn star Jack Wrangler, and in 1977 he was brought in to shoot a film called A Night at the Adonis right in the theater, after-hours when it was closed to the public. Theatre employees such as Bertha the cashier acted in bit roles, and as soon as a print was readied it was shown at The Adonis. A net posting by Oliver Penn recalls the movie. "It was well-publicized when it came out and some of the actors, I used to see on the streets of New York. I've met Jack Wrangler too, we chatted for a while. The movie is about the 'adult games' that went on at the Adonis Theatre. You can guess what activity I mean. . . . it was rather odd to be in the exact theatre that was being depicted on the screen, sort of a movie coming to life all around you. What was happening on the screen was also happening in real life as you were watching the film."15 In the lobby, photo stills from the movie were proudly displayed on a black velvet backdrop called "Adonis Superstar."

In the early '80s the theatre began to fall into serious disrepair. Its interior, which had now been painted a bright "whorehouse red," contributed to the tacky feel of an establishment in decline. Originally films were screened from twin 16mm xenon projectors in the booth, but now they were shown on a video projector placed smack in the center aisle of the orchestra pit. Sex was taking place everywhere, and the pay phone located near the balcony-level restroom (equipped with a disco ball) was constantly ringing with callers who wanted to hear some dirty talk. There were also serious structural problems, and sometime in the mid-'80s the balcony collapsed.

In the meantime real estate developers that had a stake in the neighbourhood were trying to get the theatre closed down to tidy it up for the building of the Worldwide Plaza. One prospective tenant, a law firm, stipulated that the theatre, which stood on the adjoining block, had to close. The plaza's developer, William Zeckendorf, subsequently bought up the site, and that was the beginning of the end of the Tivoli/Adonis. A postscript to this story surfaced when a partner in said law firm who had agitated so self-righteously for the closure of the "disreputable" Adonis was found dead in a squalid Bronx motel room. It turned out that this pillar of the community liked to engage in rough gay sex. When co-workers noticed his bruises, he would tell them it was the result of a mugging. The theatre was closed in January 1990 and later demolished. A high-rise was eventually built on the site.

But The Adonis lived on, its name transferred to another theatre owned by Chelly Wilson further south on Eighth Avenue, almost to 44th Street, on the west side of the avenue. This venue had most recently been known as The Cameo before its closure in 1989, but Wilson had in all probability been running it as far back as 1964 when she programmed the infamous Olga movies there. This was also an architecturally significant structure. As a poster marvelled, it possessed one of the most "distinctive facades of any surviving theatre from the early 20th century, a kind of heroic Palladian composition . . . with a breathtaking interior. Stone fixtures made almost 100 years ago could still be seen in the back."16

This became the new home of The Adonis and was quickly outfitted with campy Greek statues and the like. The black velvet photo display of stills from A Night at the Adonis was reinstalled here, and some nostalgic staffer had also put up clippings about the old Tivoli/Adonis. Bertha the cashier and other employees who had sworn allegiance to Ms. Wilson could now be found toiling in this new location. But at this late stage in the game there seemed to be a mummy's curse laid upon all adult theatres, and the new Adonis also gradually succumbed, evidencing increasing blight. In 1994 it was closed by the City's health department after a raid revealed high-risk sexual activities taking place among patrons. The neon sign that adorned the new Adonis was unceremoniously blowtorched to pieces, the chunks tossed into a dumpster.

The theatre later reopened as The Playpen, and a new sign that traced the NYC city skyline in red neon behind the reclining outline of a nude female was installed on the marquee. But its revival as a functioning theatre was short-lived. It was simply pointless in this day and age for a sex emporium to show movies on a single screen, and, like so many venues that had once served that function, it was gutted, the seats taken out and booths installed. Here girls performed for a fee, while the balcony was transformed into a male section with "buddy booths." A brief description of The Playpen surfaces in Sasha Cagen's '90s fanzine Cupsize, dedicated to riot grrrl politics and bisexuality. She describes the lobby of the Play Pen as "a house of love, a mirrored, bejewelled carnivalesque hallway," where a woman sold tokens from behind a yellow booth.

The Playpen was closed in September 2007. It was the end of another slab of movie lore that had stretched back to 1916 when it had opened as The Ideal Theater, later to go through numerous name changes and booking policy shifts that saw it screen Italian and Russian films and "girlie" sexploiters in the '50s. In 1970 it became the city's showcase venue for John Lamb's Sexual Freedom in Denmark, which laid the groundwork for the exhibition of hardcore porn.

Perhaps the theater's most dramatic moment occurred in 1946 when the 1943 film Dr. Terror's House of Horrors was playing. The New York Times reports that "during a tense moment on screen one evening a 10 x 20 foot section of the theater's ceiling fell down, injuring 19 patrons. Those in the front seats were unruffled, thinking they were hearing sound effects."17

By the time the old movie house checked out at 91 years of age, the only sound effects were paid dancers faking moans of pleasure.