Posted on 09/27/2004 9:11:44 AM PDT by El Conservador
n Avenue of the Americas from Greenwich Village to Chelsea, there is more sex for sale than at any time in the neighborhood's memory.
At No. 313, near West Third Street, there are X-rated DVD's and anatomically correct gadgets known in the sex industry as "marital aids." A few doors down, at Crazy Fantasy, two mannequins in the window suggest the provocative lingerie that can be found inside, along with many more DVD's.
Stores at 597 and 599 offer more, more, more of the same, and at Xcellent DVD, at 515, there are private booths for viewing videos, staffed by a grim-faced worker armed with a breathing mask and a mop.
Almost a decade after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani proclaimed war on the sex-shop business in New York City, the industry is alive and well and, at least in Greenwich Village, growing. The former mayor's restrictions on the industry, passed in 1995 as a centerpiece of his quality-of-life campaign, proved toothless after numerous court challenges, and an intransigent industry has found a way to dodge nearly every regulation imposed upon it.
While these stores still dot the western edges of Times Square, the Village, which has always prided itself on being a national symbol of tolerance, has become an example of how loopholes and weak language can undermine a once-celebrated law.
At a recent community meeting in the Village, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was pelted for more than an hour with complaints from residents about the proliferation of video stores with lewd windows.
Residents and elected officials from the area estimate that 20 new sex-related stores have opened in the area in the past 18 months, and say that glaring neon confronts them along Christopher Street, Seventh Avenue South and Avenue of the Americas.
"I wouldn't want a porn shop in my neighborhood," Mr. Bloomberg said at the meeting, "and you shouldn't have one in yours."
The law was supposed to prevent the clustering of such businesses in most residential and commercial areas. But store operators have exploited a loophole in the law permitting businesses with at least 60 percent non-X-rated merchandise to operate outside so-called adult entertainment zones. These stores often put large racks of instructional golf videos and "Ozzie and Harriet" episodes, which stand gathering dust between racks and racks of pornographic movies.
In enforcement lingo, this is known as "sham compliance." Robert Sacklow, the inexhaustible buildings inspector for the Office of Midtown Enforcement, calls the merchandise "Spanish Popeye." The term stems from a sex shop he once inspected in the Bronx that had 12,000 X-rated videos - and a single wall covered with 18,000 copies of Popeye cartoon videos dubbed in Spanish.
An amended law that would make it more difficult for X-rated businesses to thrive is locked in court battles, and in the meantime, the city is trying to enforce the existing law. The Bloomberg administration has greatly intensified its enforcement of every imaginable regulation against these stores - health code violations are written for lack of soap in bathrooms - and the Fire Department peppers the stores with tickets for having improper lighting on exit signs. "We want to pull every lever at our disposal," Mr. Sacklow said.
Since Mr. Bloomberg took office, 450 store inspections have been completed, compared with 78 such inspections in 2001, said John Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator.
"What we have against them is that they impact the quality of life, plain and simple," Mr. Feinblatt said. "If you are a parent, do you want your kids walking by a string of pornographic stores? No. If you are a commanding officer, do you want a pornographic store that attracts a clientele that is not from that neighborhood coming for access to pornography? Absolutely not."
City and law enforcement officials, community organizers and X-rated store managers have two basic theories as to why the Village - hardly a depressed real estate market - has become the new destination marketplace for pornography.
The neighborhood is close to the far West Side of Manhattan, where several manufacturing blocks were zoned to allow the shops. Further, the neighborhood's reputation for cultural magnanimity may be working against it.
"A lot of people think that anything goes in the Village," said Marilyn Dorato, an officer of the Greenwich Village Block Associations, a consortium of block associations in the neighborhood. "I think our virtues are being held against us."
Ms. Dorato pointed out that Pleasure Chest, which has operated for 35 years on Seventh Avenue South, is considered a good neighbor, a discreet and welcome contrast to newcomers with glaring lights and explicit windows.
"Let's face it," said Dan Lishner, the manager of Pleasure Chest, "they bring an old-school style of store that is just not attractive. We carry bath and beauty, and a lot of the videos we carry are instructional."
Contrast this with Fantasy World, one bête noire of the neighborhood, a cavernous throwback to Times Square circa 1986. "That is just a big eyesore," Mr. Lishner said of his competitor. "Their windows are hideous, and it is open 24 hours, and it is just not an appealing place." (The manager of Fantasy World, who would give his name only as John, countered that his store is "the most upscale lingerie and marital aids store in Manhattan.")
The neighborhood association recently formed a task force just to work with Mr. Feinblatt's office and the Sixth Precinct, as well as City Councilwoman Christine Quinn, to try to shut down the newer spots, or at least make their existence miserable.
The task force members have been pressuring landlords to stop renting to X-rated shops, and the groups complain regularly to the Midtown Enforcement Office. The pornography problem is "a unifier for the village," said Alan Jacobs, who is head of the task force.
For years during the Giuliani administration, inspectors would shut down X-rated shops for violating the 60/40 law, and when everyone showed up in court, the stores proved that they had mended their ways and were allowed to reopen.
The Bloomberg administration has taken a different tack, fighting in court for amended legislation passed by the City Council in 2001 that would impose much tighter regulations. (A decision by the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court is expected shortly.)
Under the new law, for instance, the presence of peep show booths would automatically categorize a business as a sex shop, regardless of how many copies of "Amish Barn Raising" are stocked. If patrons are forced to walk past X-rated material to get to the G stuff, that, too, would take the store out of compliance.
But marital aids, which many Village residents complain about, are not considered pornographic material, so if they make up most of a store's business, it would probably withstand even new legislation.
Even the sex shop proprietors themselves, hectored as they may be, say they have little room to complain. "The Giuliani administration was much more zealous just over closing the places at any cost, right or wrong," said Herald Price Fahringer, a lawyer who represents many of the sex shops. "I think the Bloomberg administration is taking a much more responsible approach. They respect the law. Under Giuliani, at any one time we had pending in the courts two active cases in all five boroughs."
Mr. Feinblatt does not dispute the characterization. "We are in the courts to get a law that doesn't have a loophole you can drive a truck through," he said, "and we are looking through a much broader lens, using every tool in the toolbox to deal with these places."
On a visit to three X-rated stores with the Midtown Enforcement Unit last week, that toolbox was in full view. At two stores on Eighth Avenue, and at Xcellent DVD, Mr. Sacklow made himself at home, extending tape measures, scrutinizing floor plans and scrupulously writing up every violation visible.
He noted illegal uses of space, improper fire extinguishers, and cigarette butts on the floor (violations of the antismoking law). Store managers looked on nervously, and at one spot, women who are paid to pose sexually for voyeuristic customers in private booths glared at the modest interruption in their business.
Mr. Sacklow was assisted by two police officers, other officials from the unit and a health inspector and an official from the Fire Department, who found numerous violations of their own at each stop.
At Xcellent DVD, the unit struck gold. The store manager apparently did not realize that both 60 percent of the floor space and 60 percent of the stock had to be nonpornographic. While most of the floor space was used for marital aids and cheap nightgowns, which do not count as pornographic, all the DVD's were X-rated, violating the stock rule.
"They think it is all about floor space," Mr. Sacklow whispered, somewhat gleefully, as he wrote up the violation.
Examining floor plans, he added, "I do notice the architect failed to file properly for a permit for an office." It is one more knock against a business that the neighborhood desperately wants to see gone.
Oh, well. It seems there's limits to permissivity after all.
Dealing with the "demand side" of this equation could be helpful. Of course, tolerance is now the only virtue in the PC lexicon.
ROTFLMAO!
Given the availability of porn on the net, I am surprised that these shops stay in business.
Given the nature of the Village and Chelsea, I seriously doubt that many of the 'marital aids' are aiding many who are actually legally married.
Gee, but I thought the homosexual lifestyle had NOTHING to do with promiscuity.
That and all these new Hollywood productions and sex education in the schools.
Tolerance means telling someone with a hole in their head that they're 'open minded'...
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