The “Smorgasbord of Salacity” Reestablishes Itself in Times Square

Adult shops are making a comeback in the Times Square area:

Ten years after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared war on Times Square’s X-rated peep shows, strip joints and video stores, shops selling sexually explicit materials have slowly begun to creep back into the area, adroitly exploiting loopholes in the law – and property-owners’ demand for high-paying tenants – to stage their comeback.

. . .

The areas that have seen the biggest resurgence are on Eighth Avenue near the Port Authority Bus Terminal and on 37th and 39th Streets near the Avenue of the Americas, where the number of sex shops has tripled, to 18 from 6, in a year and a half. North of 42nd Street, the increase has been smaller, with only three of the 17 stores in the area opening since 2003.

Part of the growth owes to the agility with which store owners have learned to comply with city zoning regulations adopted in the mid-1990’s to keep them out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and churches.

But development officials and local business owners say that another factor has been the shops’ willingness to pay well above market rents.

“There’s a disparity between what the porn guys will pay and what the market will bear,” said Tom Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. “And it tends not to be the bigger landlords. It’s a guy who owns a three-story building, and the apartments above are rent-stabilized, so the great majority of his return on the building comes from the ground-floor retail.”

It’s easy to get around the city’s formerly tough zoning laws, which were watered down after court challenges:

Today, any store with at least 60 percent non-X-rated merchandise is not technically considered an “adult entertainment” business under the law.

“If they stock their shelves with enough copies of ‘Bambi,’ they can come within compliance,” said John Feinblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator.

Since stores that obey the 60/40 rule are not subject to the rules restricting sex-related businesses, they are free not only to open but to cluster-that is, open near each other – making the law a “close to impossible thing to enforce,” Mr. Feinblatt said.

Perhaps the biggest such cluster is on Eighth Avenue, where business was brisk on a recent Friday afternoon.

“There’s one,” said Bill Daley, slyly nudging his elbow toward a middle-aged man in a jacket and tie who, just seconds earlier, had darted into a doorway marked with a movie poster for “The Bourne Supremacy” but beyond which were visible titles of a saucier variety.

Mr. Daley sighed grimly. “People always think it’s the creeps and bums who go to these stores,” he said. “But if you go there after lunch or after work, you’ll see all these guys in suits. It’s usually family guys who stop on their way home.”