There's A Porn Theater On Kings Highway!

A 1973 ad for "The Birds and the Beads," a porn playing at Kings Highway Cinema (Source: researchbuff.com)

So this conversation just happened in our office:

“Ned, did you know there is a porn theater on Kings Highway?” asked our young lady intern, so full of purity and good values.

“What? No!” I replied. Robert walked in. “Ask Robert. He’d know.”

“Ask me what?” said Robert.

“Did you know there is a porn theater on Kings Highway?” the unsullied intern asked again.

“Yeah, of course.”

Of course, Robert, of course.

Well, I can’t really blame Robert, though I enjoy the innuendo. Apparently, most people know about this place – Kings Highway Cinema – and it’s one of those well-known secrets that I somehow never heard. Our chaste intern, with her lily-white soul, innocently sent me a link to an article in Vice Magazine about it.

I read it. And blushed. A lot.

“I can’t excerpt this article. It’s way too NSFW,” I said.

“Yeah, that one’s pretty sticky,” Alanna agreed. “It’ll take forever to clean up.”

“I bet that’s what the theater’s janitor says, too.”

So, yeah, the article is totally unexcerptable, but if you’ve got the stomach for it, it’s amusing enough to check out.

And, apparently, the theater – at 711 Kings Highway – has been around for a while and is well known as one of the city’s last grand porn-theater-slash-hookup-joints. On gay meetup sites it gets rave reviews – but before you click that link, beware that it’s even more graphic than the Vice piece.

How long has this place been around? Hard to say. There’s an account of a man’s visit online from 1988 that, well, I’m not linking to it. I’m just not. The building, however, apparently opened in 1936 as the Jewel Theater, and you can see some really awesome photos of the place from the 1950s here. A fire ripped through the theater in the 1960s, and that’s when it was refurbished as a porn theater – though not without a legal battle, apparently.

That makes this porn theater – reportedly, Brooklyn’s last – about 50 years old. Some may sneer in disgust at its existence – especially in an increasingly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. But, come on, last porn theater in Brooklyn? Dating back 50 years? That’s an accomplishment! Let’s get this thing landmarked!