Not All Happy with Porn Shops in Greenwich Village

Peter Brooks from Talk Back Northampton asserted in a recent Northampton City Council meeting that the residents of Greenwich Village in New York coexist happily with their sex shops. The New York Times reports this isn’t completely true:

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…

“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…

“What we have against them is that they impact the quality of life, plain and simple,” [John] Feinblatt [the city’s criminal justice coordinator] 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…”

“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…”

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.

From The New York Times, “In the Village, Sex Shops Multiply and Test a Neighborhood’s Tolerance”, 9/27/04