Remaking Kitty’s Adult Emporium
South Broadway used to scare me. It seemed sketchy and foreign, a place where if you left your car overnight—because the bartender just so happened to over-serve you—you’d come back the next day to find a family of migrant workers living in your backseat.
“But this is my car,” you would stammer.
“No hablamos ingles,” they would respond.
Then they’d go back to tending the already flourishing crops they’d planted between the cushions, and the vehicle would simply become theirs.
I was a Colfaxian, born and raised. The house I grew up in was not far from Colfax, and my first apartment was spitting distance from the Bluebird Theater. So, when it came time for me to nightly prove my manhood by drinking like a child, Colfax was where I chose to do so.
True, Colfax is and was every bit as gnarly as Broadway. But, at the time, it was more familiar to me. So, while families of new-wave Joads may have inhabited backseats from Monaco to Josephine, they didn’t bother me none. That’s just how things had always been.
Gradually, though, as I began to meet more eclectic folk, the invitations to hang out on South Broadway increased. I found myself frequenting that strip more, sometimes even bravely not parking next to a church for karmic safety. And then for a brief, brilliant period I fell in love. I became part of South Broadway’s scene, one of the bearded, seething drunks who was above it all, yet so part of it all, and fuck them all if they don’t understand, man—not really, but I did get shit-faced there a lot. Then it got really old and hollow and insufferable, and I kind of stopped.
Now I’m back with renewed interest. I became a homeowner in the area, and South Broadway has grown to meet my needs: enough yoga studios and wine bars to up property values, yet enough charming dilapidation for me to continue having a soul. It’s gentrification-lite, a pastiche of the upscale and tolerably funky. For every Beatrice & Woodsley, a Famous Pizza. For every Delite, a Brown Barrel. South Broadway has become something of a case study in Park Slopian development, and if you don’t believe me, wait until people start complaining about strollers outside of Sputnik.
Or did you think skinny jeans made shoe-gazers impotent?
What, then, to do with Kitty’s Adult Emporium, that mammoth, crumbling testament to pornographic eras past? That giant theater has sat dormant during much of the South Broadway renaissance, shuttered yet available, the would-be fertile opportunity for a would-be urban developer (and not just because of all the dried semen).
Broadway nighthawks have proposed that the place become a concert venue—a real-deal, big-name Ogden or Fillmore. But that would never work. Hi-Dive and 3 Kings Tavern do too good a job putting on shows, and the Gothic Theatre just down the road will always have name recognition over any place Kitty’s tries to become.
Others have said that Kitty’s should become a giant dance club, but that would fail too. In spite of Blue Ice and the handful of horrible clubs 10 blocks north, the neighborhood is just not going that way.
No, I’ve got two words for someone with a little bit of cash and a hankering to transform a woebegone porno palace: Elvis Cinemas.
It could work! Kitty’s is a theater already—why not make it a cheap, second-run movie house? You wouldn’t risk competing with the Mayan’s more expensive indie offerings down the street, and you wouldn’t have to transform the place. Simply clean it up and wait for month-old reels to avail themselves. The neighborhood’s bohemians would catch $2 to $3 flicks at all hours, and the stroller-pushers would happily take in a children’s flick with little Tanner and Madison if only to get the fuck out the house. You could even offer late-night movies in Spanish as a peace offering to all the long-time residents who will eventually be displaced. I think a discount movie theater that already has three locations around the city—but none actually in the city—is a no-brainer, something that the neighborhood would use, something in keeping with this carefully manicured environment we’ve cultivated.
Because a Whole Foods would just tip the balance.
