During the last two years, X-rated shops have made a quiet but pronounced comeback in New York City, with dozens of new businesses opening in Greenwich Village, the Sunset Park neighborhood of Queens, and even near Times Square.
But strict new zoning rules now reaching the final stage of a nearly year-long legal battle could force most of them to close, bringing highly visible changes to the neighborhoods in which the stores have clustered.
"What they've done is made it impossible for these guys to stay in business," said Herald Price Fahringer, the lawyer for a coalition of about 75 video stores and X-rated theaters challenging the restrictions in court. "If this law were to be upheld, 85 percent of all the stores would have to close."
Last week a state appellate court upheld the stricter regulations but issued an interim stay of the ruling until later this month, when the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, will consider whether to grant a permanent stay and hear a further appeal. If the stay is not granted, the new rules would go into effect immediately, sewing up loopholes to zoning regulations enacted by the city during the mid-1990s.
Under those earlier regulations, stores that stocked at least 60 percent non-X-rated merchandise were not considered "adult entertainment" establishments at all, allowing owners who were attentive to the letter of the law to open up sex shops in residential and commercial neighborhoods where they would otherwise have been banned. The new regulations, said John Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, would establish a "common-sense test" for whether a business qualifies as a sex shop. Peep shows, signs excluding minors, and other features would all qualify a business as a sex shop and subject it to the more stringent regulations that govern such establishments, he said.
Under those rules, established in 1995, sex shops are banned entirely from residential and most commercial zones. They are allowed in industrial zones and some commercial ones, including parts of Eighth Avenue, the garment district in Midtown, and the West Side of Manhattan. But there is a catch: No sex shop may sit within 500 feet of another such business, of a zone from which they are prohibited, or of "sensitive receptors" like schools or houses of worship.
Feinblatt said that, should the new regulations go into effect, the city would immediately begin reinspecting sex shops to see if they were in compliance.
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