Sex-Related Shops Make Comeback Near Times Sq.

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

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.

Sex-related stores have been popping up again in other neighborhoods in the city, notably in Chelsea. But their reappearance on the side streets and avenues near Times Square is especially significant, given the large amount of time and money city officials have spent to reinvent the area as a family-friendly tourist destination.

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.

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times

A sex-related shop on Eighth Avenue between 39th and 40th Streets near Times Square. The number of such shops in the area has been increasing sharply.

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.”

Once sex shops begin to move in, Tompkins said, they can set in motion a downward spiral. “More adult establishments on a street depresses the rents legitimate businesses are willing to pay,” he said.

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