NEW YORK — A federal judge in New York City ruled yesterday that the city’s strip clubs and adult-entertainment establishments (“nude dancing and erotic materials”) fall “within the ambit of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees,” and temporarily blocked a long-unenforced Giuliani-era zoning law.
Propelled by the former Mayor (now Donald Trump’s attorney) in his drive to "clean up" the city and stamp out the type of adult “red light” zones depicted in HBO’s “The Deuce," in 1994 and 1995, the City Council imposed progressively harsher zoning regulations limiting the expansion, location, size and ownership of adult establishments.
Strip clubs, adult video and bookstores, according to a Wall Street Journal report on yesterday’s ruling, “had to be at least 500 feet from a church, school or residential district and at least 500 feet from another adult shop.”
The regulations also “established a ‘60/40’ rule that allowed businesses to stay open if they had no more than 40% of their floor space dedicated to adult entertainment.”
In 2001, a new amendment expanded restrictions and the following year several plaintiffs, including the operators of the Platinum Dolls and Satin Dolls clubs, filed a lawsuit. The subsequent legal challenges to the political campaign against adult entertainment effectively caused enforcement of the regulations to cease for over 15 years.
The legal proceedings, wrote the Wall Street Journal “have dragged on due to years of state-court litigation, which involved rulings by trial and appeals courts. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the state-court case, ending that litigation. The federal case remained dormant during the state proceedings.”
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge William Pauley III ruled against the city’s claim that “it has a right to regulate such establishments, which it says can lead to crime and quality-of-life problems.”
Judge Pauley’s opinion said that that “putting a zoning amendment on hold during a fuller examination of the case wouldn’t harm the city” and that “free-speech protections applied to adult clubs and bookstores.”
The judge set a conference in the case for later this month.
For the Wall Street Journal report by Katie Honan and Corinne Ramey, click here.
