By Perri Colley, Staff Reporter
The Bronx Beat has learned that businesses being wooed to the South Bronx could have to compete with sex shops for locations along the East River.
A map approved by the City Planning Department last week shows that legislation proposed two weeks ago by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the City Council would force X-rated businesses to secure a foothold in an area recently designated as a federal empowerment zone. If sex shops are to exist anywhere in the borough, they will have to be in this zone, which includes Hunts Point, Longwood and Port Morris. Businesses locating there would qualify for tax breaks and other incentives.
The new law would limit adult entertainment businesses to manufacturing districts by prohibiting them within 500 feet of residential zones, schools, houses of worship, day care centers and other porn shops.
If the proposal passes City Council this fall, it will almost totally confine the sale of pornography to a strip that begins near Yankee Stadium and curves around the coastline south of Bruckner Boulevard.
Seedy sex shops -- which are often located in underutilized, low-rent manufacturing areas -- aren't likely to survive the business competition the empowerment zone is supposed to create, said Kevin Davitt, spokesman for the department. "If all the efforts of the empowerment zone go through, the chance of adult entertainment businesses locating where thriving businesses are will be that much less," he said.
But there are no guarantees that the empowerment zone will stimulate as much activity as local leaders hope, and triple-X shops could actually discourage business growth. "No one would want to be in an adult entertainment district," said John Robert, district manager of the Hunts Point area, where most of the adult entertainment space would be available. "Hunts Point has a problem with prostitution as it is."
The mayor will not succeed in steering sex shops away from residences, at least not in Hunts Point, Robert said. Homes permeate manufacturing areas in his district, especially on Faile Street, Casanova Street and Bryant Avenue.
On Wyatt Street in East Tremont, homes engulf the Playhouse, a modern, freshly painted strip club. Five floors of apartments top its storefront location. Narrow gabled houses climb from the back of the block. Young men play football on a side street, and boys shoot baskets at a bare rim hung from the side of a nearby apartment building.
Neighbors can't find much to complain about, though. A waitress at the First Class restaurant next to the Playhouse said she would hate to see the club abolished. "Their security guards come over and check on us late at night," Michelle Brown said. The Playhouse did not return phone calls.
Others in the borough aren't so accommodating. The Rev. Richard Gorman, chairman of Community Board 12, organized such aggressive protests against triple-X businesses in his district that three of the area's five adult entertainment businesses were forced out of the sexuality business.
He's picketing at the fourth, and the city's proposed zoning regulations will likely close down the fifth, according to Davitt's calculations.
"People are not going to live in the Bronx if they have to be beside this filth," Gorman said. "It does not make good economic sense."