Porno in Passaic

[One of my very favorite posts from my Patrick Murtha's Diary blog, this was originally published in 2009; I am happy to give it new life here. I have made a few small touch-ups and corrections, and added photographs.]

I was born and spent my entire minority in the city of Passaic, New Jersey, which had a split personality: the Third Ward, or "Passaic Park" as it was informally called, where I grew up, was very suburban and single-family-home-ish, while the other three Wards centering on Passaic's formerly thriving downtown were much more inner-city in nature. Most northern New Jersey communities tilted one way or the other, but Passaic contained all possibilities. From my point of view as a kid, this made it interesting. But it would be no use pretending that, even then, the city hadn't seen better days. A key example of this was the cluster of movie theaters downtown.

They were truly old picture palaces. Three of them were monsters topping 2,000 seats: the Montauk, which opened in 1924; the Capitol, 1926; and the Central, 1940. The fourth, a smaller 900-seater, knew many name changes as the Lincoln, the Lexington, the Rialto, and finally, the Fine Arts. All four theaters were within a few blocks of each other.

By the Sixties, the economics of movie theaters had changed considerably, and these theaters had become dinosaurs. How did they adapt? The Central had always been mixed-use, in fact it was initially primarily a stage venue; it is famous as the Glenn Miller Band's last tour stop before the plane crash that took Miller's life. As the big band era waned, the Central gave up shows and switched to movies entirely. It specialized in widescreen extravaganzas at first (the first of the Passaic theaters to adopt Cinemascope), but by the Seventies was showing more grindhouse product, kung fu movies and blaxploitation.

The Capitol, the largest of the theaters at almost 3,500 seats, went the opposite route, shifting gears to become one of the East's major rock concert venues. Everyone played the Capitol, from the Stones to Springsteen. To this day, there is a cult of the place. The Central followed its lead a bit and put its stage back into use for the Allman Brothers and Pink Floyd.

The other economic solution was adult films. Passaic became the world capital of the raincoat crowd! The Fine Arts was the first to make the switch, re-opening after a two-year hiatus in 1958 to play films for "mature audiences": grindhouse films, then nudies, and eventually harder stuff. Unless I mis-remember, and I really do not think I am hallucinating this because it is burned in my memory, there was a very brief stint when the Fine Arts advertised "All Male Action" on its marquee. That would have been exceedingly early for gay porn, and as an eleven-year-old I recall being notably confused about what "All Male Action" would entail -- football? There was something disorienting about that marquee.

If this really did happen, it probably had to be in 1969, when there was just a little male-oriented product (could Andy Warhol films have played in Passaic? The mind boggles). The Fine Arts, as if to pay for its sins (or trigger an insurance policy), blew up (literally) on January 3, 1970, ten minutes after the theater discharged the patrons for the evening's double bill of Joys of Georgette and Temporary Wives, two early porn films that can be confirmed at the IMDB. (Thanks for this information to the Wonderful Passaic website.) The site of the Fine Arts is now a municipal parking lot.

Soldiering on for Sodom, the Montauk, the latest-active of the theaters (up to 2005) and the last to be demolished (in May 2011), also shifted to adult films in the late Sixties / early Seventies time period, eventually becoming an all-gay porn palace. The Capitol, which had dropped mainstream films after showing Tom Laughlin's symbolically-appropriate-for-Passaic Born Losers in 1967, decided to fill in between rock concerts by also showing porn films. The Capitol ultimately closed in 1986, suffered a series of suspicious fires, and was torn down in 1991.

As for the Central, I am not sure whether it showed porno among its other sleaze. It closed as a theater in September 1979, then was demolished and replaced by a McDonald's.

Anyone who tells you that the Sixties and Seventies were a more innocent time is out of their mind, or never spent time in Passaic. From the late Sixties on, the Passaic Herald News, my innocent little home-town paper, was running three or four porn movie ads daily. That was pretty much all that showed in Passaic. Just like every major rock band played the Capitol, every piece of pornographic footage from I Am Curious (Yellow) to Inside Georgina Spelvin was screened in Passaic. Wholesome suburban America, my ass! With all due respect to The Wonder Years, a television series that I enjoy and whose wide-eyed protagonist is my exact contemporary, it was a sick, sick time to grow up. Its like can scarcely be imagined today.