BY REBECCA FIORE | The free erotic video-sharing Web site Pornhub opened a pop-up shop at 70 Wooster St. in Soho on Black Friday with one catch: There’s no porn. And there’s a legal reason for that.
At the start of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s tenure, adult video stores filled Times Square. In an effort to clean up the area, Giuliani banished all adult stores from commercial districts, relegating them to manufacturing-zoned areas only, pushing them to the city’s edges.
However, then-City Councilmember Kathryn Freed, representing her constituents in Soho, a manufacturing district, didn’t want adult stores in the neighborhood. A special provision in the Zoning Resolution was created stating, “Adult establishments are not permitted in a Manufacturing District in which residences or joint living-work quarters for artists are allowed… .” In addition, adult shops are not allowed within 500 feet of one another or a church or a school built before April 10, 1995.
“The law only counts for visual and printed materials,” attorney Erica Dubno of the firm Fahringer & Dubno said. “As long as it isn’t a book or video store, they would not fall under that zoning resolution.”
Dubno is currently fighting a legal battle against the New York State Court of Appeals, which ruled to invalidate the 60/40 rule this past June. The 60/40 rule, created by Dubno and her late legal partner Herald Price Fahringer in the 1990s, applies specifically to porn shops, allowing them to remain in operation as long as only 40 percent of their merchandise is pornographic. However, the city currently is not enforcing the rule, pending the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on whether to hear the case.
“That’s why Babeland is allowed [in Soho] because it had removed all publications,” she said, referring to the well-known sex-toys shop, at 43 Mercer St. “They are able to have therapeutic devices.”
Dubno said a pop-up store is subject to the same laws as a permanent store.
A spokesperson for Pop Up Mob, the company hired by Pornhub to create the Wooster pop-up shop, said the store contains no graphic content. Even the giant brightly lit screen at the store’s rear, featuring the company’s logo over small stills from adult films is pixelated, so the images are blurred.
Pornhub, which launched 10 years ago, now has its own brand of products, including men’s and women’s clothing sporting the company logo, sexually explicit coloring books, and other branded gear from their content partners.
“As an online brand, we’ve been limited to interacting with our fans on the site and through social media,” said Corey Price, Pornhub’s vice president, in a statement. “As we continue to increase brand awareness and expand into new verticals, like retail, we are looking for new ways to interact with our fans,”
In addition to clothes, accessories and duffel bags, the company has also, naturally, created a line of adult toys, some in collaboration with the Museum of Sex. These include handcuffs, vibrators and other sex paraphernalia.
The Soho Pornhub pop-up shop — located nearby design boutiques Moschino and Céline — will remain open until Dec. 20. Visitors must be age 18 or older to enter the store.
