At almost every shop, the people I spoke to said they averaged fewer than five paying customers a day. The technological innovations of the past 15 years have obviously not been kind to the adult video store industry. In 2000, when streaming video and online purchasing didn't exist, people couldn't get their porn any other way. With the redevelopment of this area of Sunset Park, these businesses may all soon be gone. It's still open, though I wouldn't be shocked if it did close tomorrow. On my third trip, the clerk at Golden DVD ("best prices in 3rd Avenue"), said the owner had "just" told him the shop was going out of business "tomorrow," after two days of my hectoring him. One shop was closed at the appointed hour I was set to meet the owner, despite a sign attesting to its 24-hour nature. When I arrived that night, another said he always came in at "10 a.m." The next morning, the clerk from the previous day said he was there last night.
"He'll be here at 10 tonight," a clerk at Jayoda Video told me on a Monday morning. "This is my first day," said the same employee the next day when I popped in. The answers ranged from the plausible, "This is my first day," to the laughable. These are small, independent businesses, and you'd think at one point in seven days, making regular visits, you'd have one encounter with the head honcho.īut in trips to all of them, talking to dozens of counter workers, not a single one professed to know the owner. The owners are elusive: I figured this wasn't like walking into a Starbucks with the expectation of seeing Howard Schultz. The largest Sri Lankan population in the city is in Staten Island, which makes for a quick commute back and forth over the Verrazano. The clerks, too, when I went, were almost exclusively of Sri Lankan descent. Indeed, two stores include Sinhalese in their names. Many of the shops are owned by immigrants from Sri Lanka. There were a number of strip clubs not far off-most of which are now gone-so they had a bit of a seedy community thing going on. This sent many of the shops in Manhattan to areas zoned for commercial and manufacturing, including this part of Sunset Park. It's a matter of zoning: In 1998, when the city's new regulations for adult shops went into effect, the businesses were banned from residential areas. I spent a week trying to figure it all out. More importantly, how do these places, with a clearly dying business model, sustain themselves? And why did they all wind up so close together? The kind that advertise private viewing booths for when the laptop is busted and the WiFi is out and the lock on your bedroom is broken and the bathroom is in use and your imagination is unable to conjure up anything and… you get what I'm getting at. They're sex shops, like the ones you could once find in Times Square. Sunset Video, Video City, Candy Hookah Love, Golden DVD-the names are different, but they're all the same inside. Along on a stretch between 39th and 24th Streets, there are eight of these shops, a rate of nearly one per block.
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Underneath the Gowanus Expressway, in an area generously included in Sunset Park but really not much more than a detritus-strewn, completely forgotten, and rarely traversed stretch of 3rd Avenue, sit a curious collection of shops, glass windows and brick walls routinely rattled as 18-wheelers hurtle by just 10 feet above.
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