Pornhub has briefly experimented with temporary shops in New York before. The company hosted a pop-up shop in the East Village hotdog store Crif Dogs for one day in 2015, Racked reported. The shop sold shirts with sayings such as “Zone out with your bone out.”
New York has long waged a mostly successful battle against sex shops. In June, New York’s Court of Appeals reinstated rules dating to 2001 barring any establishment with “live performances characterized by an emphasis on certain specified anatomical areas or specified sexual activities” as well as sexually explicit videos from all but carefully selected city zones.
The city’s well-known efforts to clean up its once booming pornography industry began in the mid-1990s, with regulations barring adult businesses from operating near churches or schools and in most commercial and residential neighborhoods.
The rules shuttered many of more than 170 such establishments around the city, with then-mayor Rudy Giuliani helping rout them out.
Times Square, where porn parlors and strip clubs thrived into the 1990s amid Broadway theaters, now bears little resemblance to its old self.
