In November 1974, the Boston Redevelopment Authority proposed the U.S.’s first, state-sanctioned “Adult Entertainment District” in the city’s vice district, the “Combat Zone”. Paralleling developments in other cities, Boston’s pornographic marketplace had expanded and diversified during the preceding decade, bringing with it concerns about immorality and street crime. For many liberal contemporaries, the city’s innovative use of its zoning powers to create an “Adult Entertainment Zone” represented a promising compromise among adult business owners, city planners, and nearby neighborhood boosters. According to the new zoning rules, legal commercial sex businesses--adult bookstores, movie theaters, and strip clubs--would be permitted to run openly inside the District, but were banned from opening elsewhere in the city. Although city officials explicitly intended the plan to contain vice, adult business owners were optimistic about the possibilities it opened up. As a spokeswoman for several businesses in the Combat Zone explained, "Now we’re officially part of the urban fiber of the city.” Yet within a few years, most observers considered the city’s experiment a failure.
Scholars and policymakers have long noted the significance of the Combat Zone to the development of content-neutral approaches to regulating sexual display, most often counterpoising Boston’s approach to the “Detroit model” of dispersing sexual businesses. In this paper, I retell the story of the Combat Zone from the perspective of adult industry entrepreneurs. Drawing upon city records, advertisements, newspapers, and photographs, I show how entrepreneurs leveraged their relative inclusion in the “urban fiber” to develop new strategies for enticing customers and challenging police scrutiny. Even as concerns about prostitution and violent street crime undermined the truce represented by the Combat Zone, I argue that its history represents an important index of changing role of policing--from business regulator to image problem--in the pornographic marketplace of late-twentieth-century American cities.
