14th Street's Red Light District Was Protected by the Law Against It

For decades the 800 block of 14th Street ran clubs and adult bookstores, until a developer, a zoning ruling and wrecking crews closed it.

Show Notes

Just before 3 a.m. on November 10, 1984, the dancers at Benny's on 14th Street took the stage for the last time. The 1977 law written to keep Washington from ever having another red light district had spent years protecting this one.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2012/05/07/14th-street-red-light-district-washington-dc/

This episode discusses the history of adult businesses on 14th Street.

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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The lost and untold stories of Washington, DC. The buildings, blocks and people the city and region forgot.

The Beatles played their first American concert here. Sharks turned up in the Potomac in 1911. Ford’s Theatre collapsed in 1893 while government clerks worked inside.

Since 2012, Ghosts of DC has been digging through old newspapers, maps and archives for stories like these, from Georgetown to Anacostia and across the whole DMV. Now they’re a podcast.

Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.

Something for the Metro ride or the walk to work.

Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

It was a few minutes before three in the morning on Saturday, November tenth, nineteen eighty-four. The dancers at a club on Fourteenth Street took the stage for their last number. The club was called Benny's Home of the Porno Stars. By daybreak, the man who owned the building was outside pulling down the awning. That morning, more than fifty volunteers swept up the broken bottles and painted a billboard across the boarded-up storefronts. Franklin Square. Washington's Next Great Neighborhood. That block had been Washington's red light district for years. And the strangest part is the law the city wrote to make sure a strip like it could never form. It kept this one alive. So how did a strip like that survive in the middle of downtown? And what finally brought it down? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. I've spent a lot of years following this city's paper trail into strange corners, and this one runs right through downtown. We pieced it together from twenty-three sources, from a nineteen fifty-five want ad to the city's property records today. Find them all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

First, which Fourteenth Street? When people say Fourteenth Street today, they usually mean restaurant row, up past Thomas Circle toward Logan Circle. This is a different stretch. The eight hundred block, between H and I Streets, right by Franklin Square. An office district during the day. A neon one at night. In November of nineteen sixty-four, the Washington Post called it The Block. It said it was by all odds the closest Washington has come to duplicating Baltimore's notorious Striptease Strip. By day the street had a custom tailor, a barber shop and a big post office. At night it had the Red Slipper and a place called Benny's Rebel Room. The Post sorted the block's big draws in one neat line. Two of the clubs didn't sell sex, it said. And two of them didn't sell much of anything else. A man who'd lived in the neighborhood since nineteen fifty-two later walked the Post through it. In the fifties, he said, the top entertainers in the country played the block. Then it turned into a hangout for soldiers on leave. Then came bookstores and go-go bars. And by the nineteen seventies, it was openly pornographic.

Benny's was Benny Mendelson's place, a tavern at eight twenty-nine Fourteenth Street. In nineteen fifty-five, the Rebel Room was running help-wanted ads in the Evening Star. One of them began with two words. Waitresses, white. In June of nineteen fifty-eight, Mendelson went before the city's liquor board with an idea. He wanted to fly a Confederate flag outside the tavern, and hang a sign calling it Benny's Rebel Room. The board's chairman worried the flag and the sign might provoke people, and the board made it clear it disapproved. Mendelson said he'd be content with just the name Benny's. The want ads kept running under the Rebel Room name anyway. By the end, Benny's was run by Roddy Simkins. His father was Roger Simkins, known as Whitetop, one of the most prominent gamblers in the city. When Whitetop died in nineteen seventy-three, the Post remembered a joke from a former city council chairman, during a discussion about legalizing the numbers game. We might want to get Whitetop Simkins to design it for us.

In April of nineteen sixty-eight, after Martin Luther King Junior was killed, Washington burned. On Fourteenth Street, much of the burning was uptown, around U Street. Downtown, the damage was to the economy. Storefronts sat empty. Rents were cheap. And the porn business moved in. Restaurant owners on the block ripped out their booths and built stages. The Californian Steak House had been an ordinary steak house in the fifties. In the early eighties it went topless. Then bottomless. By then, Fourteenth Street had twenty-two of the city's thirty adult bookstores. Back in nineteen seventy-seven, the city had written new zoning rules for all this. Adult businesses could open only in dense commercial zones, three hundred feet from each other, and six hundred feet from any church or apartment building. The idea was to spread them out so they could never cluster again. A city planner put it plainly to the Post. Creation of a new red light district is impossible. But there was a catch. The clubs already on Fourteenth Street were exempt. So the law that banned any new strip ended up protecting the old one. By nineteen eighty-four, even the Post was calling the block Washington's combat zone.

In February of nineteen eighty-two, a Post reporter spent time on the block. Upstairs at the Californian, in an office lined with cases of liquor, the man who ran it leaned back in a three-piece pinstriped suit. His name was Quy Huy Nguyen. He said he used to run a bar in Saigon, and he held a six-year lease. A half-million dollars, he said. It'll take a half-million dollars to buy me out. Down the street, a neon butterfly flapped its wings over the Butterfly Club. Even on a cold, rainy weeknight, there were nearly seventy-five men inside by seven o'clock. And right across the corner? The National Association of Realtors had just moved into its new headquarters. An eight-million-dollar building. Directly across the street from a one-stop sex shop. The land around it was worth a fortune. In nineteen eighty, a parcel at Fourteenth and H sold for a Washington record, and Metro Center was two blocks away. Developers kept saying the strip's days were numbered. A woman at an escort service on the block told the reporter they'd been hearing that for years. Nothing ever happened.

The man pulling down the awning in nineteen eighty-four was a developer named Jeffrey Cohen. Starting in nineteen seventy-eight, he'd been buying property on the block, including the buildings that housed Benny's, the Butterfly and the Californian. The tenants didn't want to leave. So he sued the Californian. When that went nowhere, he went to the zoning office. And that's where the nineteen seventy-seven law came back around. The Californian's nude shows had started after nineteen seventy-seven. So it wasn't protected like its neighbors. The club's owners made an argument to the zoning board. Unclothed dancers, they said, weren't sexually arousing unless they touched the customers. The board didn't buy it. Its ruling said the dancers' poses were clearly designed to stimulate or arouse patrons. On December second, nineteen eighty-three, city officials, escorted by police, shut the Californian down. It was the first time the city had ever done that. Meanwhile, a business group called the Franklin Square Association went after the clubs' liquor licenses. It hired private investigators, with miniature cameras, to catch violations inside. The group said its problem wasn't the sex shows. It was the crowd they drew. Then the law closed in from other directions. The two men who ran the Butterfly pleaded guilty to using it as a front for fencing and prostitution. The owner of another club building went to federal prison for tax evasion and racketeering. By the fall of nineteen eighty-four, Benny's was nearly alone.

So back to that last night at Benny's. Roddy Simkins stood by the bar. This strip, for all intents and purposes, is already gone. Outside, a barker who went by Cowboy remembered when every club had a doorman out front, each one trying to outshout the others. That night he was turning people away. It wasn't quite the end. Down the block, a club called This Is It had lost its liquor license, so it switched to soft drinks and Jello wrestling. And it hired some of Benny's dancers. In April of nineteen eighty-five, the Post reported that Trammell Crow, one of the biggest developers in the country, would build offices on the site. The head of the Franklin Square Association put it simply. They will bring an end to Fourteenth Street as we know it. The wrecking crews came on April twenty-eighth, nineteen eighty-six. By the end of that first day, Benny's, the Californian and the Butterfly were heaps of twisted steel and broken brick. And Roddy Simkins? He took it in stride. I don't think the city has lost anything.

A few adult bookstores hung on after the wrecking crews. The last two didn't close until nineteen eighty-nine. And I remember one of them. In December of nineteen eighty-eight, my dad took me to the auto show at the old convention center. I was in sixth grade, and we parked right next to one of the last of those bookstores. I was a kid. But I knew it wasn't good. There's one more twist. In nineteen eighty-eight, the city floated a downtown nightclub zone, where clubs could stay open until six in the morning on weekends. It was also pitched as a landing spot for adult clubs being pushed out of neighborhoods. The Franklin Square Association organized against it, and the plan died. The liquor board's chairman publicly blamed the association. Its director said, she gives us too much credit. And then he smiled. When we made this, in October of twenty twenty-six, the city's records showed an office building on that corner, built in nineteen eighty-nine, and a hotel down the block from nineteen ninety-nine. Remember that billboard the volunteers painted in nineteen eighty-four? Washington's next great neighborhood? If you ask me, it turned up a little farther north. On the other Fourteenth Street. The one with the brunch lines.

And that's the end of the strip. Thanks for walking the block with me. The old ads and the Post's photos from those years are waiting at Ghosts of D C dot org. Ghosts of DC exists to dig up the stories this city paved over. This has been Ghosts of DC.