It was a few minutes before 3 a.m. on Saturday, November 10, 1984, when the dancers took the stage at Benny’s Home of the Porno Stars for their final number. Benny’s had long sold its nude revue as the raciest show on the East Coast, and that night it finally ground to a stop.
By daybreak, after the owner and about 25 employees and friends had finished their last night of partying, developer Jeffrey N. Cohen was outside pulling down the awning. He owned the building, and he had spent years buying up property on the block.
More than 50 volunteers from the Franklin Square Association showed up that morning to clear the broken bottles from the curb. Then they painted a billboard across the boarded-up storefronts that read “Franklin Square: Washington’s Next Great Neighborhood.”
Wait, which 14th Street?
When people talk about 14th Street today, they usually mean restaurant row, the stretch north of Thomas Circle toward Logan Circle and U Street. That’s where you find Le Diplomate, the rooftop bars and the Sunday brunch lines. It’s a different story, and we’ll get to it at the end.
This strip was downtown, on the 800 block of 14th Street NW between H and I streets, just south of Franklin Square. It was an office district during the day and a neon one at night. In 1982 the Washington Post counted more than a dozen sex-oriented businesses on that one stretch.
The Block
Long before anyone called it porno row, the 800 block had a nickname. In November 1964 the Washington Post called it “The Block,” and said it was “by all odds the closest Washington has come to duplicating Baltimore’s notorious Striptease Strip.”
By day the east side of the street held a custom tailor, a barber shop, the Post Office Department’s Central Station, the Californian Steak House and a men’s clothing store. At night that same side lit up with the Red Slipper and Benny’s Rebel Room.
The paper had a neat way of sorting the block’s four big draws. The Speakeasy and Benny’s didn’t sell sex, it said, while the Blue Mirror Club and the Red Slipper didn’t sell much of anything else.
The Blue Mirror had once offered jazz from the likes of Duke Ellington and Jack Teagarden. By 1964 its headliners were burlesque stars like Blaze Starr.
Thomas Lodge, a neighborhood resident since 1952 and a founder of the Logan Circle Community Association, later walked the Post through the whole arc. In the 1950s, he said, the top entertainers in the country performed on the block. It slowly turned into a hangout for soldiers on leave, then picked up bookstores and go-go bars in the early ’60s, and by the 1970s it was openly pornographic.
Benny’s Rebel Room
Benny’s was Benny Mendelson’s place, a tavern at 829 14th Street. By 1955 the Rebel Room was running want ads in the Evening Star, and one of them began, “WAITRESSES, WHITE.”
In June 1958 Mendelson went before the Alcoholic Beverage Control 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 chairman, Frank E. Weakly, worried the flag and the sign might provoke people, and the board made it clear it disapproved. Mendelson said afterward he would be “content with just the name ‘Benny’s.’”
The want ads kept running under the Rebel Room name anyway. By 1963 a notice in the Star’s classifieds came from someone billing himself as the old owner: “Wanted to buy, by former owner. Benny’s Rebel Room.”
The man running Benny’s at the end came with a family history of his own. Roger W. “Roddy” Simkins Jr. was the son of Roger “Whitetop” Simkins, one of the most prominent gamblers in the city, and Roddy wore his late father’s $20 gold piece.
When Whitetop died in 1973, the Post recalled a joke from former D.C. City Council chairman John Hechinger during a discussion about legalizing the numbers game: “We might want to get ‘Whitetop’ Simkins to design it for us.”
After 1968
In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Washington burned. On 14th Street, much of the burning happened uptown around U Street.
Downtown, the damage was mostly to the economy. In 1978 the Post explained that the porn business moved onto 14th Street after the riots, when storefronts sat empty, rents were cheap and the middle class had moved away.
Restaurant owners on the block ripped out their booths and built stages. The Californian Steak House had been an ordinary steak house in the 1950s, and in the early 1980s it switched to topless dancing and then bottomless.
By 1976, adult theaters were advertising in the Washington Post. By the early 1980s, 14th Street had 22 of the city’s 30 adult bookstores.
The law that froze it in place
In 1977 the city passed zoning rules for sexually oriented businesses. They could open only in high-density commercial zones. Even there, they had to stay 300 feet from each other and 600 feet from any church, public building or apartment building.
The point was to make sure a new strip could never form anywhere in D.C. A city planner, J. Kirkwood White, put it plainly to the Post: “Creation of a new red light district is impossible.”
The city had rejected the combat zone approach, which sets aside one district for adult businesses. It chose what planners called the Detroit approach instead, which meant spreading those businesses out so they could never cluster.
But there was a catch. The clubs already on 14th Street were exempt, so they could have stayed open indefinitely unless someone caught them breaking some other law. The law that banned any new strip ended up protecting the old one, and by 1984 even the Post was calling the block Washington’s “combat zone.”
In October 1983 the Post’s Jerry Knight took stock of the whole arrangement. He called that block of bawdy businesses in a prudish town “as much a monument to free enterprise as a testament to free thinking.”
The strip at full tilt
In February 1982 the Post’s Peter Perl spent time on the block. Downstairs at the Californian, a go-go dancer worked the stage. Upstairs, in a cramped office lined with cases of liquor, her boss, Quy Huy Nguyen, leaned back in a three-piece pinstriped suit and smiled.
Nguyen said he used to run a bar in Saigon, and he held a six-year lease on the Californian. “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 at 823 14th. Even on a cold, rainy weeknight, nearly 75 men were inside by 7 p.m., while upstairs the Cocoon showed adult films.
Across the corner, the National Association of Realtors had moved the year before into a building it bought for $8.2 million at 777 14th Street. Directly across from the Realtors sat what amounted to a one-stop sex shop, with adult movies, books and baths, and hostesses on offer.
The money around the block was enormous. In October 1980 a parcel at 14th and H sold for $530 a square foot, a Washington record at the time, and Metro Center was only two blocks away.
Developers kept saying the strip’s days were numbered. A woman at the Paradise Escort and Model Service told the reporter they had been hearing that for years, and nothing ever happened.
The squeeze
Cohen had been at it for a while. He bought the Parkside Hotel on I Street in 1978. Over the next few years he picked up the buildings that housed Benny’s, the Butterfly, the Cocoon and the Californian.
The tenants didn’t want to leave, so in 1981 Cohen sued to evict the Californian’s operator, arguing that nude dancing violated the lease. When that went nowhere, he complained to the zoning office instead.
That’s where the 1977 rules came back around. The Californian’s nude shows didn’t begin until after 1977, so the club wasn’t protected the way its older neighbors were.
The city revoked the Californian’s certificate of occupancy in March 1983. Its owners argued that unclothed dancers weren’t sexually arousing unless they touched the customers, but the Board of Zoning Adjustment didn’t buy it. In a 14-page ruling on November 22, 1983, the board found the dancers’ poses were “clearly designed to stimulate or arouse patrons.”
On December 2, 1983, city officials escorted by police shut the Californian down. It was the first time the city had ever taken that step.
Meanwhile, the Franklin Square Association, a business group of investors, developers and real estate brokers formed in the early 1980s, went after the clubs’ liquor licenses. It even hired private investigators whose miniature cameras caught liquor and zoning violations inside. The group said its problem wasn’t the sex shows themselves, but the crowd the shows drew.
At a January 1984 hearing, the liquor board received 34 letters about This Is It? at 813 14th Street, including complaints that its barkers harassed people walking by. That July the board denied the club’s license because it wasn’t really a restaurant, its dancers solicited drinks and its restrooms weren’t up to standard. The board found too little evidence on the charges of obscene shows and sexual solicitation.
The Butterfly and the Cocoon went down harder. Their operators, Abraham and Isidore Zaiderman of Potomac, pleaded guilty in 1984 to using the clubs as a front for fencing and prostitution, and by that summer the federal government was about to seize the clubs.
Across 14th Street, Herbert C. Cole, who owned the Casino Royal building and had run its businesses, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and racketeering. He went to federal prison along with his wife, Mary.
Benny’s last night
That brings us back to November 1984. By then Benny’s three neighbors, the Butterfly, the Cocoon and the Californian, had all gone dark. Roddy Simkins stood by the bar and said, “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 for customers. At 2:15 a.m. he was turning people away, telling them it was all closed and that was it at Benny’s.
It wasn’t quite the end of the strip. Down the block, This Is It? was hanging on without a liquor license by offering soft drinks and female Jello wrestling, and it hired a number of Benny’s dancers.
The wreckers
On April 2, 1985, the Post reported that Trammell Crow, one of the country’s largest developers, planned a 200,000-square-foot office building on the site of the porn shops. Part of the deal was a $12 million joint venture with Cohen, and Trammell Crow would pay about $800 a square foot. Art Schultz, the Franklin Square Association’s executive director, told the Post, “They will bring an end to 14th Street as we know it.”
The demolition crews arrived on April 28, 1986. By the end of that first day, Benny’s, the Californian, the Cocoon and the Butterfly were heaps of twisted steel and broken brick, and Schultz told the Post that watching it was gratifying.
Lt. Robert Poggi, who ran the city’s prostitution task force, said that in his experience sexually oriented businesses were fronts or contact places for prostitution. Without a cluster of them downtown, he said, customers had no reason to make the drive.
This Is It? had closed too, and a sign in its window said its dancers were now working at the Adam & Eve next door. Roddy Simkins took it in stride. Some people got their start on the strip one way or another, he said, but “I don’t think the city has lost anything.”
The adult bookstores held on
The clubs were gone, but a few adult bookstores and peep shows outlasted the 1986 demolition. The last two adult bookstores on 14th Street didn’t close until 1989.
In December 1988 my father took me to the auto show at the old Washington Convention Center. I was in sixth grade, and we parked a few blocks away, right next to an X-rated bookstore. I was a kid, but I knew it wasn’t good.
One more twist
In 1988, two years after the wreckers came, a proposed set of city liquor rules included a downtown nightclub zone. Clubs inside it could stay open until 6 a.m. on weekends and 4 a.m. during the week.
The zone was also pitched as a landing spot for bars, sexually oriented ones included, that were about to be pushed out of residential neighborhoods. The Franklin Square Association organized against it, and the liquor board chairman, Marlene Johnson, withdrew the plan and publicly blamed the association for killing it.
“She gives us too much credit,” Schultz told the Post, and then he smiled.
What’s there now
Today the east side of the 800 block, where the clubs stood, holds an office building at 14th and I that went up in 1989. Down the block is a hotel at 815 14th Street, built in 1999.
The other 14th Street, north of Thomas Circle, had its own long comeback. Up there, prostitution defined the street for years. Then Studio Theatre moved to 14th and P in 1987, and Whole Foods opened on P Street in 2000. Le Diplomate followed in 2013, in the building that once housed the Q Street Cleaners.
If you want more of the old neighborhood, Franklin Square has its own strange history, and the Pearl Dive building goes back well before the oyster bar moved in.
We dug this one up with help from AI and checked it against the original records below. Here’s how we use AI.
