Historic SF site says goodbye to its porn movies

Porn film director J.P. Pike was packing up a roomful of bondage equipment in the basement of the Mission District Armory on Monday morning — all manner of heavy piping and leg irons and clamps and cuffs and other mysterious metal objects.

“This is the vice bondage set,” Pike said. “It started out as a small little corner and just expanded more and more over time. We’re going to take all this and put it in a U-Haul and head to Vegas.”

January is moving month for a lot of folks at Kink.com. Ten years after purchasing the historic Armory for $14.5 million, the BDSM film producer is ending film production at the site, and its in-house directors are scattering to Nevada, Southern California and elsewhere in the Bay Area. Filming will end next month, although Kink.com will continue to have administrative offices in the building at Mission and 14th streets.

Peter Acworth (left), CEO of kink.com, is reorienting the Armory to a variety of uses as the porn industry moves on. Peter Acworth (left), CEO of kink.com, is reorienting the Armory to a variety of uses as the porn industry moves on. Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 23 Caption Close Historic SF site says goodbye to its porn movies 1 / 23 Back to Gallery

The move is being driven by the weakening economics of the porn business as well as ambitions that Kink.com founder Peter Acworth has for the Armory, a 200,000-square-foot, Moorish Revival castle of a structure.

Over the last three years, as porn has migrated to free sites, membership groups like Kink.com have struggled to make up revenue, Acworth said. Kink.com’s membership has dropped from 50,000 to 30,000, and its revenues have dropped by 50 percent. The company laid off half its workforce a year ago and is focused on providing an Internet platform for BDSM entertainment, rather than creating content.

“Porn is not nearly as profitable as it was,” he said. “We have had to change our business model.”

At the same time, owning the Armory, which had been vacant for 30 years prior to Kink.com’s acquisition, increasingly poses both opportunities and challenges. As the Kink.com business has eroded, Acworth has been refocusing on transforming the building into a mixed-use complex with space for offices, entertainment, artists and PDR, which stands for production, distribution, and repair.

To that end, Acworth last year won approvals to convert the building’s 40,000-square-foot drill court into a venue for concerts, parties and other entertainment, with a capacity of 4,000 people. Those approvals allowed Acworth to get a $4-million bank loan that is being spent on a sound system and soundproofing, lighting, rigging and pressing needs such as fixing the leaky roof and repairing crumbling turrets.

“This has been a labor of love — we have reinvested back into the building a lot of what the porn has generated,” Acworth said. “Were it not for being able to borrow money on the back of the entertainment business, we wouldn’t have money to fix all these turrets.”

But the $4 million is just the start in terms of work the building needs. It has no heat or elevators. It is not accessible to the disabled and needs more bathrooms and a new roof. Acworth estimates that a minimum of $13 million — possibly as much as $20 million — is needed to bring it up to code. Because the Armory is a historic landmark, the work will be monitored closely by preservationists.

Acworth says the only way he would be able to finance the work is by getting permission to convert the top two floors — about 50,000 square feet — from PDR to office space. The problem is that Prop. X, which voters approved in November, requires property owners replace any PDR space converted to offices.

Supervisor Jane Kim has introduced legislation that would exempt historic buildings such as the Armory. That legislation will be up for a vote at the Historic Preservation Commission on Wednesday and the Planning Commission on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the activity at the Armory is slowly morphing from porn to other, more public activities. On Thursday, the cloud communications platform Twilio was setting up for a big corporate event, and Airbnb is scheduled to use the space next month. The Chemical Brothers have played there and the Armory threw a big New Year’s party. There have been fundraisers for nonprofits, including the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and San Francisco Heritage

However, as long as porn is produced there, all-ages shows are unlikely to book the drill court. In fact, Acworth said that the Golden State Warriors backed out of an event after seeing the large bondage-themed oil paintings hanging in the grand stairwells.

“They wanted to do an event here, but then they walked up to the third floor they noticed that there was a picture of the hunting guy with his penis out,” Acworth said. The woman in charge of the event then “beckoned the others over and they whispered to each other and took back the deposit check.”

Meanwhile, Pike said he is doing his best to replicate the Armory’s atmosphere in the space he has leased in Nevada. The first movie will be filmed there in February.

“It’s a little sad,” said Acworth. “It’s the end of an era.”

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @sfjkdineen