An era has passed.

The Oregon Theater on Southeast Division Street appears to have closed. The business’ phone service has been cut off and its Twitter account deleted.

Willamette Week, which first reported the shutdown, called it “Portland’s last porno house.”

The Rose City was once known as “the pornography capital of the West Coast.” That was in the 1970s, when the Oregon Theater, built in 1925, relaunched as a porn palace, joining at least a dozen other such venues in the city. Along with showing X-rated movies on their big screens, many of the theaters offered live performances of (mostly) simulated sex.

Stores selling pornographic magazines and showing X-rated movies were common in Portland in the 1970s and '80s, leading politicians and activists to crack down on them. (The Oregonian)

The garish marquees of these theaters -- and the foot traffic they engendered -- actually gave Portland some much-needed life at the time. The city’s business district in particular was struggling, so much so that The New York Times lamented its “scattered, bomb-site look of downtown parking lots made by demolishing older buildings that pay less than metered asphalt.”

Portland's porno houses thrived in the 1970s and 1980s. (The Oregonian)

The police tried to keep a lid on Portland’s porn theaters through drug-and-prostitution busts, and zoning restrictions eventually cut into where adult businesses could be located. But it was no use: In 1987, the Oregon Supreme Court came down on the side of smut, ruling that in Oregon “any person can write, print, read, say, show or sell anything to a consenting adult even though that expression may be generally or universally ‘obscene.’”

Porn theaters would soon face economic headwinds anyway. Home video began to eat into profits in the 1980s and ’90s, and then the internet arrived.

The Oregon Theater, at 3530 SE Division St., in 1974. (The Oregonian)Oregonian

For a while, film archivist Gary Lacher told Portland Monthly in 2013, The Oregon Theater was “the last holdout of an era.” Until it could hold out no longer.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.