St. Paul's last adult bookstore closes
Fly the flag at half-mast, gentlemen -- the last adult bookstore in St. Paul is dead.
Photo: Kyrill Poole The lights go out in the last dirty bookshop in St. Paul.
Too bad. The Denmark was the kind of place you could really let your hair down, meet a few friends and get a car wash with extra polish.
But as local zoning laws have become more unfriendly to strip clubs, adult movie stores and peep shows, dirty businesses have slowly gone under and never been replaced. Denmark's owners also said the limp economy coupled with competition from the Internet helped seal the store's fate.
The current landlord hopes to see the West Seventh St. space turned into a health food store, which would give it the same Stepford wife-like transformation that other former St. Paul porn palaces underwent. The Faust adult theater? Now a library. The Belmont strip club became a police precinct.
The real final frontier is now the Lamplighter Lounge, where girls dance nude behind glass. And while the economy took the Denmark down, some people think it's bringing the Lamplighter up.
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