Another One Gone - Horse Cave, KY ABS Closed

[ejaculaTe]

8 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

That would be my guess - the owners of the business and the owners of the real estate were probably two different entities.

It's possible, of course, that when the outlet mall emptied out, the sex store bought the property at a discount and just left it vacant except for their own business - in which case they'd have the right to impose the deed restriction before selling. But if, as you and I suspect, the property was owned by someone else, they were probably happy to get rid of a tenant that kept the property from being productive across the board, and were fine with imposing the deed restriction before its sale.

The account given by @ErosWired reads as if the ABS owners are also the mall's owners. That's not impossible, but it would be inconsistent with general principles of commercial real estate development.  Moreover, at a time when commercial real estate isn't (and hasn't been) exactly the hottest property market, it would be very odd. 

Edited September 14, 2022 by ejaculaTe
added 2d sentence

[BootmanLA]

1 minute ago, ejaculaTe said:

The account given by @ErosWired reads as if the ABS owners are also the mall's owners. That' s not impossible, but at a time when commercial real estate isn't (and hasn't been) exactly the hottest property market, it would be rather odd. 

I think it depends on how long the outlet mall has been (otherwise) empty. If it emptied out in, say, 2008 or 2009, and has been sitting mostly vacant since, the owners may have sold at a loss (and the attendant tax breaks) to get rid of the overhead of maintaining the empty stores - something that the ABS wouldn't care about because they're not using them. But again, just a guess.

[ejaculaTe]

2 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

I think it depends on how long the outlet mall has been (otherwise) empty. If it emptied out in, say, 2008 or 2009, and has been sitting mostly vacant since, the owners may have sold at a loss (and the attendant tax breaks) to get rid of the overhead of maintaining the empty stores - something that the ABS wouldn't care about because they're not using them. But again, just a guess.

Property taxes and utilities, even for an almost empty outlet mall in central Kentucky, can't be cheap. We simply need @ErosWired to fill in the blanks for us. 

[ErosWired]

15 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

It's possible, of course, that when the outlet mall emptied out, the sex store bought the property at a discount and just left it vacant except for their own business - in which case they'd have the right to impose the deed restriction before selling.

This is what I believe is the case. When the outlet mall went belly-up, the adult store owners bought the thing at a fire sale price because it was majority vacant already.

Not all such closures may be the result of targeted action, but as a longtime local resident I can tell you that this place has been in their sights for years, ever since it opened, and they’ve been itching for some pretext to shut it down.

[ErosWired]

7 minutes ago, ejaculaTe said:

Property taxes and utilities, even for an almost empty outlet mall in central Kentucky, can't be cheap. We simply need @ErosWired to fill in the blanks for us. 

I can’t speak to the property tax question, but as far as utilities, every other store space in the place was derelict - a ghost town, utterly abandoned save the one space in which the ABS operated. There wouldn’t have been any utilities to the entire rest of that property; it had been essentially left to rot.

The place never really took off as an outlet  mall in the first place, though there were initially a few tenant stores, but once the empty spaces started outnumbering the occupied ones the writing was on the wall, and when an adult emporium moved into one of them that was all she wrote. The remaining shops closed, and I guess the adult store owner purchased the entire property. It may have changed ownership in more recent years as well, but I’m not certain about that.

[ejaculaTe]

8 hours ago, ErosWired said:

This is what I believe is the case. When the outlet mall went belly-up, the adult store owners bought the thing at a fire sale price because it was majority vacant already.

Not all such closures may be the result of targeted action, but as a longtime local resident I can tell you that this place has been in their sights for years, ever since it opened, and they’ve been itching for some pretext to shut it down.

Thanks for clearing up the ownership question. ABS in my hometown were also the target of the local churches. In fact, the building in which one was located was purchased by the Lutheran church 2 blocks away. No prize for guessing that there was no renewal of the lease.

[ErosWired]

The local weekly newspaper hit the stands today, and guess what the big headline was, up top, front page, full-color photo - “Adult Store Closed”. The photo was of the storefront with big, red, ink-stamped letters reading “CLOSED” superimposed over the top of it. It might as well have been a report that a monster that had been plaguing the village for years had finally been slain.

It’s such a relief that all those tut-tutting, pearl-clutching, fine churchgoing folk who never set foot in the place but find every other way to be sinners can sleep easy tonight knowing that the den of iniquity has finally been done away with.

If I seem to judge the people of my community harshly, it’s because I do.

[ejaculaTe]

5 minutes ago, ErosWired said:

It’s such a relief that all those tut-tutting, pearl-clutching, fine churchgoing folk who never set foot in the place but find every other way to be sinners can sleep easy tonight knowing that the den of iniquity has finally been done away with.

I wonder what the Carrie Nation of the county will do with all of her free time now that the peddlers of skin have decamped.

[ErosWired]

This just gets better. Apparently this wasn’t the result of a single incident or raid. The local authorities have been manufacturing a case over the last several months on the basis of a patchwork of complaints about disorderly conduct at neighboring businesses (there aren’t any other businesses within a quarter mile), public intoxication, arrests for indecent exposure (on the premises, in the back room - in other words, they had to go looking for them), the presence of gloryholes, a pair of drug-use-related fatalities, and the sale of “illegal” volatile aromatics, which, as near as I can determine, are not illegal to sell here as room deodorizer or other type of utility chemical.

Evidently, having gathered up their evidence early on and finding they couldn’t make a case out of it, the county attorney then drafted new ordinances regulating sexual activity and the sale of sexually oriented products in the county so it could be enacted by the county court. In other words, they tailored the ordinances to fit what they had.

Even so, it’s very telling that the result of all this was not, apparently, criminal charges, but a hearing in which the owners agreed to immediately close and put a deed restriction on the property prohibiting anything sexy.

This wasn’t reactive, this was proactive.

[ejaculaTe]

So the owners had the choice of selling now or being slowly driven out of business, the ordinances prohibiting the behavior that made the place profitable. The arrests for indecent exposure make no sense: second degree I/E requires exposure under circumstances "in which he knows or should know that his conduct is likely to cause affront or alarm to a person eighteen (18) years of age or older." If you're in the back room of an adult bookstore, who the hell is going to be affronted or alarmed by someone displaying his genitals (almost typed "displaying his wares")? I know, it's easy for me to sit here and ask that question, but the guy who's been arrested probably isn't inclined to fight the charge. So much for justice in small town America....

[ErosWired]

5 hours ago, ejaculaTe said:

So much for justice in small town America....

Absolutely right. I could expound on the decrepit state of “justice” as practiced in this one-goat county, but I won’t.

[Guest]

We have 3 ABS in my town. Of course during the pandemic they closed up. One remodeled and reopened, one just reopened, and it looked like the skeevy one was going to remain closed, but just recently I saw it was open again. I don’t know if they’ve cleaned it up at all, but this was the one that you’re kneeling in loads of cum and surrounded by used condoms when at the roughly hewn gloryholes.

I thought the town would have gotten after them to close it because the booths were not even close to the same level of the other two ABS; an hourly hotel being the only other business in the strip mall made it fairly obvious to everyone what the places are meant for. Since the town has been in cleanup mode since the pandemic, I assumed these would both disappear. 

When I went back to the skeevy one though recently, it was just as skeevy - and just as busy - as ever. 😏

[TravelGuy1956]

This place was always a "rest point" in my travels on I 65.  Like most such places,  it was hit or miss,  but when it hit,  it hit big time.  I had so much sex there,  they should have put an engraved plaque in one of the booths...LOL!  I remember a 5 man suck and fuck in the gay theater.  I got picked up by a gay long hair couple and went with them back to their shack of a house in the middle of nowhere.  Ended up staying the weekend there with them parTying.  Can't tell how many sleepers I climbed in with horny drivers.  I'm really gonna miss that place.

[pervinmt]

You all should live where I do, then complain, lol.  City county health forced our sad, pathetic abs to cover the glory holes. And they raised the rates to $15 for three hours. Of course there's no guarantee you'll even encounter another person there during that three hours.

[BootmanLA]

15 hours ago, pervinmt said:

You all should live where I do, then complain, lol.  City county health forced our sad, pathetic abs to cover the glory holes. And they raised the rates to $15 for three hours. Of course there's no guarantee you'll even encounter another person there during that three hours.

That is a side effect primarily due NOT to repressive health officials, but to the fact that Montana has the third-lowest population density in the nation, only behind Alaska and Wyoming.

And yes, it's true that we don't have control over where we're born, and to some extent, that can dramatically influence where we live as adults. If you inherit a spread of land in a state like Montana or Wyoming, it can be daunting to sell that asset and move to a more densely populated area (which presumably has a higher percentage of gay people as well). But that's still something largely within the control of the individual.

In many respects I loathe the state where I was born and live to this day. Looking back from the perspective of being out of high school over 40 years now, my first mistake was not working harder to go to an out of state college or university; and the second mistake was not leaving once I finished school and made a go of it elsewhere. And I could blame it on any number of external factors - all of which impacted things - but the bottom line is, I was too insecure to trust that I could do well elsewhere without the safety net of multiple generations of a large extended family right here. And I could blame my parents for instilling in me a sense that I wasn't good enough - because nothing I ever did was good enough for them - but ultimately, I made choices and my life, as lived, is the consequential result. So be it.