SF Gate
by JK Dineen
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.
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.” …