‘The Pride of Clarksville:’ Theatair X and Its 50-Year Fight To Stay Open
Driving north on Interstate 65, you might drive past the basic red and white billboard and never notice it. It’s a simple logo for Theatair X, with the tagline, “The Pride of Clarksville!” Amidst a flurry of commercial businesses on either side of the highway and a multitude of other billboards screaming about a wide variety of products, the sign doesn’t stand out.
But the adults-only Theatair X literally sits in its shadow. If you leave the main highway and find your way to Indiana 31, you’ll drift just outside the bluster that is Clarksville, Indiana, with its chain restaurants, big box stores and traffic. Driving north, you’ll pass a White Castle, a tire center, a business called Big Tex Trailer World and a Furniture Row warehouse store. Off the road a bit are a couple of small hotels.
On your left, it’s just a railroad track and trees.
And if you didn’t see the sign on the highway (or its southbound companion identifying Theatair X as a “Clarksville icon”), you may just drive past Theatair X, the former open-air drive-in theater, which sits between a clump of brush and a roadway overpass.
The oddly-shaped building is a faded peach color with a single door surrounded by signs touting an adult bookstore and “video peep shows.” A thin, cursive neon sign with the business name isn’t on in the daylight.
The place looks perpetually closed, if not abandoned altogether. But if you turn into the parking lot and drive around back, you’ll find yet another door — darkened, so that it’s impossible to see in. That door is surrounded by signs with messages like, “No guns” and “No camera phones.” A sign over the door simply says, “Bookstore Entrance,” and also warns, in unnecessary quotation marks, “Not responsible for damage to vehicles on lot.”
On a recent afternoon, a single red pickup truck parked outside the door. A pair of semis, one pulling a Dollar General store-branded trailer, sat farther back. The lot is quiet, and it’s still unclear from the rear view if the business is open or closed.
And then you open the mysterious door and step inside to a surprisingly clean and modern retail space which looks roughly 2,000 square feet, with a soft lavender color scheme. The contrast is startling to the point that it’s almost reminiscent of Dorothy first opening the black and white door and stepping into the Technicolor Land of Oz.
