Brookhaven, NY Business Licensing & Operations: Adult Entertainment (2026)

Brookhaven Town Code treats adult uses as a Town Board special permit category under § 85-561A, available only in the L Industrial 1 District (Light Industry), not as a by-right use anywhere else in town. Section 85-569A sets out the siting math the Town Board applies when it reviews an application under the general special-permit criteria of Article VI, § 85-67: the use is prohibited within a 500-foot radius of any area zoned for residential use, prohibited within a one-mile radius of another adult use, and prohibited within 1,000 feet of the lot line of any school, church or other place of religious worship, park, playground, playing field, library, hospital, or similar public or semipublic place of general congregation, as well as non-degree-granting instruction programs such as self-defense, dance, swimming or gymnastics studios.

On top of the spacing rules, § 85-569A(4) caps density directly: no more than one adult use may be located on any single lot, so a multi-tenant building cannot stack a bookstore and a theater together to get around the mile separation. The zoning parking schedule elsewhere in Chapter 85 separately requires one parking space per 150 square feet of gross floor area for an adult use. Because siting is confined to the L Industrial 1 District and layered with three overlapping buffers plus the one-per-lot cap, in practice very little industrially zoned land in Brookhaven can actually clear every test at once, making this one of the more restrictive special-permit categories in the zoning code.