Cicero, IL Business Licensing & Operations: Adult Entertainment (2026)

Article V of Chapter 26 defines 'adult use' broadly under Section 26-266 to include adult cabarets and adult theaters offering live performances emphasizing specified sexual activities or specified anatomical areas, adult bookstores where a substantial portion of stock is sexually oriented books, magazines or films, and adult arcades or adult motion picture theaters showing similarly characterized films. Each type constitutes a separate adult entertainment business even when operated alongside another. Section 26-267 requires a license before anyone may engage in the business of operating an adult use in the town; the application goes to the business license department, which has 21 days to determine whether the premises comply with all applicable requirements, issuing the license if they do and denying it in writing if they do not, with denial reviewable by the circuit court as a final administrative action.

Operational rules under Section 26-268 bar anyone under 21 from the premises, require a manager or employee at least 21 years old present during all operating hours, prohibit any adult use where a liquor license has been issued (except as provided in Chapter 10), and ban public exposure of specified anatomical areas or simulated sex acts on the premises. The zoning and distance requirements are the sharpest limit: no license issues unless the premises sit in a district zoned M-1, M-2 or M-3 and are more than 500 feet from any private or public school, day care center, public park or place of worship, and more than 1,000 feet from any residential use or residential district, measured in a straight line ignoring intervening structures.

The town also bars more than one adult entertainment business in the same building and bars substantial enlargement, a floor-area increase of more than 50 percent, within those same buffer distances.