These are pictures taken at adult film sets at the San Francisco Armory. The San Francisco Armory lies In San Francisco’s Mission district. The SF Armory is a massive building taking up almost an entire city block. It is a historic 200,000 square foot reproduction of a Moorish castle that now serves as headquarters to Kink company. There is a forbiddingly high, incongruous, block-sized Scottish castle. It used to be a city armory back in the day, but has been abandoned and disused from the 1950s. Abandoned, that is, until recently. In an effort to raise money, the city decided to look for potential buyers to purchase the abandoned armory building. However, they wanted to find a buyer who would preserve as much of the building’s historic appearance as possible. The winning bidder was a company that, unlike the other bidders, was happy to get a set of dingy, mostly windowless spaces with heavy iron doors, boilers, and lots of attachment points on the wall and ceiling.
The building has been out of official use as an armory since 1978, and has since been acquired by a BDSM porn production Kink company. Started in 1997 by bondage enthusiast and entrepreneur Peter Acworth, Kink company produces pornographic fetish-related films focused mainly on BDSM. Specifically, this company made BDSM porn, and an old castle suited them perfectly. There were some protests from local residents who felt that the company would bring an unsavory character to the neighborhood (a neighborhood, that’s rife with drug dealing and other street crime), but the city government went ahead with their bid.
Kink company operates more than twenty premium subscription sites with content ranging from sex machines to rope bondage to erotic wrestling and much more. Free documentary site, Behind Kink, offers a behind-the-scenes look at Kink company. Kink on Demand is on-demand site that allows customers to purchase every shoot ever published by the company on a per-shoot basis. Kink Men offers the best and most authentic gay bondage. Kink Live is the ultimate destination for interactive bondage and fetish cam shows.
Recently, the kinky porn company started offering building tours. Would you like to have a look at the internal workings of the porn industry? You are able to take a tour of the building as it operates now. Getting to poke around a mysterious old building is too hard to resist. So, in late June 2012, we took a fascinating employee-led walking tour (which we highly recommend) of the building which focused on the company’s adult film sets and props.
The 1.5 hour-long tour will take you through all five floors of the landmark building and allow you to explore the facilities originally built to service the National Guard, as well as the elaborate and cinematic sets that have since been constructed by Kink company’s Art Department for use as production studios. You don’t get to see that everyday. Everything is regularly sterilized, and they have sanitation procedures reminiscent of the sort of thing you’d see in a hospital. This is especially amusing when you’re in a room designed for acting out medical fantasies, and you realize that the line between pretend and real is not where you thought it was. There were also rooms that were designed to look as dirty and degrading as possible, but in actuality were extremely clean and regularly power-washed. Sexual lubricant does come in 35-gallon containers. The stockrooms are a sight to behold… long lines of every conceivable sexual toy neatly arrayed and organized on the wall. In addition to the usual BDSM toys you may know about, there are some crazy handmade sex-related gadgets in there. We got to talk to several of the Kink company employees, and from what we could tell, they do a very good job of treating their employees well and trying to keep safety standards as high as possible.
Somday I hope to visit! Seattle isn’t far away! Chad-o P.