For all the press and acclaim and high-profile-osity accorded over the decades to the Lusty Lady, the operation was simply a slightly-cleaned-up rendition of a live peep show, a type of sex business devised at Manhattan’s 42nd Street fleshpots of the ’70s.

Considering how much the porn and stripper industries have changed since then, what’s amazing isn’t that the Lusty’s closing in June, but that it’s lasted this long.

In an age when high school kids freely disseminate nude cell phone pictures of themselves and “amateur adult couple” images flow bountifully on Tumblr blogs, the mere sight of nude women across a glass curtain has lost its novelty.

The full story of the place, when it’s written, will be a story of a changing city and a great job of branding. Its roots are in the Amusement Center, a pinball-and-bowling arcade on the ground floor of the Showbox ballroom, first opened circa 1938. By the 1970s the coin-op arcade had gone, replaced by a new business under the same sign and name with coin-op stag film booths.

In 1981 it was revamped again, as a nominal nonprofit calling itself The Venusian Church and Temple of Aphrodite. It still had a few movie booths, but its main attractions were two live coin-op shows. One had nude couples making out (but never coiting) on stage. The other had naked lady dancers, performing continuously in staggered shifts all day and night. (I had a summer crush that year on one of those first live dancers.)

The Venusian Church concept generated its share of civic controversy at the time, but it faded as a commercial premise. When the peep dance operation moved across and down First Avenue in the mid-’80s (to the former Seven Seas Tavern building), it only kept the “Amusement Center” name. That was soon changed to “the Lusty Lady,” a name the owners were already using for a branch operation in San Francisco.

Along with the new name and location came a highly promoted new image. While the “Venusian Church” brand had sought to confront moralists, the “Lusty Lady” brand was meant to fit right in with the new Seattle’s upscale NPR-ish affectations. It advertised itself as the respectable sex business. It boasted of how its workers were well treated in clean surroundings by kind mother-hen managers. (Contrary to common belief at the time, it wasn’t all-female owned.)

Its main promotional vehicle, of course, has been its marquee sign with its cute dirty-joke slogans lit up in huge type. Roger Forbes’ old XXX movie houses downtown in the ’70s and ’80s had had all-text signage; but the Lusty’s ever-changing punnery was itself an entertainment, all good clean dirty fun.

Business at the Lusty peaked in the late 1990s. It owned its building, so it got a big cash infusion by selling the “air rights” above the space to the Four Seasons Hotel’s developers. But the overall economy, and the peep concept’s own fall from favor, meant its end was nigh.

What now? I’d obviously like to keep the sign up (and continually refitted with new risque verbiage). Behind it, I’d like to see an adult cabaret, with tables and chairs and coffee and snacks and burlesque-inspired strip acts. (And while we’re at it, let’s amend the WA liquor laws, so this new establishment could serve up both cocktails and no-touch nudity.)