Going From XXX to Ex : Foes cheers as the marquee comes down on Buena Park’s Pussycat Theater.

It just took one tap of the bulldozer to accomplish what neighbors have waited 24 years to see--the crash and fall of the Pussycat Theater’s provocative marquee.

A crowd of more than 50 people cheered and motorists honked their horns Monday morning as the marquee hit the pavement along Beach Boulevard.

“It’s a dream come true,” said City Councilman Donald L. Bone, who voted to buy the property and sell it to Ted Jones Ford last summer. “It was impossible to ignore. They used to put some pretty vivid pictures up on the marquee.”

The ceremony, which included speeches and refreshments, was largely symbolic because a special work crew will return to remove asbestos and knock down the brown stone-and-brick theater in 10 days.

But on Monday workers demolished a small, abandoned car-rental agency next door and took down the theater’s marquee in preparation for the dealership’s expansion.

The demise of the Pussycat Theater in Buena Park, the city that is home to such family fare as Knott’s Berry Farm and the Movieland Wax Museum, leaves just one adult theater in Orange County. The remaining venue, the Studio Theatre, sits less than a mile away on Beach Boulevard.

Eric Pirtle of Pacific Amusement Co., the Los Angeles-based company that owns the Studio, declined to discuss the Pussycat Theater, but said adult theaters are legitimate enterprises.

“We pay taxes, and we have as much right to be there as any other business,” he said.

Pirtle and owners of other sexually explicit businesses in Orange County have long battled with local residents.

Donna Bagley, an 83-year-old Buena Park resident who lives near the Pussycat, was part of a group that fought the showing of “Deep Throat” and “The Devil in Miss Jones” beginning in 1972.

On Monday, she watched the demolition and remembered when the late Vincent Miranda bought the old Grand Theater, originally built as a Vaudeville theater in 1921, to turn it into an adult movie house.

“That theater has been an abomination since 1971,” Bagley said. “It wasn’t good for anybody. It wasn’t good for the neighborhood, and it certainly wasn’t good for schoolchildren seeing it.”

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Beginning in the 1970s, Bagley and others contributed to numerous lawsuits filed by residents and local authorities involving the Buena Park Pussycat and the Balboa Pussycat Theater in Newport Beach, which is now closed.

Those efforts were halted in 1974 when a three-judge federal panel ruled that the state’s obscenity statute was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling the next year, but by that time the Orange County district attorney’s office had stopped pursuing the lawsuits against the Pussycat and other theaters.

Santa Ana city officials spent 10 years and about $500,000 in unsuccessful lawsuits trying to shut down the Mitchell Brothers Theater in their city. They had to wait until the owners lost their lease to see the notorious theater finally shut its doors in 1990.

Buena Park officials were also stymied until the Pussycat Theater’s last owner, George M. Tate, filed for bankruptcy protection last year. That allowed the city to buy the property from U.S. Bankruptcy Court for $300,000. And just in case that fell through, the City Council already had approved eminent domain proceedings to take over the site.

For Mayor Don R. Griffin, Monday was the culmination of 10 years of work.

“It was a marvelous day, really,” he said. “The city has sought to have this eyesore taken out of the community for well over 25 years. It has no redeeming value, and it has brought a bunch of derelicts to this community and caused a burden to its neighbors.”

Kenneth B. Grody, president of Ted Jones Ford, said he is as happy to be rid of the Pussycat as he is about his impending six-acre expansion. For years, he and his sales teams have escorted clients around the theater, which sits between the dealership’s office and its sales lot.

“The two clienteles clashed,” he said. “It’s just embarrassing when you had a family with a child and you want to show inventory on the other side of the theater. What do you say to the child?”

Robert Chiono, 71, who lives a few blocks away, said he raised his three children not to ask about the theater. “It’s the devil’s work,” he said of the movies that were shown there. “It was a temptation to really bring down morals, and it really needs to be blown up.”

Local businesses were largely glad to be rid of theater clients who would park in their limited spaces and then go into a nearby bar to drink before and after the movies.

“I wish they had all the bars gone too,” said Chung Kim, owner of Ann’s Flowers on Beach Boulevard.