Hooker's Market

Since the days of Fiorello La Guardia, New York has seemed a fairly antiseptic town. No more. Oldtimers and out-of-town tourists alike are astonished this summer at the parade of prostitutes who have turned midtown Manhattan into a bawdwalk that compares with Rio de Janeiro's Avenida Atlantica or Rome's Via Veneto.

Tricked out in such garish plumage as bouffant vermilion coiffures, patterned stockings and silver demi-mini-dresses, the new whore corps is aggressive, ubiquitous and expensive (around $1 per minute). In the past five years, three huge new hotels, catering mostly to out-of-town conventioneers, have deluged the midtown area with lonely, well-to-do customers. Obeying the laws of supply and demand, girls from Harlem, Queens and states halfway across the country have flocked in to mulct the ever-growing clientele. Many of them are blonde-wigged Negroes sporting the furled umbrellas that seem to be badges of the trade.

New York's police would like to clear the streets, but the task is difficult and often futile. As Deputy Police Commissioner Jacques Nevard argues, "Jail for the girls is a revolving door." New York police are arresting trollops at a rate that has increased by 73% in the past two years, and the number of repeaters rises in proportion. Of the 795 women arrested in midtown Manhattan in the first six months of this year, 67% had prior prostitution records; each girl averaged seven arrests. A revised state penal code will limit prostitution sentences to a mere 15 days, and so the revolving door will spin faster and faster.

As for the girls, they earn easily $150 each in a twelve-hour working day. But nearly all of them, in keeping with the age-old code of their craft, turn over their earnings to their pimps, many of whom manage stables of four or five tarts each and give them back no more than $10 a day for expenses. The girls in return seem to achieve one of their few genuine gratifications at the sight of their flashily attired ponces tooling down Broadway in chauffeured "hogs" (Cadillacs).

A onetime nurse named Barbara sighs: "The life is a drag. I hate it, but I can't get out. I'm just like a junkie." She may become even more like a junkie. Many pimps double as pushers and give samples to their protegees. Eventually, the majority of the girls, thanks to their pimps, wind up as hopeless narcotics addicts, working New York's slum flophouses for 50-c- a "trick."

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