Sex has always sold well, and it’s been business as usual in Portland's Old Town for at least 150 years
SEX WORKERS have been making money in Portland’s Old Town for as long as the neighborhood has existed.
In the late 1800s, prostitutes filled storefronts known as cribs, hung out in saloons, and held in-house positions at hotels and lodging houses, where they would rent a room for business in the building.
Brothels continued to flourish north of Burnside Street well into the 1940s. But after Dorothy McCullough Lee was elected Portland’s first female mayor in 1948, the city began to crack down on prostitution, closing all public-facing houses of sexual recreation.
By the 1970s and '80s, many prostitutes were working for pimps and soliciting along Portland roadways such as North Interstate, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and East 82nd Avenue – an enduring hub for street walking.
According to a City Club of Portland report published in 1983, the typical Portland “street-walking female” at the time had been physically and sexually abused as child, had low self-esteem, lacked employment skills and drifted into sex work for economic reasons. She was between 18 and 32, but usually burnt out after five years, turning to low-paying work, welfare or property crimes to support her drug habit or to survive.
In more recent decades, advertisements in the backs of alternative weekly newspapers, then online, have largely stood in place of in-person solicitation. And since the 1990s, many of Portland’s sex workers have opted to work as escorts or strippers. But through it all, Old Town has remained a place where transactions often occur, and when it comes to prostitution, it's always been where the most vulnerable and marginalized in the profession have sought work.
IN THE LATE 1800s, Old Town was known as Whitechapel – named after London’s waterfront vice district where Jack the Ripper was murdering prostitutes.
As in London, Portland’s Whitechapel neighborhood was known for its saloons, gambling houses and brothels.
By 1898, the vast majority of Portland’s prostitutes lived and worked north of Burnside Street between the Willamette River and Broadway Avenue, according to a lengthy dissertation on the history of Portland’s “Skid Row District” that mapped out vice-related businesses. This report was written in 1983 by Portland State University doctoral student and Old Town landlord, Chris Sawyer, and is housed in the archives at the Oregon Historical Society.
Sawyer explained that the concentration of sex workers in Whitechapel was largely the result of its location. It was filled with transient laborers, such as sailors and railroad workers, and it was in close proximity to Portland’s business district.
At this time, there were about 1.4 men for every woman in Portland, according to 1900 census data.
Additionally, clients usually desired anonymity and privacy, and the location of Whitechapel met these needs: isolated from upper-class residential neighborhoods and separated from the rest of Portland by the railroad station, river and immigrant communities.
While more expensive, higher-class prostitutes, who were often French, worked in establishments west of Burnside, Sawyer indicated it was often the less-expensive prostitutes who worked north of Burnside.
As time progressed into the 20th century, the growing family-oriented middle-class population advocated for the increased segregation of prostitution into the Whitechapel neighborhood, which was starting to become better known as the North End. It was generally believed that while sex work was immoral, it was a universal fact of urban life and therefore no one was suggesting it should be abolished or prohibited. This attitude prevailed for decades.
Police began raiding bagnios, encouraging sex workers to relocate north of Burnside. Sawyer notes prostitution hit the peak of this era between 1902 and 1905, with more than 500 “working girls” in Portland. Other estimates, he noted, were as high as 2,500.
During this time, Sawyer placed the “hypothetical center of prostitution,” at Northwest Third Avenue and Davis Street, where a Starbucks and the Society Hotel sit caddy-corner from each other today.
FURTHER READING: When Old Town was the North End
Between 1900 and 1910, the number of Old Town inhabitants grew from 7,400 (about what it is today) to more than 9,300. Meanwhile, Portland’s population more than doubled, from 90,400 to 207,200.
It was also during this time the “moral campaign” against gambling, drunkenness and prostitution escalated under pressure from churches and civic groups. In 1908, Portland Mayor Harry Lane instructed police to close every prostitution house in the North End. This so-called “angel brigade” counseled the evicted sex workers on morals and career changes.
For unmarried women who had no family to support them, sex work was often seen as a reasonable option. According to a 1912 survey from the Consumer League, Portland’s working women who were employed in socially-acceptable positions weren’t paid enough to meet the cost of living, with three-fifths earning less than $10 a week (about $250 in 2018 dollars).
Prostitution was an alternative to starvation wages and begging on the street.
The moral campaign and similar campaigns since have done little to thwart sex work.
In 1912, the Portland Vice Commission visited hotels, lodging houses and apartment buildings in the city’s center in order to report the establishments’ moral standings to the City Council. It found that many regularly employed sex workers, extending from the North End to 23rd Avenue and south to Irving Street. The cheaper prostitutes – “$1 and $2 girls” – remained concentrated north of Burnside Street.
Investigators appeared to gather their intel by renting rooms in each establishment they visited and chatting up the proprietor. Their report offers a glimpse into the lives and earnings of Old Town’s many sex workers at the time.
One lodging house, on what is now Northwest Third Avenue, was run by an Italian woman who was a “professional prostitute” named Rosie, according to the report.
Three sex workers rented rooms at her hotel for $3 a day ($76 in 2018 dollars), and their clients were “laboring men of very low class and degraded character,” the report went on to say.
These three sporting girls set their price at what would be about $25 to $50 when adjusted for inflation. The investigator reported that one, named Cora, told him it was their practice to “take anything they could get.”
As was common, they also sold liquor out of their rooms at an inflated price to their clients to pad their pay. Cora said she rarely earned less than $15 a day ($380 in 2018 dollars). The conditions these three women worked in were terrible. The investigator indicated the beds in the hotel were so filthy he was afraid to lie down, the furniture was battered and the carpeting had been reduced to rags.
Throughout the report, sporting girls among various establishments north of Burnside were described as profane, vulgar, drunk and noisy. It seemed many of these impressions came from observing women in the hotel hallways while they were using the telephone.
At another North End establishment, a Vice Commission investigator wrote that the “star” sporting girl had come to Portland with her aging father two years earlier and fallen into prostitution because it was her only means for getting food and shelter and because “she wanted beautiful clothes.”
He went on to write: “This woman is 28 years old, but does not look her years. She has a pretty, sweet face, which lacks the bold, dissipated look that many of these women have. She is bright, attractive, most cleanly and a great favorite with men because she is a clever talker. She has lived in various sporting houses in this city, knows the women of that class and has a remarkable following for a girl who has been in the business but a short time. She is a businesslike young woman and keeps a book in which is set down the exact amount of all she takes in as bed money.”
Her accounting showed she earned $5,772 in 1911. That would be about $146,500 today.
At yet another North End hotel, the innkeeper said the women there worked hard during business hours, taking on 25 to 30 men each day. One of them was addicted to absinthe and would go a little crazy sometimes, he warned. He also said four of the hotel’s sporting girls had each taken as many as 150 clients in one day.
This was dangerous work. According to Kimberly Jensen, a history and gender studies professor at Western Oregon University, about one third of Oregonians had syphilis at the time and there was no cure. Gonorrhea was also common. Jensen has studied the arrest and imprisonment of, she estimates, about 300 to 500 Portland women who were held at length against their will while they underwent mercury injections at The Cedars. This hospital-prison was located at the poor farm that serves as the location of McMenamin’s Edgefield today.
In 1911, Oregon’s vagrancy law was the first to criminalize prostitution in the state, according to a City Club report on prostitution from the 1980s. While brief, the law was remarkably broad.
“It’s a big basket that the Legislature put in some ways, a lot of specifics, but in other ways, a lot of ambiguity, so that people could be arrested for vagrancy for just about anything,” Jensen said.
This made it much easier to target prostitutes and other undesirable people for arrest.
“They don’t have to have a statutory proof of prostitution,” she said. “It’s easier, and people just get picked up – especially black women and women of color.”
In last week's edition of Street Roots, we told the story of Lena Smith , an African-American prostitute in the 1910s who was arrested frequently in Old Town.
Also making arrests easier were a series of laws passed around the turn of the century that forbade women from entering or owning any establishment that sold liquor.
The vagrancy law was repealed in 1971 and replaced with a state statute outlining the crime of prostitution as a misdemeanor.
Many women engaging in transactions for sex at the time didn’t necessarily think of themselves as sex workers, Jensen said.
“There was a custom called treating, where they might go out and have a meal in exchange for sex,” she said. “There are lots of variations of that.”
IN PRESENT-DAY Old Town, many women continue to use sex to survive. It’s not uncommon for some women experiencing homelessness across the city to exchange sex for food and shelter, but like women who did this in the past, they don’t consider themselves sex workers, explained Matilda Bickers. Bickers is an escort who volunteers her time and money doing outreach with Portland’s most vulnerable sex workers as the director of STROLL (Sex Traders Radical Outreach and Liberation Lobby).
In 2016, she and other STROLL members testified before the Oregon Legislature against a bill that expanded the crime of prostitution to include this type of trade. The bill passed the House and Senate unanimously before being signed into law. It was intended to make it easier for prosecutors to charge human traffickers who receive goods and services as payment, however Bickers argued that the law makes no distinction between the traffickers and sex workers.
A former prostitute who once walked Old Town’s streets described what she knows to be the common course of events for sex workers in the neighborhood. At 44, “Terri” said she’s been clean now for more than a decade, but used to perform sex work to support her crack-cocaine addiction when she was experiencing homelessness.
“You come here on Friday, park on 10th Avenue after 7, then mosey around and someone will ask you what you’re looking for,” she said.
She said most sex workers walking the streets in Old Town are drug addicted and desperate, and Johns know that for $300 or a pile of crack, heroin or meth, they can have any of their sexual fantasies fulfilled.
Typically, she said, a John will decide which sex worker seems safest – because there’s always a chance he’ll get robbed – and then he’ll take them to a motel until check-out time Sunday morning. Then, after he’s spent up to $1,000, it’s time for him to go back to his Monday through Friday life.
“It’s a good lick for a street person,” she said.
She said her clients were typically blue collar, construction worker types. She’s been asked to do everything from paddle a man’s behind for $500 to don a strap-on.
“That one traumatized the living shit out of me,” she said.
Between May 2015 and Nov. 2018, there have been 802 arrests for prostitution made in Portland. Just one of those arrests was made in Old Town, according to Portland Police Bureau.
IN A CITY known for its high density of strip clubs, Old Town and its bordering blocks is home to four, including Portland’s 18-and-over club, Golden Dragon, and one of its oldest and most famous, Mary’s Club, which has been open for more than 50 years.
FURTHER READING: BDSM practitioner on Portland – the ‘kinkiest city in America’
Among Old Town's clubs, Bickers danced at Mary’s, and before it closed in 2014, the Magic Garden. She said she started dancing at age 19 with a fake identification back in 2005.
She said at Magic Garden and Mary’s, patrons represented “a wide swath of people; businessmen and also the people who were in the extended stay motels. There was one guy who would get his check, and then he’d spend it all, and then we wouldn’t see him again for another month.
“And then there were people who’d come in and nurse a beer for five hours,” she said. “As a dancer, you really don’t appreciate having people hang out and not tipping.”
Portland’s strip clubs don’t get raided in the way prostitution houses of the past were targeted.
“I think because strip clubs are so popular here,” Bickers said. “It’s mostly true for downtown and Southeast clubs, but the dancers are more politically active, and I think they would organize a really big outcry if something like that were to happen. It just wouldn’t be politically popular. They’re going to limit raids to clubs that are more on the peripheral.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean Portland’s clubs are always on the up and up.
Bickers said she’s danced at clubs that never checked her ID.
“A lot of clubs don’t keep any paperwork,” she said.
Additionally, competition has forced some dancers to offer extra services.
“Prostitution or sex acts? It depends on the club. Some of them do it because there are so many dancers, and you have to do that in order to make money,” she said.
“In 2004, we didn’t touch customers at all, and then that changed in like 2008 or ‘09 when clubs started allowing that. It just depends on the club and the dancer. For the most part, the clubs that have three to six dancers on stage are going to have less extras because there’s not as much pressure, and the clubs that have a lot of dancers are going to be more iffy because there is so much competition, and people really need money.”
She said it’s even tougher for dancers of color because many clubs have an unofficial limit on the number of women of color they’ll employ, if any.
Working as an escort can also be tough in Portland, due to the saturation of sex workers, she said. There are only so many clients to go around.
“We might have the same amount of clients as always, but they have the power right now, because we are so scared and desperate,” she said.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org . Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites .
Criminals, one and all
In 1911, Oregon passed a vagrancy law that was the first to criminalize prostitution in the state, according to a 1980 City Club report. The law was short but inclusive of just about everyone a police officer might want to find reason to arrest:
“Every person without visible means of living, who has the physical ability to work, and who does not for the space of ten days seek employment, nor labor when employment is offered him; every healthy beggar who solicits alms as a business; every idle or dissolute person, or associate of known thieves, who wanders about the streets or highways, at late or unusual hours of the night, or who lodges in any barn, shed or shop, outhouse, vessel, car, or place other than such as is kept for lodging purposes, without the permission of the owner or party entitled to the possession thereof and every common prostitute, and every person who shall conduct himself in a violent or riotous, or disorderly manner, or use any abusive or obscene language in any street, highway, house or place whereby the peace or quiet of the neighborhood vicinity may be disturbed, shall be deemed guilty of vagrancy, and … shall be punished by imprisonment in the county jail for a period not exceeding six months, or by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars, or by both such fine and imprisonment.”
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