Hey, Big Spender

The Daily News today takes a look at what has become the eternal New York question in the post-Giuliani era: Where have all the hookers gone? And the survey says... Queens.

While arrests of streetwalkers in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx has decreased in recent years, arrests in Queens and Staten Island have gone up by over fifty percent (of course in the case of Staten that increase is admittedly from a paltry 11 arrests to 20, pathetic compared to the 728 arrests in Queens at the same time). Apparently in recent years as business uptown and in Times Square has become increasingly risky the trend among nightwalkers has been to move their business to the hard-to-bust internets and the easier-to-walk outer boroughs (that does not, we assume, include those who choose to hook on the cover of New York). Which isn't to say that the ladies of the night have left their historical haunts, like Times Square and the Meatpacking District, only that they're not out there in their previous army-like numbers.

What else did we learn from the article? Let's see, well, the going rate for a blow-job is apparently $50 and sadly "last year, 150 children younger than 17 were busted for prostitution including 53 in Queens." Now, we've got nothing against the oldest profession, first and foremost because we can't really imagine that it is something that law enforcement will ever properly deal with, but whenever we read about children in the "business" we get sick to our stomachs. But maybe that's just us.

Still of Giulietta Masina from Fellini's Le Notti di Cabiria which inspired Sweet Charity