NYC’s ‘Market of Sweethearts’ back in business — with one sex worker trying to woo Post reporter after NYPD raided a dozen brothels
The “Market of Sweethearts” is open for business.
On Jan. 26, the NYPD boasted it had shuttered in one week a dozen massage parlors that were allegedly housing backroom bordellos along Queens’ Roosevelt Avenue, a notorious red-light district exposed in a series of exclusive Post reports.
The next day, at least a dozen skin merchants stood outside different storefronts to lure clients, according to a 27-minute YouTube clip with the caption “Still Here!”
This week, The Post again toured Roosevelt Avenue, where one bold sex worker wearing a furry white jacket and pink dress whispered in a reporter’s ear: “F—k f—k, one hundred dollars.”
Later that evening, several X-rated coworkers were out in the 34-degree cold luring customers even as cops manned a mobile command center 200 feet away.
“[Police] stop them on Monday, and then they start again on Wednesday,” said one 45-year-old clothing store manager, who declined to give his name for fear of retaliation.
“The police officers here, they have to … keep constantly doing their job [addressing prostitution]. It cannot only be one time.”
Sarah Gil, 21, a server at La Pequeña Colombia restaurant, fretted that the ongoing influx of migrants to the Big Apple is challenging to the city’s mission to clean up the sex strip.
“I’m going to have faith [in the city’s efforts], but a lot of immigrants are coming here, especially from Venezuela,” Gil said, echoing Mayor Adams’ comments from November on the source of the area’s surge in sex work.
“There’s always gonna be prostitution on Roosevelt Avenue.”
Democratic Councilman Francisco Moya, whose district includes Jackson Heights and Corona, claimed that a long-term plan was underway to address the illicit sex trade in his district.
“What we’re doing here is truly creating the beginning of a real crackdown on these establishments,” Moya said, insisting that police and the feds had “multiple ongoing investigations” into the brothels, but declined to provide further details.
“Those that operate these types of establishments, beware. We’re coming to close you down.”
An NYPD spokesperson said that the dozen storefronts shuttered during last month’s raids were still subject to court-ordered closures, and anyone who entered them would be arrested and prosecuted.
They added that police are investigating other illicit brothels throughout the Roosevelt Avenue area and looking to shut them down them via the city’s nuisance abatement law “as soon as possible.”
