Queens hooker hangout compared to Bangkok red light district, critics gripe ‘this doesn’t feel like NY anymore’
Protesters marched along the notorious “Market of Sweethearts” in Queens Sunday, lamenting the prostitution plagued neighborhood looks like Bangkok’s infamous red light district — and “doesn’t feel like New York anymore.”
Some 40 activists stood in the rain in Corona, holding white flags emblazoned with “Peace on our Streets” — with one sign calling out state Sen. Julia Salazar and demanding “WE DON’T WANT PROSTITUTION.”
The protesters are pushing for the city to shut down local brothels and reign in the chaos that’s taken over the neighbhorhood’s streets.
“The prostitutes are out here now at all hours, day and night,” Ramses Frias, 42, told the Post. “ We want families and children to be able to walk down the street without women soliciting them for sex.”
Frias compared the neighborhood along Roosevelt Avenue to the red light district in Thailand’s capitol that’s earned a reputation for prolific and cheap sex workers.
“But this doesn’t feel like New York anymore,” Frias said. “It’s like Bangkok, the red light district. It’s like a market in a third-world country.”
“We don’t want to have to walk around our streets walking through trash,” Frias added. “We want to walk like New Yorkers, with our heads held high.”
Former GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa joined the group in the downpour, charging that things are worse now than in the Big Apple’s bad ol’ days, when young men were handed “chica cards” — flyers for call girls — at subway stations on 108th Street near Harlem.
“They would lure you down the side street into a park or apartment buildings where they had sex trafficking,” Sliwa recalled. “Well now, it’s been taken to a new level. They’re outdoors. It’s like in Hamburg. It’s like in Amsterdam. It’s an open red-light district.”
Sliwa blasted Mayor Eric Adams, the NYPD and Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz — with whom he had a relationship and shares two children — claiming they weren’t doing enough to curb the problem.
“You’re turning a blind eye to something that’s right in front of you,” a fired-up Sliwa said. “Do your freaking job or the people are going to handle this problem.”
After a Post exposé on the rampant open air sex solicitation, Adams took a tour of the seedy spot in July, vowing to address the problem.
YouTube channel “The NYC Walking Show,” which offers first-person tours of major city attractions, featured two recent videos of the “Market of Sweethearts” with YouTuber Sifat Razwan declaring: “It just shocked me what’s happening in the broad daylight.”
One of his videos already has over 683,000 views.
Protest organizer and mom of two Massiel Lugo of Jackson Heights said she also posted a video of Corona on social media.
She said not only is prostitution an issue, but also unchecked and overcrowded food vendors who leave trash strewn about and block sidewalks and public transportation — all culminating in “chaos.”
“Our quality of life is what we’re fighting for,” Lugo said. “We need the laws to be enforced. Regulation. We want clean and safe streets again.”
Another demonstrator, Dianna Latzanich, 53, of Jackson Heights, said she went to a Roosevelt Avenue coffee shop Saturday — and on her way out at 11 a.m., saw a sex worker.
“I saw firsthand how on certain blocks, there were many more massage parlors than six months ago,” Latzanich said. “I’ve been to Amsterdam. I’ve seen girls in windows. But I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Despite the heavy rains Sunday, groups of two to five call girls clustered in doorways along Roosevelt Avenue for over 30 blocks calling out and offering their services.
Since Adams’ statements to deal with the issue, only one brothel has been shuttered by the DA’s office compared with six closures in the two months prior.
City Hall, the Queens DA’s Office and the NYPD all didn’t immediately return requests for comment Sunday.
Additional reporting by Tina Moore and Carl Campanile
