Arts & Culture

As Baltimore gentrifies, will a red-light district called “The Block” disappear? Should anybody care?

On a snowy Monday night in December, the lights of the packed bars are warmly tempting. A thousand dancers work in the 28 strip bars here - bars like Flamingo Lounge, Lust, and Two O’Clock Club (home of cinematic icon Blaze Starr). Inside one of the clubs, patrons nurse beers as a young stripper extends her body upside down along the shimmer pole. One dancer, with moonstone eyes and luxurious dark hair, idles near the entrance of the bar. She comments that business was better after last week’s football game, played by the Baltimore Ravens, whose 70,000-seat coliseum is less than a mile away. Moments later, an older gentleman enters the bar; the dancer takes his arm and leads him into the dark, curtained back room for a private lap dance, and perhaps more.

In downtown Baltimore, a stone’s throw from a Barnes & Noble and a Best Buy - and less than one hundred yards from City Hall - sits a red-light district known simply as “The Block.” A dense assemblage of strip bars, antiquated neon signs, and grizzled doormen, the Block covers one-quarter of a square mile along Baltimore Street between South Street and Gay Street and has stubbornly occupied the same location for almost 75 years. Many of the clients of the Block’s bars are businessmen willing to spend up to thousands of dollars in high-end venues like the newly-renovated Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. But it’s no secret that the tourist trade - 11 million people visited Baltimore in 2004 - fuels the Block. According to a bartender at one of the more popular establishments, “We clean up during conventions - tourism is very important to us.” Baltimore City Councilman Nick D’Adamo, Jr., who represented the Block for nearly fifteen years before redistricting in 2003, adds that “Tourists definitely visit the Block, especially after football and baseball games.”

Councilman D’Adamo takes a pragmatic view of the Block’s economic and social impact. He views a concentrated red-light district as a means of controlling an industry that would exist anyway. “If we close it down,” he argues, “it will just spread out to other neighborhoods; here, we can keep an eye on it.” Part of that attitude may stem from the failure of previous efforts to control or eliminate illegal activity on the Block. In 1994, then-Maryland Governor and former Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer ordered state troopers to conduct a four-month investigation of alleged drug dealing and prostitution. The investigation culminated in a massive raid, which effectively shut down the Block and resulted in dozens of arrests. Most of the charges were later dropped, however, as several of the undercover troopers were later convicted of bedding dancers and purchasing illegal drugs. Since then, despite the continued rumors of prostitution, drug dealing, and other illicit activity, the Block has operated without interference.

A Contrast with the Rest of Downtown

That the Block still exists is especially surprising because it rests at the heart of Baltimore’s most valuable real estate. Just yards away, at the revitalized Inner Harbor, are granite skyscrapers, million-dollar condominiums, and retail development. The symmetrical square columns of Baltimore’s 25-story World Trade Center sit alongside familiar suburban signs: a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, an ESPN Zone Sports Bar, and a Hard Rock Café. Couples linger on a pleasant, brick-laid harbor walk. Recently, the Brookings Institution issued a report titled, “Who Lives Downtown?” The report called Baltimore’s downtown “Emerging” - a category showing “promise of becoming a fully developed downtown” and just a step below A-list cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

Aside from a few upscale strip clubs, the Block has resisted the revitalization of the rest of downtown. Perhaps as a result, it is more true to the overall character of Baltimore. With a median household income of roughly $33,000, as reported to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2003, most Baltimoreans cannot afford to live in the rapidly gentrifying downtown. The rest of the city maintains a blue-collar ethos, fashioned by decades of steel workers, longshoremen, and factory workers living in working-class villages dominated by brick rowhouses.

With 269 murders in 2005, according to the Maryland Central Records Division, Baltimore had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country. Much of the housing stock is in disrepair, and Baltimore has the highest eviction rates in the country, with 5.81 evictions per 100 renters, a statistic which shows in the piles of splintered furniture towering like burial mounds in front of rowhouses. Add to this a high concentration of opiate addicts and crack dealers, and one can get a glimpse of the divergent realities of the gleaming downtown and the rest of Baltimore.

The Trouble with Red-Light Districts

These hopeless conditions likely compel many young women from the city’s poorer neighborhoods to fill the bars as sex workers. To be sure, prostitution is not an ideal lifestyle. Sidney Anne Ford, Executive Director of You Are Never Alone, an outreach center for city prostitutes located in West Baltimore, points out that almost all the women she works with share a common experience of sexual abuse. She argues that regardless of how sex work is characterized, the industry takes unfair advantage of emotionally traumatized and economically disadvantaged young women. “Exploitation is exploitation; it doesn’t matter what you call it,” Ford says.

Others defend the urban red-light district as a reflection of changing social norms. Timothy Gilfoyle, a historian who researches urban prostitution and commercial sex, says that a commercialized sex industry is “more tolerated now than at any other point in U.S. history.” Gilfoyle notes the wide use of pornography in private homes, citing the statistic that in 1999 Americans rented 711 million pornographic videos, resulting in a $10 billion industry (more current sources put the value of the industry at $12 billion). Gilfoyle also cites performance artists like Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera who treat “prostitution and pornography as sources of creativity and liberation” - and not as marginalized activities. Councilman D’Adamo claims that the Block’s establishments employ many young women who view dancing as a career: “Some women, this is all they know.”

A chain-smoking stripper named Tabitha confirms this analysis: “A dancer can make good money if she knows how to hustle,” she says. “In here, I’m in control. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want. On the street it’s a different story.” Inside the bar a contingent of bouncers and bartenders watch over the place, providing some safeguard against abuse. But on the street, things are less secure. Off-the-clock dancers loiter near a pizza parlor, pale and blemished under the harsh fluorescent lights. A pack of young men restlessly scour the sidewalk as hawkers beckon them inside their clubs: “We have twelve girls, all fresh,” says one, “guaranteed beautiful.” The scrolling LED ticker of the Hustler Club touts drink specials and “couples night.” Meanwhile, at the end of Calvert Street, the Inner Harbor Pavilion is festively lit and casting gold platelets across the water.

In Baltimore, residents have choices: the Harbor Pavilion or the Hustler Club, sex or professional sports, drugs or open air shopping. Indeed, they can have both. Unlike nearby Washington, where prostitutes traffic on the streets, and Philadelphia, where three “lifestyle” sex clubs have just been shuttered by the city, Baltimore’s “dirty” district is much more concentrated, active, and readily accessible to the pristine new downtown. The question for Baltimore is whether - and how - its gritty red-light underworld can co-exist with the city’s efforts towards economic and social advancement.