Plainfield whorehouse potpourri

The Plainfield NJT Station, conveniently located between
two whorehouses? (Image from Google Maps.)

Parking in the City Hall lot for Thursday night's Plainfield Planning Board, I was startled by a 20-something Black woman who approached my car saying, 'Lookin' for something, honey?'

A hooker working the City Hall parking lot? Seems she was hanging out with a group of young men on the steps of the house across from the lot's entrance. I have heard complaints about this particular house recently.

The incident gave me the idea of doing a riff on Olddoc and offering a whorehouse 'potpourri'.

Years ago, when I was working for the City, we had a big bust of a whorehouse in the West End. Mayor McWilliams was adamant that we shut it down -- it had been busted on several occasions and reopened as soon as the hookers were sprung on bail. On his insistence, the bust was staged to include fire, code and health inspectors and the absentee property owner was hit with a list of summonses for violations and the house boarded up. That particular property was a whorehouse no more.

At the time, one of the cops explained to me that there were 'cultural differences' between Black and Latino hookers. The Black sex workers, he said, preferred to work solo on the streets, picking up johns as they drove by. Latino sex workers, he said, preferred to work in whorehouses.

That has seemed to be true over the years. Even a casual observer can see Black hookers working West Front Street.

From what I hear, the whorehouses have taken a lesson in economic development and have moved into the downtown Transit Village area.

When I posted recently a photo of a truck emblazoned 'American Stell Doors' (see here), a reader wrote to let me know that a whorehouse on North Avenue had a 'stell door'.

This particular bordello is nearby the La Bamba bar and I am told the customers are taken through a regular apartment to a back section of the building which serves as the whorehouse -- the 'stell' door making it harder for the cops to bust the joint and the rear location offering an escape to the NJT station platform. Well thought out, no?

A more stunning example seems to be over on Watchung Avenue.

I am told that a seemingly vacant store between the ice cream shop and the Texas Weiner is functioning as a bordello. Seems the customers are solicited at one of the restaurants across the street and taken over to the storefront, where someone inside the building raises the metal gate to let them in. Very enterprising.

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  -- Dan Damon [follow]

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