The Market of Sweethearts is nothing like Brooklyn’s crummy Penn Track.
East New York’s notorious open-air sex market has seen an explosion of scantily clad prostitutes in the nearby Pennsylvania Avenue neighborhood, prompting a local police office to plead for officers to crack down as parents are forced to protect their children’s eyes and for residents to wake up. used condoms scattered in the parking lots of their condominiums.
“We need the same attention that the police give to Roosevelt Avenue, to extend it to East New York. . . to help solve the problem,” Councilman Chris Banks told the Post.
The Post encountered nearly a dozen scantily clad prostitutes Wednesday evening, standing next to sanitation trucks and tractor-trailers parked along Georgia and Malta avenues, stopping shady drivers and even blocking traffic as they were chatting with potential customers.
“Would you like to go out together?” » asked a prostitute, who wore black platform boots and a small skirt exposing most of her buttocks, to a Post reporter.
After offering sex for $120 or oral sex for $85, she said, “I know a place we can go,” before being turned down.
Another local woman promised a good time in the backseat of the scribe’s Chevrolet Malibu for $140.
“You don’t have tinted windows?” We’re going to have to go for a fishbowl,” cooed the sex worker, who wore thigh-high boots and a red and black leather jacket.
Longtime residents lamented brazen prostitutes selling sex in broad daylight, less than four blocks from PS 306.
“If there had been a quick response to this situation, it would have reduced activity, [but] it’s been allowed to fester over the last couple of years,” said a frustrated Banks, who supported the recently passed hotel licensing bill aimed at cracking down on “bad actors” who profit from the illicit sex trade.
Through October 27, police made 18 prostitution-related arrests along the Penn Track, including 12 for patronizing prostitutes, compared to 19 during the same period in 2023, with 16 johns arrested. During this period in 2022, only four arrests have been made in the region, all for prostitution.
Migrant women staying in nearby shelters are believed to be fueling the rise of prostitution in Penn Track, historically the domain of young black sex workers, said Banks and a women’s rights advocate.
Prostitutes are extorted by pimps, the lawyer said – some of whom have been arrested for allegedly forcing girls as young as 16 to work on the streets and gunning down their rivals in turf wars.
“Everything is controlled by the pimps,” said the lawyer, who requested anonymity. “We cannot work on it independently. »
City Hall and the NYPD have made “numerous verbal commitments” to provide additional resources to combat prostitution in his district, but “we haven’t seen results on the ground,” Banks said .
An NYPD spokesperson said police have focused their patrol efforts in the Penn Track area and will continue to tackle the problem.
City Hall spokeswoman Kayla Mama said Mayor Adams “has made it clear that lawlessness, particularly the exploitation of women, will not be tolerated or ignored.”
While about 50 officers were seen patrolling Roosevelt Avenue on a Wednesday evening two weeks ago, The Post observed only two officers in an NYPD cruiser and an unmarked car around the prostitution center for four hours Wednesday.
“Be careful,” two police officers in the unmarked sedan warned a reporter they initially thought was a customer. “You don’t want to be in The Post.”
