Hanging on the corner with Pittsburgh's hustling sex workers
As part of my weekly series 'Saturday Night Live,' I had a midnight rendezvous with the various ladies and gents who practiced their profession in downtown.
The oldest profession gets old at 10th and Penn
May 31, 1999
From a distance, she looks like your stereotypical hooker.
Short dress. Low-cut top. High heels, black stockings and big hair. Heavy red lipstick. She is tall, statuesque, yet up close she is big-boned, flat-chested and unattractive in a suspiciously masculine kind of way.
She is smoking a cigarette, aggressively eyeballing motorists and leaning against a mail box at 10th Street and Penn Avenue as if she owned it and the whole corner. Business has been horribly slow tonight, but she couldn't ask for a nicer Downtown spot to sell her illicit wares.
Tenth and Penn is a well-lighted intersection with plenty of traffic cars, taxis, buses and city police cars flowing across its nice new bricks. Its four corners are occupied by the Doubletree Hotel, the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, an office building housing WAMO radio and a parking lot.
She has been on the job since about 11, when she sashayed over from Liberty Avenue and made a slow, sacrilegious stroll up Penn through the hallowed Cultural District, which was obviously not gentrified with fake gaslights and posted with brass historical markers to meet the needs of her venerable profession.
Well after midnight, as wet, warm steam swirls from sidewalk manhole covers, she paces nervously at the corner diagonally across from the Doubletree. She poses at the granite curb with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, a hand on her hip and a thin leg jacked up on a low wall.
She makes eye-contact with each potential customer who walks by, sometimes giving the extra-curious a guarded little wave and once asking in a tender voice, "You don't want no company?"
After a while she takes a break and talks to a less-than-dapper, high-strung young man in a blue and white athletic jersey. He has been lurking about for hours. Earlier he was slumped behind the wheel of an old white Nissan parked on Penn. Is he her friend? Her lookout? Her pimp? Maybe all three.
In more than two hours, 10th-and-Penn's only working hooker has had no hassles from passing city cop cars, no competition — and no customers. On this damp, cool Saturday night, her corner is not living up to its hot reputation.
Where are all the other prostitutes tonight, she is asked? In jail, she says sharply in a husky voice before launching into a perfectly lucid but triple-X-rated rant that would get her kicked off Jerry Springer's show.
First she makes a philosophical point on behalf of all sex professionals through the ages: She ought to be free to sell, lease or time-share her body to whomever she wants without being arrested. Next she asks a couple of rhetorical, public policy questions that would be perfect for one of Lynn Cullen’s radio talk shows. Do taxpayers really want to pay police officers $40,000 a year to chase prostitutes? Why should the cops or anyone else care whom she drives away with or what she does when she's with them?
Casually referring to herself as "a known prostitute," she says she's been arrested many times. She's worried about the two squad cars that have been parked behind 927 Penn on French Street for the past hour or two, but most cops don't bother with her profession.
"I'd like to chat," she says in a friendly way as she moves closer to the curb. "But I got to make some money."
It's now 2 a.m. Everywhere bars are emptying. Traffic coming from the Strip is picking up. The two city cop cars are gone. The doorways and alleys on Penn are quiet and dark and seemingly safe.
Tenth and Penn is just one of several spots in and around Downtown where streetwalkers of all colors and sexual persuasions are regularly found after midnight. Even at its busiest, no one could ever mistake it for Hamburg's infamous Reeperbahn or one of Hollywood's thriving corner sex markets.
But suddenly, several other prostitutes appear on Penn.
One is older, heavy-set and stays in the shadows. The second is young, smiley and sweet looking. She's decked out in a Players cap, running shoes, several gold bracelets and matching Tampa Bay Buccaneer jacket and shorts. Within minutes, she is jumping into the front seat of a Toyota pickup truck that has popped out of one of Perm's alleywavs.
She, like all the prostitutes observed working this Saturday night, is black. But a sergeant with the city's vice unit said white women are arrested at 10th .and Penn all the time. And for the record, the sergeant said, the flamboyantly dressed prostitutes are almost guaranteed to be men in drag, and the going rate for most sexual acts is about $20.
A third prostitute proves that after thousands of years of practice, selling sex on the street for money as well as buying it is still an ugly, degrading and poten tially dangerous activity.
Wearing a long red-orange plastic skirt with a big split up one leg and a matching top, she is no happy hooker. Mean, agitated and nasty looking — predatory almost — she is obviously drunk or strung-out on something.
She struts, prances and twirls on the sidewalk. She struggles out of her plastic jacket, revealing bare shoulders and a bra-like top. She hops up on top of a city trash.' receptacle at the bus stop for a few minutes. Like a gargoyle of the evening, she beckons to passing cars with her index finger, then hops back down.
A man with long hair, glasses and a premature beer gut suddenly appears on the sidewalk and says something to her. She extends the back of her hand awkwardly, drunkenly, in the direction of his crotch. He steps back. She does it again. He backs off and walks away. A minute later, she staggers down the sidewalk, gets into his car and they ride off into the night. At 10th and Penn, it's just business as usual. "','