Mayor Eric Adams vowed Monday to deal with the illicit sex market that’s been thriving in Queens for months — even as the open-air red-light district continued unabated two days after being exposed in an exclusive report by The Post.
Adams said he took a wee-hours tour of the seedy strip to see for himself, and was shocked by what he witnessed, telling reporters: “It was filthy.”
“There was just a state of disorder,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference. “I was out there about 1 a.m., 2 in the morning because I wanted to get an observation as to what was happening.
“And there is a plaza that’s there where there was illegal vending and just dangerous food service and then I walked along Roosevelt Avenue under the L line and it was clear: There was prostitution.”
Adams said City Hall was “putting in place an operation to deal with the sex workers,” but did not provide more details nor a timetable.
The so-called “Market of Sweethearts” was running at full steam, with streetwalkers still openly selling their services on the strip of Roosevelt Avenue, near Junction Boulevard, after The Post’s report Saturday.
Locals on the beleaguered block continued to complain Monday that cops are a no-show, and that, when they do make the rounds, officers spend more time harassing food vendors than those in the sex trade.
“Our sales have decreased,” Gabriel Andrade, a waiter at a local eatery, griped on Monday. “We have complaints from customers. People who sit at the tables, they can see everything through the windows.
“They complain and say, ‘I’m not going to bring my family here anymore,” said Andrade, 37. “Before the pandemic, they weren’t here. Back then it was a little messy around here, but it’s gotten so much worse.”
Mom Marie Ortiz, 38, agreed that the neighborhood “is worse and worse and worse.”
“It’s so dirty, smelly, people selling clothes, the girls. It wasn’t like this before,” Ortiz said.
“The police need to do something about it. The city needs to do something about it,” she added. “We’re thinking about moving. I worry for my kids every day.”
Merchants and residents said their complaints have fallen on deaf ears — and that prostitutes proposition even children, while drunken pervs get into scuffles over the streetwalkers and their fees.
“We made a considerable effort to shrink the sex trade and provide services to people in prostitution and hold ‘Johns’ responsible,” said Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the National Organization of Women/NYC.
She said cops are not “incentivized to enforce anything because it won’t be prosecuted” by lenient district attorneys.
“These are the unintended consequences of criminal justice reform and reducing mass incarceration efforts,” Ossorio added. “Residents don’t want open-air sex markets in their neighborhood.”
A spokesperson for Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said the borough’s top prosecutor “created a Human Trafficking Bureau to aggressively prosecute the real criminals in the commercial sex industry, the traffickers.”
“Rather than treat enslaved sex workers as criminals, as used to be the case, we connect survivors of trafficking with meaningful services to empower them to escape their exploitation,” the rep said in a statement.
In a statement for Saturday’s expose, the office said Queens is particularly vulnerable to sex trafficking because the borough is home to JFK and La Guardia airports.
“People like to believe that sex workers is a victimless crime,” Adams said Monday. “That is not true.
“Our goal is to go in, communicate with the sex workers [and] give them service that they need,” he added. “And we also want to go after the ‘Johns,’ because the demand is creating the supply.”
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