Word: amsterdams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deal brokered by city officials last October, one of the district's biggest brothel owners, "Fat" Charlie Geerts, sold 18 buildings alongside one of Amsterdam's most picturesque canals to the semipublic property company NV Stadsgoed for $37 million. Officials immediately closed down the buildings' 51 brothel windows, and installed in 16 of them young fashion designers, who pay a token monthly rent of $220. That's just one small piece of a much more ambitious cleanup initiative. A wall map in City Hall shows a block-by-block plan that aims to halve the size of the red-light...
Beginning last year, the city has intensified its pursuit of financial investigations into the neighborhood's sex and drug businesses. The officials' best tool is an anti-money-laundering law that obliges all business owners in Amsterdam's red-light district to disclose their financial records when they apply for permits and licenses; anyone suspected of criminal activity can have their application suspended or refused, whether or not the charges have been proved. The strategy has sent a chill through De Wallen, where long-time building owners - some nearing retirement age - have little stomach for long legal wrangles...
Walk along Amsterdam's inner canals and you retrace the steps of centuries of sailors whose ships docked here after months at sea. These narrow paths long marked the water's edge, and they have drawn prostitutes since the 1400s. Many of them raised children upstairs in the canal houses and plied their trade below, much as did the neighborhood's butchers and bakers. While those old houses have been painstakingly preserved, little else remains the same. Many prostitutes (some of them men) still show off their bodies in about 400 display windows, wearing sliver-sized underwear and heavy makeup...
...prostitutes dropped and thousands of women, many from Eastern Europe, arrived to take their place. "We used to know all the prostitutes, they were our neighbors," says Gerrit van der Veen, a management consultant who has lived in De Wallen since 1972. Van der Veen, like other locals, blames Amsterdam's government for ignoring the growing presence of traffickers and pimps, preferring instead to promote the city's open-mindedness. "The government just gave away the old center of Amsterdam," he says. Cohen admits that the city missed early warning signs of criminal involvement. "It took some time before...
...already jolted many into contemplating a different future for themselves. Monika says she thinks she will one day find a regular job - the kind she could tell her parents about. After a decade working as a prostitute, Irina has begun studying to be a Russian-language tour guide around Amsterdam. And Van Brunschot, the company executive, says he has grown tired of waiting for the city to change his neighborhood. Earlier this year he began looking for a new home, either in Amsterdam's western suburbs or in the seaside city of Haarlem. "I've told myself...