Life after a crackdown on sex work along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens

Each night, Tsomo Dasel, the owner of Himalayan Yak restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, lets some of her staff leave work hours before closing. The measure is protective: Most of her employees, she said, are female and are regularly accosted by men on the street seeking paid sex.

Dasel, 38, who has owned the restaurant for five years, said sex work on the thoroughfare, while long a community concern, has become more pervasive in recent years and scares away customers. She isn’t immune from the harassment.

“When I'm standing outside my business, men pursue me,” Dasel said. “They come and say, ‘Hey, hello beautiful. Can I get your number?’”

Similar complaints reached a crescendo over this summer from the people who live on, work on and visit Roosevelt Avenue, part of a commercial district serving residents of Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Corona. The concerns often voiced in community board meetings, phone calls to police, and other forums have also included public drug use, used condoms littering the sidewalk, rising crime and public sex.

The din grew so loud that Mayor Eric Adams two weeks ago took a break from his defense from public corruption charges, to front a showy, multi-agency law enforcement crackdown on what local residents, leaders and officials say are massage parlors along Roosevelt fronting as brothels. The 90-day “Operation Restore Roosevelt,” Adams said, aims to stop the neighborhood from “being taken over by illegal brothels.”

Now, weeks into the effort involving hundreds of police officers and a contingent of state troopers, local residents say they detect subtle changes, including a noticeable police presence, and a slight dip in soliciting – though certainly no full retreat by sex workers or their customers who still cruise the sidewalks.

At the same time, new fissures have opened in the community, with advocates for sex workers pressing for an end to the crackdown. They contended in a rally earlier this week that the enforcement action amounts to an unwarranted intrusion into the lives of people just trying to make it in New York, including many immigrants who are unable to work legally.

And some paint the crackdown as part of Adams' efforts to shift attention from his own legal difficulties, which include a five-count federal indictment on bribery and conspiracy charges. The law enforcement crackdown was launched less than three weeks after the mayor was indicted.

On any account, local residents and merchants in interviews say they just want their neighborhood back. Shagor Chowdhury, a longtime resident of Jackson Heights, said sex work had transformed the area for the worse. He said it had become a “common occasion” to encounter people having sex in cars along side streets.

Many seniors in his Bengali community now avoid taking their evening walks, he said. Worshipers had begun to steer clear of the Om Shakti temple, the Hindu house of worship on 72nd Street, where Chowdhury is active, even on festival days.

He added that parents were often in the uncomfortable position of having to explain discarded condoms to their kids.

“I saw syringes on the ground,” said Chowdhury. “It's nasty.”

Under cover of darkness

Aides to the mayor deferred questions about the crackdown to the NYPD, which did not provide data on arrests resulting from the enforcement measures to date.

The Queens district attorney’s office did not respond to queries about the operation either, although DA Melinda Katz said in a statement after Adams’ announcement that “addressing the pressing issues on Roosevelt Avenue is a priority for my office.” Crime in the two precincts encompassing Roosevelt Avenue is up by double-digits over the last two years.

But the signs of the crackdown are visible all along the thoroughfare after dark. On a recent visit, NYPD officers patrolled the area beneath the elevated 7 subway line in pairs; at certain corners, they stood in groups of four. Occasionally, officers stopped by bars with music blaring inside to check in with bouncers.

But even with the significantly heightened police presence, sex work appeared to operate in the open along different stretches.

At one storefront located on the same block as Himalayan Yak, men came and went late into the evening. The establishment operated without any signage other than a small “For Rent” sign on the door, and curtains were drawn across the entire storefront, preventing views of the interior.

Women congregated outside, and when a Gothamist reporter walked by the establishment, one of the women asked, “Massage?”

Many massage parlors in the neighborhood are in fact brothels, according to local elected officials. In January, the NYPD shut down more than a dozen massage parlors it alleged were fronts for brothels. It closed the businesses under city nuisance law, after officers posing as customers alleged they were propositioned for sex acts in exchange for money.

City Councilmember Francisco Moya, a local Democrat who supports the crackdown, has introduced legislation that would help the city regulate the businesses.

Sex work has been a mainstay of the area for decades, and has existed alongside immigrant-run restaurants, bars and clubs as well as food trucks selling tacos, ceviche and momos. In 1988, a Newsday article noted that “neighborhood residents have complained about prostitutes smoking crack with johns in the hallways, stairwells and backyards of their buildings before engaging in sex acts."

But some observers link the recent trouble to the start of the migrant crisis two years ago, which has brought more than 210,000 newcomers to the city, many of whom are desperate for work.

One restaurant owner who was unimpressed by the city’s recent crackdown said sex workers continue to congregate outside her establishment and occasionally engage in fights over clients.

And Dasel, the owner of Himalayan Yak, said she wasn’t getting her hopes up about “Operation Restore Roosevelt.” Over the last year, after meeting with police officers, she said she’d repeatedly called 911 about the nearby massage parlor.

“I call, if not once every week, at least twice a month,” she said.

She felt her efforts had paid off in early September, when she received a notification on her Citizen app that the “suspected human trafficking operation” had been raided by police. But her relief was short-lived.

“They were back in business. Next day,” she said, repeating her words for emphasis. “Next day.”

Push back against enforcement

Although the police enforcement appears to have broad backing, a number of immigrant rights groups have mounted a vigorous pushback in tandem with organizations representing trans New Yorkers and sex workers. Dozens of demonstrators gathered for a rally at Corona Plaza on Tuesday, with some holding up signs that read “STOP Operation Restore Roosevelt” and “Gov. Hochul & Mayor Adams stop policing our neighborhoods.”

“We know that Major Eric Adams has many indictments and he's using our communities as a distraction, and we are not going to be that distraction,” said Bianey Garcia, the TGNCIQ (transgender, gender non-conforming, intersex, and queer) Justice organizer with the group Make the Road New York who addressed the crowd in Spanish, followed by an interpreter. “We are people like any other human beings.”

Street vendors also joined the rally. The city's quality-of-life sweeps, which involve a host of agencies, have also targeted unlicensed and unpermitted vendors. Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, the deputy director of the Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center, said the Adams administration should instead focus on “licensing reform.”

“Mayor Adams is pouring tax dollars into militarizing the streets of Roosevelt Avenue,” Kaufman-Gutierrez said in an email. “As cops with guns throw the fruit, vegetables, and prepared food that feed the city's working class into the trash.”

The police crackdown has pitted supporters against opponents from the same community, sometimes dramatically. Shortly after Tuesday’s rally, in a scene captured on X, demonstrators spotted and surrounded Hiram Monserrate, a former state senator who endorses the police enforcement.

“More resources, no more raids!” the crowd chanted.

Abigail Anzalone, a case manager at the Sex Workers Project, said in an email that her organization was closely following the issue. “These operations disproportionately affect migrants who turn to sex work for survival and further compound the challenges they face when seeking safety and survival in the U.S.,” said Anzalone.

The Sex Workers Project is one of dozens of organizations that have endorsed passage of the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act, a bill in the state Legislature that would maintain laws relating to human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of minors while repealing statutes “that criminalize sex work between consenting adults.”

New York, not Amsterdam

However, others in the community rejected the prospect of decriminalizing sex work in New York.

“No one said this was Amsterdam,” said Frank Taylor, the chair of Community Board 3, whose members represent the area.

Others second that view.

“There is a very serious issue of trafficking on Roosevelt Avenue,” said City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, a Democrat who represents Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Woodside.

Krishnan said the increased enforcement is an “emergency measure,” but inadequate on its own. He said that improved street lighting and "supportive services" — such as help securing housing — for trafficking survivors and people in economically precarious situations are also needed. Krishnan also supports Moya’s bill that would require the licensing of massage parlors, a measure he has cosponsored.

Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Jackson Heights who is now campaigning for mayor, is a cosponsor of the decriminalization bill. However, in an interview outside her apartment building on 79th Street, Ramos said enforcement was needed as well.

“This is the kind of mid-level policing that needs to happen,” she said.

Ramos noted with concern that a brothel had operated across the street for years – an observation shared by other residents of the block as well as Krishnan’s office.

She said it was important to go after traffickers while protecting victims.

“We have to strike the right balance,” said Ramos.

Vulnerable to predation

Sonia Ossorio, the president of the National Organization for Women’s New York City chapter, said a confluence of factors had contributed to the spike in outdoor sex work along Roosevelt Avenue.

Ossorio said the pandemic had upended many New Yorkers' lives, forcing some to turn to sex work in order to get by. At the same time, she said the city had received a “huge influx of asylum-seekers here who don't have work permits, don't have a network here, and are very, very vulnerable” to predation by “pimps and traffickers.”

Finally, she pointed to the state Legislature’s 2021 repeal of the loitering for the purposes of prostitution statute, often referred to as the “Walking While Trans” ban. At the announcement for “Operation Restore Roosevelt,” Ossorio stood with Adams and endorsed his enforcement plan.

“He understands that prostitution is a system of degradation,” she said in an interview. “It's not a pretty picture for the post-MeToo America if men with impunity can buy women and girls on the street or order them online, like pizza. And that is what's happening.”

Adams declared at the announcement “we are not here for one day” and that city officials would fight “for the problem to go away.” Still, some in the community said they are skeptical of the city’s commitment.

Dasel, the owner of Himalayan Yak restaurant, said after the massage parlor on her block was raided and quickly reopened, she’d grown wary.

“I have to see with my eyes,” she said.