MEAT MARKET


Transvestites becomeing rare in the Meat Market

By Lincoln Anderson

She leaned suggestively on a pole on Washington St. at Horatio St. as traffic rolled by last Friday night around 11 p.m. Wearing tight jeans and a short black tank top that exposed her stomach, she made jittery jerking motions with her arms, as if she was strung out.

“I’m Marta,” she said. “Yeah, I’m a girl — you want some?”

A female prostitute working the street in the Meat Market, much less West Village, is a rarity.

But soon the same may have to be said for transvestite prostitutes. Like the area’s once infamous sex clubs, none of which now remain, their days could be numbered.

For decades the Meat Market has been the stomping ground of transvestites, many, though not all of them, “sex workers,” to use the politically correct term. But as the Market has livened up with galleries and boutiques, bistros and clubs and become a 24-hour district, the activity has pushed the transgender hookers out. Where they have gone isn’t entirely clear, possibly it’s south into the West Village’s quieter residential streets.

Indeed, on a tour of the Meat Market last Friday night, from 11 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., a Villager reporter saw only three transvestites — at least one who seemed to be overtly trolling for Johns.

George Selwanes, manager at Samba’s Deli on Gansevoort St., said the number of transvestites who come into his store or pass by his door has dropped since three years ago.

“You’d see thousands of them,” he said.

Selwanes said the transvestites feel pinched by the changes in the area.

“They are so upset,” he said. “They feel like their area was stolen. When I say, ‘Get the hell out of here,’ they say, ‘You get the hell out of here. This is our area.’ ”

Melissa Sklarz, a Greenwich Village transgender activist, said she no longer does outreach work, but from what she has observed and is hearing, the transgender presence in the Market is shrinking fast.

“The people that are doing sex work in the Meat Market, the words is out that it’s not safe,” she said. “The residents made it very clear they wanted the transgenders swept off the streets and this was done. It was the residents’ demand. Greenwich Village continues to be gentrified, to be developed. It affects us all. The trannies are the canary in the coalmine.

“Who knows where we’ll be in 10 years?” Sklarz said. “You’ve got your million-dollar hotel right in the middle of the Meat Market with $1,000-a-night rooms. People have come to the Meat Market because it was dead, dark and alone. Not anymore. It’s a new Meat Market, new priorities.”

Spots where the transvestites once clustered, like around the Triangle Building at 14th St. and Ninth Ave., or the former parking lot a block south, were devoid of them last Friday night. A new hotel is being completed on the former parking lot and a casual Italian restaurant is slated to open this fall in the Triangle Building.

As a reporter rounded the corner of Hudson and 14th Sts., a figure in a long black wig pressed against the building shot a seductive look. Asked his opinion on whether the number of transvestites in the Meat Market was reduced because of the area’s new activity, the transvestite said he was “not interested in a story” and turned away.

Watching the stranger warily from the curb was a small teenaged male on a bike, wearing a baseball cap. A pimp or protector?

Florent Morellet of Florent restaurant said the area has definitely become safer, though has lost some of its edgy excitement from the days when the sex clubs predominated.

“It used to be great here when I was young. It was scary at the same time,” he said. “The late ’80s, early ’90s, the time of the crack activity, on the weekends, every three prostitutes, there was one crack dealer.”

Carina Moeller, who runs Triangulo Tango on the third floor of the Triangle Building, sees pluses and negatives to the area’s change.

“It got really fancy,” she said last Friday night as the tango dancers slid across the floor in the glow of red lights strung around the small studio. “We moved in here like six years ago and it was completely different. You still had all the prostitutes downstairs. They’re gone. I don’t know where they went. It’s definitely safer now, but I liked the feel.”

When Matt De Matt opened Gaslight, his bar and lounge, at 14th St. and Ninth Ave. eight years ago, it used to be a nightly battle to get the hookers to move off his corner. Asked what had happened to the prostitutes, there wasn’t too much to discuss. “Gone,” he said with a shrug.

Carrie Davis, a social worker at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center and a coordinator of the Center’s Gender Identity Project, said the transformation of the Market from an industrial area has happened gradually over the last 20 years, but added, “I do agree that the changes have almost reached a climax.”

“When an area that was a borderline zone of the city, an area that was in transition has changed, those people who are pushed to the borders no longer feel welcome or comfortable in that neighborhood,” Davis said. “It’s become a very high income area. As to the specific numbers, I can’t attest to that,” she said, regarding the transvestites’ current presence or the lack thereof in the Market.

Also making the area less appealing to the transvestites has been the change in the clubs and the renovation of run-down or empty areas in buildings where they would go.

Davis said young gays and “trans-people” are gravitating back to the waterfront now that the Hudson River Park’s Village segment was recently completed.