Why Is There So Much Prostitution On Aurora Avenue In Seattle?

Why is there so much prostitution on Aurora Avenue in North Seattle? Beth Quintana, who lives in North Seattle near Aurora, asked KUOW’s Local Wonder project, so we sent reporter Posey Gruener to find out. Well, Beth, one reason there is so much prostitution on Aurora Avenue North is that people know there’s prostitution on Aurora Avenue North. “In every city you go to, there’s a track,” Noel Gomez, a former prostitute, said. “In this city, it’s Aurora and Pacific Highway South. So when the pimp comes here with his girls, he comes to the track.” Update: We photographed Ericka when she was a sex worker. This is her life now The track is a stretch of road where prostitutes walk. Teen girls are pimped on Pacific Highway South; older women, many of them addicts, end up on Aurora.

The wheels were set in motion for Aurora to become a place for pimping and prostitution in the 1930s. More people had cars, and the middle class wanted to get out and explore America. Roads like Aurora were paved so cars could speed out of town. Motels and filling stations popped up alongside. More from Local Wonder: Where Do Seattle-Area Crows Go At Night? “Here was a place where you could pull up your car, unload the family and rent a room for a dollar a night in the early years,” said Leonard Garfield, director of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. “Everything that would appeal to a motorist is on Aurora.” But this motor utopia declined. Jet travel replaced cars. Interstate 5 replaced Aurora. And when the World’s Fair left town in 1962, the motels lost business. “They became much more housing for transient people,” Garfield said. “There was some prostitution that was often associated with it. It became, in a general sort of way, a neighborhood that Seattleites viewed as seedy.”

Aurora had always been transient, even in its heyday. With cheaper motels, it was the go-to place for pimps and prostitutes when police cracked down on prostitution in downtown Seattle in the 1960s. On a recent rainy night, Sgt. Thomas Umporowicz drove up and down Aurora between North 90th and North 140th streets. Umporowicz heads the vice squad at the Seattle Police Department. His detectives are undercover, posing as johns. More from Local Wonder: Do Pacific Northwesterners Have An Accent? “Before you go to your spot, why don’t you meet me at the Home Depot in your regular spot in the back,” he said into his radio. He continued, “There’s another blonde working up here by the Holiday Inn.” The blonde woman wore a puffy coat and a hat with a pompom. He could tell she was a prostitute.

“It’s the way that they’re walking, the way they’re looking,” he said. The woman ambled along, looked over her shoulder and tried to make contact with cars driving by. Cheap motels are another reason prostitution thrives on Aurora. The older motels offer some of the cheapest lodging in the city. A few motels have become places where pimps and prostitutes live and do drugs. Umporowicz said some motel managers aren’t aware. Others allow it passively, but others help the pimps.

Police busted a motel like that earlier this year. Just driving by, they knew something was amiss. “When we saw it, it was heavier than we’ve ever seen around a particular hotel, just like a little bees’ nest,” he said. “As we started going in there, doing some undercover operations, it was easy for us to see, ‘Hey, these people aren’t just permitting it. They’re encouraging it.’” Gomez, the former prostitute, said many women end up trapped on Aurora. When Gomez and her best friend Miranda were 15, they both had what she called major issues at home. Then they met two men in a grocery store parking lot. “They had nice cars and had nice stuff and were a little bit older, and you know, wanted to buy us things and treat us good and were paying all this attention to us,” Gomez said. “We just thought that we met some really great guys.”