A two-mile stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Queens — running through the Corona and Jackson Heights neighborhoods — has earned a nickname from the people who work there: the "Market of Sweethearts." The going rate is $60 to $80 for each sexual encounter and business is booming.
Prostitution arrests along the corridor have plummeted 59% since Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office.
Through September 13 of this year, the NYPD made 193 prostitution-related arrests on Roosevelt Avenue. During the same period in 2025, under former Mayor Eric Adams, that number was 468. The drop didn't happen because the sex trade shrank. It happened because the city's enforcement posture changed.
Adams launched Operation Restore Roosevelt in October 2024 — a targeted crackdown that flooded the corridor with uniformed officers and vice units. The operation made arrests, generated headlines, and produced visible results. Then Mamdani took over. He had co-sponsored something called "Cecilia's Act for Rights in the Sex Trades" — legislation designed to strip criminal penalties from consensual adult sex work. The policy position wasn't a secret. The voters elected him anyway.
Now the residents along Roosevelt Avenue are living with the results.
"The police are always around, but it seems like there's nothing they can do," a 40-year-old Manhattan man identified only as John told the Post after visiting the area. "The women know New York laws are lax."
That last line lands harder than any policy paper. The women working the strip aren't confused about the legal environment. They've done the math. A 59% drop in arrests is not subtle. It's a signal — and the market responded accordingly.
A city government official, speaking anonymously, described the enforcement cycle with three words: "Restore, rinse, release." Suspects picked up during targeted operations pop back up on the same block. "Pop up like whack-a-mole," the official said. The machinery of arrest still functions. The machinery of consequences does not.
The Mamdani administration has pointed to a 3% decrease in major crimes — murders and shootings — along the corridor as evidence that the area is getting safer. That framing requires you to believe that a neighborhood where open solicitation, drug use, and street-level sex work are now fixtures of daily life is "safer" because the specific category of violent felonies dipped by a number within the margin of noise.
The residents who live on those blocks didn't ask for a policy experiment. They asked for law enforcement. What they got was a mayor who arrived in office with legislation pre-written to decriminalize the very activity now taking over their streets, and a police department that got the message.
Operation Restore Roosevelt made 468 arrests in the same window last year. This year, 193. The operation didn't end because it failed. It ended because the new mayor didn't want it to succeed.
Former Mayor Adams, whatever his other problems, treated Roosevelt Avenue like a law enforcement priority. Mamdani treated it like a policy disagreement. The difference is 275 arrests — and a two-mile stretch of residential Queens where grandparents walk past open solicitation on the way to the grocery store.
$60 to $80. That's the price on Roosevelt Avenue. The cost to the neighborhood is considerably higher.
