No, we're not talking about street lights. Not Christmas lights either. Always a popular town with visiting sailors, Portsmuth was especially known for its bordellos -- in their heyday from to Under police protection and with a nod from town officials, our waterfront was a shopping center for the world's oldest profession. SEE: Deadly Summer of Today Portsmouth's gentrified waterfront includes a G-rated family park and gardens across from a squeaky-clean colonial museum.
But from the s until the closing of the infamous "red light" district in , this street was Sin City, the locus of the flesh trade in a gritty seaport. Today, all but one of nearly a dozen former bordello buildings are gone, purchased and destroyed starting in the s by the wealthy Prescott sisters for whom the park is named. Like an early version of urban renewal, relying on an inherited fortune, Mary and Josie Prescott worked to rub the scarlet stain from their childhood neighborhood.
With their lawyer Charles Dale, they wanted the seamy image "wiped from the face of the Earth. But so far, two local historians have refused to hush up. The short profitable history of this morally bankrupt era is well chronicled in the late Ray Brighton's book "They Came to Fish," and in a detailed college paper by Kimberly Crisp.
Crisp's page study is enlivened by the fact that Alta Roberts, the last surviving Portsmouth madam, was her great great aunt. Her study includes oral testimony from more than a dozen local citizens. Where seamen meet seaport, prostitution often follows. As recently as , Navy Secretary Knox announced in the Portsmouth Herald that he would exercise a four-year ban on prostitutes "in or near the navy yard" in Kittery, Maine.
In , spurred by the action of the Spanish-American war, as many as 1, visiting sailors per day were ready to ferry across the Piscataqua in "liberty parties," according to Brighton. They arrived at the head of Water Street, near where the Memorial Bridge now stands.
