‘Venus ships’ meeting storm in Rotterdam

Press, 6 May 1980, Page 24

‘Venus ships’ meeting storm in Rotterdam

By

ROBYN SMYTH

in Rotterdam

Tourists from all over the world gazing out from the rotating cabin which spins up and down Rotterdam’s 600-foot Euromast observation tower may soon see eight floating brothels moored at the quayside below.

If the sex ships go into business at the foot of the Euromast, with its neat lawns and banks of tulips, a bizarre solution will have been found to a decade of strife about prostitution in Europe’s largest port. Rotterdam City Council’s decision to evacuate the city’s notorious red light district and put it offshore is coming up against strong opposition. It is being resisted by pimps and prostitutes, and challenged by citizens’ groups who fear the spread of massage parlours and drug pushers along the quayside. Three different moorings have been chosen for the

brothel barges, which are already known to some people as “whoreships.” Two are tucked away in the immense stretch of docks on the south side-of the port and the third is 40 yards from the Euromast. One of the dock sites is felt to be so deserted that the prostitutes may never consent to go there. The second is declared to be uncomfortably close to a school for seamen’s children. Of. the third, the general manager of the Euromast, Mr Albert van Raalte, says: “I can’t accept that this should happen to one of the main national tourist attractions in western Holland. It is going to cut deeply into the appeal of the tower and into its takings and will be extremely negative ,to our whole operation. “I have nothing against prostitutes. They have a social function. But I don’t want them next to my door.”

To the despair of the socialist city council, most o. the citizens of Rotterdam arc equally determined not t: have prostitutes as neigh hours. Meanwhile Rotterdam’s re; light district remains where it has been for more than a century, in a slice of redbrick seaside boarding houses two streets wide on the narrow Katendrecht Cape jutting out into the Rhine estuary. In 1974 years of tension between the red light community and the several hundred working class Cape dwellers burst into antiprostitution riots. Led by angry mothers, groups of inhabitants barricaded the approach road, stopped cars and attacked the men inside them. An action group of Cape citizens then managed to wring from a socialist councillor a promise that the red light district would be re-

moved within two years. The councillor who gave the pledge has since publicly regretted it, but at the time the elected representatives of the people of Rotterdam, who have built up a handsome modem city centre on the war-time wreckage, felt that

remodelling prostitution along rational lines should not be beyond them.

Three years after the promise to the Cape people, the city fathers were toying with the idea of floating brothels and were studying models of ships in Denmark. Then the choice moved to a large empty port authority building which was to be turned into a highly organised brothel along the lines of the German Eros centres.

The decision to go ahead with this plan was taken last year. But it is against Dutch law for the authorities to have any part in running brothels, so an independent organisation or individual has to be found to do it for them.

The authorities said they would have no truck with the pimps, gamblers and criminal elements, but the answer of the pimps was: no negotiations, no girls. So now there are contacts behind the scenes.

The police want to keep the present red light district. As they see it, the Cape is hidden from the rest of the city and the approaches are easily blocked if there is trouble. Some Rotterdam citizens react to the idea of living next door to prostitutes as if it were comparable to having

a nuclear power station for a neighbour. They say red light districts have become much more sinister and intrusive places than they used to be.

Earlier this year the Eros centre plan fell through when the pimps increased their demands for space round the port authority building for sex shops and massage parlours. By then the people of the area were up in arms against the whole project. It soon became clear that the vast brothel, and the empty buffer zone around it, would take up space allotted for hundreds of apartments urgently needed to ease the city’s housing shortage. Local socialist representatives threaten to repudiate their own leaders, who fell back in panic on the idea of sex ships at three widely spaced mooring in the port. Now local groups are challenging the sex ships site in the State Court, the highest Dutch tribunal.

What the city fathers of Rotterdam fear most is that popular opinion will force them to select moorings so remote and uninviting that the pimps will break off relations. Then Rotterdam could become the city with the world’s only uninhabited floating red light district. Copyright, London Observer Service.