East 21st Street between Charles and St. Paul, 11 p.m. on a recent night: a rat scurries across an alley; a motorcyclist clad in leather revs his Harley outside a Hells Angels clubhouse; a man wearing high heels, a halter top and a red-and-white striped miniskirt saunters by.
Up the street, another man dressed as a woman - wearing nothing more than shoes, a T-shirt and a thong that reveals, well, almost everything - stands outside the stone edifice of Lovely Lane United Methodist Church.
They're on the streets and on the corners, arguing, fighting, competing for customers and tricks, loudly talking on cell phones to pimps and to drug dealers, and they've turned the Old Goucher part of Lower Charles Village, Calvert and St. Paul and the side streets in between, into an all-night outdoor sex shop.
The problem is not new - "it's been like that for a hundred years," says the deputy police major of the Northern District, Dennis Smith. But the location shifts over time; the men dressed as women who used to work Mount Vernon have ventured north.
"It's on Craigslist as the meeting spot," Smith says of Old Goucher. Residents said men come up from Washington and down from Philadelphia to work their streets.
Fed-up homeowners have written the mayor and the cops and each other, sharing horror stories of being kept up at night by the shouts of the workers, being propositioned as they head off to work at 6 in the morning, and the stuff they find when daylight comes: used condoms and drug needles.
"I'm tired of being picked up on ... every time I go out and sit on the steps on St. Paul," wrote one woman. "The first time a guy asked me if I was working, I didn't even know what he was asking. I said, 'Yea, I work, I'm a nurse.'"
Members of the Old Goucher Community Association met one recent evening in the Lovely Lane church, sipped wine from plastic cups and talked with their neighborhood services police officer, Douglas C. Gibson Jr., about what can be done.
Their problem is similar to that of many other communities around the city, such as Brooklyn, Curtis Bay and Pigtown, where angry residents have resorted to tactics such as copying license plate numbers from suspected customers and sending letters to their homes, and taking pictures of the women and men and posting them on the Internet.
In Old Goucher, people asked whether the city could establish a prostitution-free zone, similar to a drug-free zone, that at least on paper allows police to clear the area of loiterers.
