There was the boom of the s when every second building in St. Pauli was a brothel and the AIDS epidemic during the s that saw most of them close. Then came the modernization of the harbour in the s that resulted in a vast reduction of sailors and dockworkers looking for a good time.
But come April, the Luxor will fornicate no more. Now, that number is down to four. Mehrer says that in the past, customers spent more time and money in the bordellos of St. But like everything else these days, sex has to be cheaper and faster. Pauli and its notorious Reeperbahn in recent years.
On any given Friday night, there are not just stag parties and groups of young men looking for largely free action, but also street tours, families, busloads of pensioners, and middle-class villagers on a night out. A perfect example of such recent developments is Hopfen Strasse, which runs parallel to the Reeperbahn.
The Astra Brewery formerly took up this notorious block and the ground level windows along Hopfen Strasse were filled with scantily clad girls. They liked to lean out of the windows in summer making it possible to look at all they had to offer. But the brewery was recently torn down, replaced by a vast expanse of modern apartments, office buildings and a five-star hotel.
The Hopfen girls are gone and a swath of media companies and urban professionals — those who can afford the rents — have moved in. Local St. Pauli authorities have at the same time tried to curb a rise in violent crime by introducing a ban on all kinds of weapons in and around the Reeperbahn. For many, the Waffen Verboten rule has been a positive development, as club bouncers often had to wear bullet-proof vests and pools of blood were sometimes washed into the gutters on Sunday mornings.
