Residents opposing activity
Six “No ho zone” yard signs, which were placed along North Gallatin Avenue in Uniontown on Saturday in a homespun effort to dissuade prostitutes from doing business in the neighborhood, were stolen almost as fast as they were set up. They were intended to be lighthearted notices that residents are fed up with prostitution and the poor image it and other illicit trades have given the neighborhood.
But, they also were signs of changing times in the community, said North Gallatin Avenue resident Rich Lee, who put up the signs.
“We had a little bit of fun with that. It brought awareness. It was done tastefully,” said Lee, a member of the North Gallatin Avenue Concerned Citizens Association and the city’s zoning hearing board. “It’s a sign of the times. No prostitutes. We just don’t want to see them anymore. Just go away.”
He said the choice of words used on the signs had nothing to do with Don Imus, who was recently fired from his CBS radio show for using one of the words in a slur about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.
Like the unannounced placement of the signs, the next effort also will be a surprise, but it could carry serious consequences. Lee said he and more than a dozen neighborhood residents will be armed with cameras when they walk the streets that prostitutes walk and wait at the corners where prostitutes wait for customers.
The photos they take of prostitutes and johns as well as their license plates will be handed over to city police, Lee said. He said announcing the date of the “john patrol” would defeat the purpose.
“We know, but we’re not saying so we can catch them in the act,” said Lee. “We want to eradicate the problem, not just push it back a couple days.”
Although he wasn’t happy about the theft of the signs, which he put up at 5 a.m., he said he would have taken them down before Tuesday’s Americanism Day Parade.
Three signs were stolen by 8 a.m. Only one remained standing by 5:30 p.m. and that one was stolen by midnight.
City police patrolled the area and cited two women for loitering at 5 a.m.
Lee said he believes most of the signs were stolen by people who saw them as novelties.
The next effort will be more serious and similar plans will be carried out until the neighborhood is cleaned up, he said.
The North Gallatin Avenue Concerned Citizens, the city and the Uniontown Redevelopment Authority have applied for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grants to revitalize the mostly residential neighborhood.
They also are working with another local agency to build 25 new houses for first-time homebuyers.
The city has been condemning and demolishing blighted houses and buildings in that neighborhood and the rest of the city for the last several years.
Lee said it is difficult to attract businesses and residents to the neighborhood because of problems with prostitution, drugs and absentee landlords.