Gogo Lidz reports on the pull-up, pull-in and pull-out service. I roll down my window. I hear a car horn behind me β my cab is holding up the line. Lining the track are 10 covered wooden sheds about 10 feet apart about the size of a typical bus shelter. Some are spray-painted with prices. The cost of services varies, depending on bartering between the sex worker and the client.
Each shed houses two to six prostitutes, all in provocative outfits. In numerous surveys, Zurich has been named the city with the best quality of life in the world and the wealthiest on the continent. It also has a booming pleasure industry. Prostitution has been legal in Zurich since , and some 1, prostitutes are registered with the city. Today, the only legal designated strutting ground for streetwalkers is a small cobblestone patch in Niederdorf, near the upmarket cheese and antique shops.
But the prostitution in Sihlquai became a strain for residents β the pimps turned the area into a haven for organised crime, and many men got away with violent attacks on the prostitutes. Residents complained about the condom wrappers littering their backyards and doorsteps. For the city, however, the most pertinent problem was the traffic β mostly from rubberneckers gawking at the prostitutes. The sex boxes are in an industrial suburb favoured by artists and refugees.
In the Zurich boxes, each transaction starts in the waiting area shed loop and unfolds in the neon-lit car park garage units. A customer cruises the loop, picks a prostitute, agrees on a price, veers off the loop to the garages, selects an empty box, does the deed, pays and says auf wiedersehen. During working hours, the premises are patrolled by security. There are bathrooms, showers, condoms, free laundry and a small kitchen in a free health pavilion on-site called the Flora Dora that provides complimentary contraception, sex education, HIV prevention programmes, medical services, social counselling and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
The women also have access to a free off-site ob-gyn clinic. Each stall is decorated with an HIV or sex education poster and equipped with a condom disposal bin and a panic button to protect the sex worker. The button sounds an alarm throughout the entire pavilion and a flashing light inside the box in question. Panic buttons are pushed about once a week, says Ludwig, typically after a dispute over money. The women of the boxes live a harsh life.
