In 1917, the legal prostitution district of New Orleans, the infamous “Storyville“, was shut down over the strong objections of the city by the Federal government. In response, New Orleans Mayor Martin Behrman said “You can make [prostitution] illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”
The Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, recently demonstrated that ninety years of nearly universal prohibition of prostitution in this country has done nothing to make Behrman’s prophecy untrue.