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Adult Theaters, Broadway
Broadway was built wider than most San Francisco streets because it was the main route down to the docks, and like most port cities, that area attracted certain enterprises. In 1850 the city's population was 25,000 men and 300 women, mostly prostitutes. Within six months they were joined by another 2,000 prostitutes from France, New York, and New Orleans. That occupation continued to thrive a hundred years later as San Francisco became a major port of embarkation for soldiers heading off to fight three wars in the Pacific.

In 1973 Margo St. James founded COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), a sex worker activist organization whose goals include decriminalization of prostitution as well as the elimination of social stigma concerning sex work as an occupation. Later she founded the St. James Infirmary in San Francisco to help provide health care to the sex worker community. In 1996 St. James ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and while she didn't win she did receive 76,000 votes.
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