52, and Still Working the Streets

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

Barbara Terry, 52, has worked nearly her entire adult life as a prostitute in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. She hopes to retire in a year or so to a house she bought upstate.

By COREY KILGANNON
NYT

LIKE many single mothers, Barbara Terry, 52, scrounged for baby sitters and leaned on her own mother while raising her four children and working the night shift.

But Ms. Terry is a prostitute who has worked nearly her entire adult life on the streets of Hunts Point, in the Bronx.

“When they were old enough to understand, I would tell them the truth,” said Ms. Terry, whose daughter and three sons are now grown. “I’d say, ‘This is how I’m supporting you.’ For me, it’s a business, a regular job.”

Yes, she said, she was arrested more than 100 times, sometimes landing at Rikers Island for several days or weeks — but that never deterred her from returning to this area of industrial warehouses and repair shops off the Bruckner Expressway.

(More here.)