According to several alumni and long-term faculty, Wisconsin Avenue at one time had a problem with prostitutes and their associative pimps.,”

Marquette Trivia 101: What do Jay-Z and Wisconsin Avenue have in common? Answer: They both have a history of "Big Pimpin'."

According to several alumni and long-time faculty members, Wisconsin Avenue at one time had a problem with prostitutes and their associative pimps.

"There was a time when prostitution flourished in the Wisconsin Avenue and 27th Street area," said Richard Jones, associate professor and chair of the Department of Social & Cultural Sciences.

Marquette students could usually avoid this area, except in situations like the fall 1978 housing shortage when Marquette rented two and a half floors of the Ambassador Hotel, 2308 W. Wisconsin Ave.

According to Rosemary Belgiovine, a residence assistant in the Ambassador Hotel during that time and a 1980 alumna from the College of Business Administration, the area outside the hotel was an area "known as a place where prostitutes solicit possible customers."

Prostitutes and pimps did not just work in the street around the Ambassador Hotel, but according to Belgiovine, some prostitutes worked on the cleaning staff in the hotel as well. They would leave messages written in lipstick to Marquette students on the mirrors in their rooms in an effort to solicit more customers.

The makeshift dorm at the Ambassador and the events that occurred as a result led to a "very entertaining semester," Belgiovine said.

"The university acted on it immediately after finding out and we were moved out of the Ambassador within about six weeks of the first soliciting events," Belgiovine said. "I never felt threatened as a student and looking back on it . it was actually quite funny."

The use of the Ambassador Hotel as a dorm was not the only situation that placed students in the prostitute-riddled area. Students like 1981 College of Communication alumna Ellyn Barry lived in off-campus housing in the area as well.

Barry said she resided in an apartment several blocks north of Wisconsin Avenue near 25th Street – at least for a weekend. Barry moved in on a Friday and was promptly moved out on Sunday during her parents' first visit.

"My parents were mortified by the neighborhood . and they didn't like the, let's call them 'characters,' in the building," Barry said. "My father swore he saw a pimp in the building, and then my family and brothers' friends immediately moved me out."

Though Associate Director of DPS Capt. Russ Shaw acknowledged there was once a prostitution problem around 27th and Wisconsin until the early 1990s, he denied there was ever a problem with prostitution on Marquette's campus.

According to Barry, the university looked "quite different" back in the 1970s and early '80s when there was a prostitution problem in the area. She said it was as if Marquette was just "plopped in the middle of an urban area."

"It didn't look like a college campus like it does today," she said.

Prostitution in the area would have had a dramatic effect on the neighborhood, according to Jones.

"You tend to find a variety of problematic behaviors in these neighborhoods – poverty, drug use and sales, petty crime and just a dramatic impact on the quality of life issues," Jones said.

According to Jones, prostitution occurs because of demand, poverty and inequality.

"You eliminate the problem by attacking demand and reducing inequality," Jones said. "Removing prostitutes from a neighborhood can work through making it uncomfortable for prostitutes to work a particular neighborhood . but even then they will just move to a neighborhood a few blocks away."

“