Commercial sex was in your face everywhere in Montreal until about a decade ago.
Street prostitutes brazenly stood on sidewalks, not just on Ontario, the Main and St. Denis but also in residential areas like Verdun, St. Henri and Lachine.
Streets were lined with porn theatres, strip clubs, sex boutiques and sexy serveuse restaurants.
Sex signs and storefront photos were once so common that their proliferation was seen as a major political issue as entrepreneurs fought back mightily to protect their right to erect such signage.
Every week some sex-related business would launch with a spread in Photo Police. Come to the naked car wash! Enjoy private no-touch dancing! (at least one such place still exists).
There seemed no end to the appetite for commercial sex.
Magazine stores and video stores, once numerous and thriving jam-packed hotspots, all contained impossible-to-ignore porno sections inches from the mainstream fare.
Sex was such a big industry that it boosted journalism and provided legitimate jobs. Now-extinct alternative weekly newspapers were funded by dozens of pages of ads for escorts, massage services and 1-976 sex hotlines.
In-your-face commercial sex was around from the very earliest days of Montreal, as street prostitutes made their availability known in the fields at Sherbrooke and Fort and then moved on to the old city.
Hookers would call out to men offering "a suck and a fuck for a buck" in the 1930s and in the 1960s pimps would stand on all four corners of the Main and St. Catherine offering male passerby a fun time. Alain Stanke counted an average of 10 women sitting alone waiting for commercial pickup in bars on the Main on a Sunday night in 1958.
This ancient street tradition has suddenly disappeared. Prostitutes are long gone from streets and bars.
Strip clubs are disappearing fast as well. The 75 on the island in the 1970s have been reduced to about 18. The Downtown Club at St. Catherine and Drummond the latest to close its doors this week.
Some argue that commercial sex has not diminished, it has simply found other less-visible outlets.
Escorts now advertise on sites such as Backpage, which are either free or almost-free (the reduction in advertising overhead cost presumably leading to lower prices.)
Some argue that massage parlours have supplanted strip clubs, as they are easier to operate, being beyond the scrutiny of alcohol-related inspection.
However massage parlours are still not that numerous and each can only accommodate two or three customers at a time, while strip clubs could host dozens.
Sexy serveuse restaurants were pushed out of business by provincial regulations, although one might speculate that they would have disappeared on their own.
Porn theatres were wiped out by online porn. Indeed some believe that almost all of Montreal's once-ubiquitous local sex industry has been supplanted by online porn, which implies a sex trade international deficit, as the beneficiaries are largely in such places as California, Europe or South America.
Some note that the younger generation is less interested in sex, as studies have repeatedly demonstrated that millennials have sex far less frequently than their parents did.
Vices such as cocaine have seen similar declines, as the younger generation appears to have snubbed such fun for excitement from Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and smartphone games.
The evolution is a significant change for Montreal, which was once seen by fun loving tourists as a sex-and-drugs-and-rock-n-roll party central.