In the early days of the Arizona Territory, when men greatly outnumbered women, prostitution was legal.
The painted ladies, nymphs, sinners, angels - they wore many labels - did their business openly along Maiden Lane in Tucson, Sixth Street in Tombstone and Brewery Gulch in Bisbee.
But as Arizona became civilized at the dawn of the 1900s, attitudes about prostitution started to change. Sort of.
Tucson imposed a $5 monthly licensing fee, and the county charged $1 for mandatory weekly health inspections.
In 1917, after Tucson abolished its government-sanctioned red-light district, some residents alleged the women had only scattered to nicer neighborhoods.
This prompted anti-prostitution forces to take out an ad in the Star listing seven reasons re-establishment of a district would be a bad idea.
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Point No. 6: "It would be sufficient cause for the right-minded people of this state to demand that the university be removed to Phoenix where their sons will not be subjected to the temptations and degradations of the district."
The rector of Grace Episcopal Church wrote that men who visited prostitutes had "fallen in the scale of humanity to the level of the beast... with their diseased and depraved appetites."
Society ladies, meanwhile, did show sympathy for the fallen women. The ladies of the Tucson Civic League protested the arrest of the prostitutes and said property owners should be the ones prosecuted.
By the 1920s, a committee led by a UA professor advised the city that prostitution would never disappear. Some of it even continued in the red-light district, by then known as Gay Alley.
It's long gone now, though - in Gay Alley, that is. The neighborhood was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by the Tucson Convention Center.