Tombstone Red-Light District (Allen Street Cribs / "Rotten Row")

Tombstone licensed its prostitutes. The town printed cards, charged fees, and kept the trade orderly — at least on paper. The Bird Cage Theatre, at the western edge of the red-light district, still displays surviving licenses issued to women who worked the district's cribs.

The cribs ran two or three blocks east along Allen Street. At the district's peak, 106 cribs were recorded — shacks, most of them two rooms, fronting the dusty street. The women who worked them occupied the lowest tier of a structured trade: parlor houses at the top, saloon girls and hurdy-gurdy dancers in the middle, cribs at the bottom, streetwalkers below that. The cribs charged roughly twenty-five cents to a dollar per customer. Tour guides repeat the figure of eighty men a day per crib, though no primary source confirms the count.

The district acquired the nickname "Rotten Row" in popular and tour usage, though the name doesn't appear in documented primary sources. It may have borrowed the phrase from elsewhere — working slang for a vice district — or simply earned it.

Chinese prostitution operated separately in a section of Allen Street called Hoptown, documented by a historical marker. That trade had its own structures, its own hierarchies.

The cribs are gone. Allen Street today is tourist businesses and empty lots. The Bird Cage survives as a museum, and inside, behind glass, are the licenses — names, fees, official stamps. Physical proof that the town ran the district like any other permitted business.