Street Whores in Second Life | How Neglect Destroyed the Top Red-Light Sim

Last Updated on: 20th September 2024, 12:40 pm

I was locking the door to my slave’s cage when my screen lit up with a flood of notifications. A quick glance showed that Governor Linden had returned a load of items to me. I’d known this was coming, but the confirmation still hit hard because it meant one thing: Street Whores had been fully repossessed by Linden Labs. And that meant something was gone—something that had been part of Second Life longer than I had.

I’ve held back for months, trying to stay quiet. I let the rumour mill just run wild, and let people believe what they wanted to believe. But I’m done with that now.

Watching It Slowly Fade Away

Street Whores wasn’t the centre of my world, but I’m not going to pretend like it didn’t matter. When I first joined Second Life, I rented a building there and opened a massage parlour. It wasn’t until last summer that Lumi and I moved a branch of X-Sisters into the sim, thinking things would keep going as they always had.

At first, it seemed like everything was going well. But if I’m being honest with myself, I could see the decline, even if I didn’t want to admit it at the time.

From June to December, the slow unravelling of the sim became more obvious. At first, it was subtle, almost like nothing had really changed. But over time, fewer and fewer people showed up. It wasn’t a sharp fall—just a gradual decrease that became harder to ignore.

New owners had taken over last summer, and for a while, they seemed committed to keeping things running. But the people who used to come around just started disappearing. A lot of them followed another bar owner, someone unrelated to me, to other sims. And with them gone, the place started to hollow out. The rentals emptied. The town square, once full of life, became a shadow of what it had been. And it was painful to see something that had once felt so alive begin to crumble.

Rachael Ezvalt | A Constant Presence, Even in Absence

I owe a lot to Rachael Ezvalt. I don’t say that lightly. She made my time in Second Life better, and that’s something I will always be thankful for. She had been banned from the sim years ago due to some personal differences, but before that, she was one of the originals—one of the people who gave life to the place and helped it grow into what it was.

Even after her ban, I knew she still cared. When Lumi and I opened our second bar at SW, Rach wanted to get back in. She reached out to one of the new owners to see if the ban could be lifted, they spoke but she never got a real answer. Even up until the day she died, she didn’t know if she’d ever be unbanned. That kind of thing sticks with you, you know?

Rachael wasn’t just my best friend—she was the heartbeat behind a lot of the things I did in Second Life. And watching her try to reconnect with something she’d helped build, only to be ignored, hurt. It still does.

Trying to Keep It Alive | A Decision I Couldn’t Ignore

In January, one of the owners contacted me, asking if I knew anyone who wanted to rent a parcel at SW. I read between the lines pretty quickly—she was struggling to keep the sim going and wanted to see if I would rent a big chunk of land. But I wasn’t interested. We already had a small bar there, as well as our main bar and the one in Gutter Trash Alley. Things were running smoothly. Why would I invest more into a sim that was clearly on its last legs?

I could see the frustration in the managers. Their ability to ban people had been stripped away, leaving them with almost no power to handle anything. Christina, who’s been with X-Sisters since day one, made it clear in her own way how much things had shifted. After all the time she’d spent there, it was impossible not to feel the change. She wasn’t the only one, either—there were other managers there who used to work for us, and also Tsai. They had all invested so much time into the sim, and I felt for them, I really did. But even with all of that, I just didn’t find a need to take on a big parcel.

But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about what it would mean if the sim closed. Rach was tied to that place, even if she hadn’t been there in years. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I let it go, I’d be losing something more than just a sim. So I caved.

I rented the parcel, which was not a low price either. It was thousands a week. I built X-Sisters Street. I even rented seven or eight more apartments through alts, grabbed as many ad boards as I could. I even told people that if they took a rental there, I would pay for it. I paid for a couple of people to live there for a month or so.

People thought I was trying to take over, that I was pushing X-Sisters too hard into SW, but that wasn’t it. I didn’t care about the business aspect of it at all. This was personal. Rach was gone, and I was clinging to the last pieces of her I could find and my way of doing that was trying to make sure that the sim was making enough income to survive.

Looking back, I wouldn’t do it again. Rach hadn’t been involved with SW in years, but in my head, it felt like keeping the place alive meant keeping a part of her alive, too.

Throwing Money into a Sinking Ship

Month after month, I was throwing tens of thousands of Lindens into SW. Ad boards, parcel rent, apartments, stores—you name it. I kept our original bar building there, even when it was empty, just a sign hanging in the window so I could have a reason to keep paying it. I wasn’t making enough to cover the costs, but I didn’t care. The main bar was doing more than well enough to offset the losses from SW, so I let it slide.

But if I’m honest, I don’t want to go back and calculate just how much I lost trying to keep that place afloat. It wasn’t smart. It wasn’t even about business. I was doing it because I missed my friend and I thought keeping the sim alive was a way of keeping her memory alive, too.

I spent some time there, in Fiver’s bar when I was new to the grid. For all the differences we might have, I have a lot of respect for Fiver and what she created and I had fun there. To me, what SW was and how it felt back then when Fiver had her bar open and populated, that’s the way it always should have felt. Alive. The sim became something I was attached to, even as I watched it slowly unravel.

The Final Blow | The Day It Was Taken Away

In May, we were at our SW bar when it all came crashing down. Our main bar was down for the weekly restart, so a few of us had moved over to the bar at SW. We were having a good time, drinking and talking, when suddenly we were thrown out. I ended up in the middle of some trees, disoriented as hell with my face pretty much in Christina’s tits (They’re great tits btw, if you haven’t hired her you should). I checked the radar, and there it was: a Linden had locked down the sim.

The sim had been repossessed. The tier hadn’t been paid.

I was pissed. No, I was beyond pissed. I had been sinking money into that place for months, money that should have more than covered the tier, but somehow it wasn’t enough. I later found out why, but the details don’t matter. What mattered is that I had invested time, money, and energy into trying to keep that place alive, and now it was gone.

Stepping Up, Even When I Shouldn’t Have Had To

I sat in my office, angry as hell. The sim owners had both logged on by then. Finally, after a few hours, one of them reached out to me. I got a run down on the whole situation: they didn’t own the land directly, they had been funnelling money through someone else who was supposed to pay the tier. But that person was gone, and now they were stuck.

Despite how angry I was, I couldn’t just let it go. After a talk with her, I reached out to the Lindens, talked with them about the repossession. After a lot of back-and-forth, I ended up buying the land back. I increased my own tier allowance on my account and donated the land back to the SW group. I told them that they had two months to figure something out and that on July 18th I would remove the land donation. Unless they needed me to keep it there. But the important thing was to communicate with me.

I didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t my problem to fix. But I did it anyway.

The Silence That Followed

And then… nothing. The sim owners went silent. I sent messages, trying to keep the lines of communication open, but I got nothing in return. I know that one has reasons not to log in, I don’t hold that against them at all. But the other one logged in multiple times and actively ignored me. SW was still locked out of search, and because of that, people couldn’t find our X-Sisters parcel there or the main SW sim. Our traffic plummeted, and we lost staff.

I don’t blame them for leaving. They didn’t want to move to the main bar, and I understood that. The street vibe was something special, and it was hard to let go of that. But the fact that we were losing people because the sim owners couldn’t even check a fucking box to make the place visible in search—that was the final straw.

Letting Go on July 17th

By July 17th, I’d had enough. I cleared out our X-Sisters parcel, left only the walls and road so there wouldn’t be a massive hole in the sim. I cancelled my last rentals, pulled all the ad boards, and walked away.

I was done. There was nothing left for me to save. I couldn’t keep pouring money and energy into a place where the people responsible for running it didn’t care enough to send a message, let alone keep the sim running.

Later on, I rented some ad boards again, but that was purely for business. I needed to advertise for new staff, but it had nothing to do with keeping Street Whores alive anymore. I was finished with it.

Street Whores Is Gone, and It Didn’t Have to Be

The only real saving grace in all of this, both personally and from a business perspective, is that Tsai now works at X-Sisters. That feels like something positive that came out of this mess.

And now, after over a decade, Street Whores—the best red-light district in Second Life—is gone. Not because of dying trends or competition, not because of being forced out or new impositions by Linden Labs, but because the people running it didn’t give a fuck. It’s gone because of neglect, because the owners stopped caring enough to keep it alive.

To all of you who stood on those streets night after night, sent out group messages trying to bring people in, and rented apartments and stores even when you had no idea if you’d get to stay the full rental period—thank you. You showed up. You cared about SW in ways that were obvious to anyone paying attention. And believe me, everyone saw you.

To everyone who made it clear that the sim mattered, whether you were there for years or just recently joined—you deserve to be recognized. I’m not the one who should be thanking you. I didn’t own Street Whores, and I didn’t run it. But I do know this: the people who did sure as hell aren’t going to give you the thanks you deserve. So, I’m saying it, because someone needs to.

If you’re going to run a sim in Second Life, you have to care. That’s the lesson here. If you don’t, you end up like Street Whores—locked out, repossessed, and gone.

Update – September 17th

So, uhm… despite everything I said above, Street Whores might actually not be dead after all. Someone—cough, not naming any names, wink—may have placed a bid on the land during the auction, won, and decided to bring it back to life.

If you want to know how that all went down, you can read the full story here.