Once upon a time, before there was Craigslist, a “financially independent” male looking for a slender mistress had to resort to placing a personal ad in alternative newspapers like the Village Voice or the East Village Eye.
Any woman interested in the offer would actually write a letter to a PO Box and wait for a phone call. Very archaic.
This ad ran in the August 1984 edition of the Eye. Hmm, how many responses do you think he got, and did he find the mistress he was searching for?
Tags: craigslist, East Village Eye, East Village in the 1980s, Village Voice, vintage personal ads
Ephemeral New York 
March 18, 2009 at 6:21 pm |
I love the old personal/classified ads, too. And like you I always wonder what happened afterwards.
I love how he puts “Mistress” in quotations. And the sentence fragment. Consider, “Mistress”-? Consider correct sentence structure first, then we’ll see about your other requirements.
March 18, 2009 at 7:56 pm |
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt; maybe it was the typesetter’s fault.
March 19, 2009 at 1:35 am |
Ads like this ran in the back of New York Magazine until what feels like very recently but I guess it’s been about 15 or so years since they stopped when the interwebs took over.
April 18, 2009 at 1:48 am |
My favorite personal ad was in the East Village Other around 1967-68 that appeared for several months:
“Keep me high and I’ll ball you forever” with a telephone number
November 27, 2011 at 5:20 am |
I’m ashamed to admit that I responded to one of these ads in the early 90s. His name was Bill and he owned an antique shop near Cooper Union. It was lame, and here I thought I was being very sophisticated lol