Prostitution had existed in Tehran since at least the 1870s, scattered across the city in brothels marked by lanterns. Over the following decades, as sex workers became more visible on the streets, the government's interior ministry -- then secular -- decided on containment rather than abolition. In March 1922, authorities rounded up prostitutes and relocated them to an area near the old citadel, which became known as Shahr-e No. Over the next eleven years, Tehran's remaining sex workers were forced to join them. Then a wall went up -- 2.5 meters of brick encircling the district, sealing the women inside. They were forbidden from leaving. What had begun as a policy of consolidation became, in practice, an open-air prison for women the state preferred not to see.

By the late 1970s, Shahr-e No had grown into a self-contained community of a sort. Approximately 1,500 women lived within its walls, but they were not alone. The district supported 753 street sellers, 178 shops, and two theaters. An entire economy had taken root in the margins -- vendors, barbers, food stalls -- serving both the women and their clients. Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan documented Shahr-e No between 1975 and 1977 in a series titled The Citadel, producing some of the only visual records of life inside the walls. His photographs captured women who were not abstractions or statistics but individuals with faces, routines, and the quiet endurance of people surviving within a system that had reduced them to a function.

The Iranian Revolution reached Shahr-e No in July 1979. A crowd that had witnessed the death sentences of three women accused of procuring turned its fury on the district itself. Rioters set fire to brothels, attacked women, and spread terror through the narrow streets. The women inside -- many of whom had been confined there involuntarily for years -- were now persecuted as symbols of the old regime's moral failures. The following year, after Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated power as Supreme Leader, the government sent in bulldozers. Every structure in Shahr-e No was flattened. As author Hooman Majd noted in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the demolition served dual purposes: a demonstration of Islamic authority and a literal leveling of a place the new government considered an affront to its values.

Physical destruction was only the beginning. The Islamic Republic undertook a systematic campaign to erase Shahr-e No from cultural memory. Books that mentioned the district were destroyed. Films were confiscated or banned. The site itself was left barren, then marked on official maps with the anodyne label suggesting a park under construction. The erasure was remarkably thorough. For a district that had operated openly for six decades, that had housed thousands of women and sustained hundreds of businesses, Shahr-e No left almost no official trace. Kaveh Golestan's photographs survive as among the rarest documents of a place the state decided never existed. Today, a park and a hospital occupy the site. The 1,500 women who lived behind the wall -- what became of them after the bulldozers finished -- is a question the historical record does not answer.