Shahrinaw is amongst well-known neighborhoods of Tehran during the Pahlavi period (1925-1979) with proliferating rumors, stories, and legends around it. Formed in 1921, and shut down after the revolution in the spring of 1979, Sharinaw’s history neatly maps the Pahlavi period, contributing to articulation of a certain regressive political temporality of the 20th century Iran; One, which assumes a radical break between the progressive Pahlavi period and the subsequent regressive Islamic regime. To this end, the space of Shahrinaw, coupled with Farmānfarānian’s famous social work program in the district, launched in 1970s, is by and large addressed within the limits of reformist literature. Shahrinaw then is remembered as the home to vulnerable bodies and a place in need of rescue. Using government documents such as correspondences regarding early attempts to displace sex-workers to Shahrinaw in 1921; petitions against residency of sex-workers in Tehran dating back as early as 1914; hospital documents related to regulations of sex-workers with venereal diseases in 1930s; and government documents on concerns with the space of Shahrinaw dating back as early as 1924, this presentation attempts to revisit Shahrinaw’s history, uncoupling it from the reformist legacy attributed to the Pahlavi period. In doing so, it will attempt to go beyond dual frameworks of progressive/regressive historiographical temporality of modern Iran, attending instead to the not-so-coherent formation of the heteroglot affective moral landscape of Tehran, and constant redistribution of spaces of intimacy and danger, in the period of relatively fast urbanization. This presentation will specifically explore the mechanisms and spatial measures the state took to organize Shahrinaw as a public space, yet private—as it was gated in 1930s—to regulate what was deemed as the necessary evil: sex-work, in a city with growing population and increasing temporary residency in the aftermath of WWI. It will further engage with the role the space of Shahrinaw played in negotiating competing conceptions of moral subject citizens, and moral action.