City helps fund deal that shutters windows where sex workers pose.

A non-profit corporation has purchased a large number of the buildings where prostitutes pose in windows in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, the city said Thursday, in a deal that may lead to a third of the windows being shuttered.

The move is intended to break a logjam in an multi-year effort by the city to cut back on the windows, which it says are a magnet for crime and money laundering.

Mayor Job Cohen said the move was not intended to get rid of prostitution entirely, since it is part of the area’s history and a major tourist draw for the city.

“What we do want is to get rid of the underlying criminality,” Cohen told local television station AT5.

With its scantily clad prostitutes posing in brothel windows and coffee shops oozing the pungent aroma of cannabis smoke, the Red Light district’s seediness has always been part of its attraction.

Prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, and coffee shops are licensed to sell small amounts of marijuana. But the district is a magnet for petty criminals and, authorities believe, human traffickers, drug lords and mobsters — who take advantage of the situation to launder money.

Prostitutes’ rights organizations have generally been indifferent to the crackdown, arguing that pimps are the main source of problems, not landlords.