The red light district south of Market Street, from the 1878 temperance resolution to the November 10, 1912 raid and the Gaslamp Quarter that grew out of it. All records sourced and cited.
In December of 1888 a gambler named Wyatt Earp sat before a San Diego city council committee and swore he had never paid the police a dime.
The committee was looking into payoffs from the town's gambling rooms. One witness said "Gifford, the gambler, and Wyatt Earp, his partner in the establishment" had handed over a hundred dollars so a local paper would not "burn them up." Earp said he never paid the police for protection and never paid the paper either.
Fourteen months later a constable named Barney Manning stood in front of a saloon boss named Pete Cassidy and asked whether he remembered taking "$1,700 to allow Wyatt Earp's faro game to run near the corner of Sixth and F Streets." Then Manning beat him. Earp got into it with Manning before the two were pulled apart.
Pete Cassidy ran a saloon at Fifth and I. That corner was the Stingaree.
At eight o'clock on the morning of Sunday, November 10, 1912, thirty San Diego patrolmen walked into the Stingaree, and by evening 138 women had been arrested. Almost every one of them bought a ticket to Los Angeles. Almost every one of them bought it round trip.
This is the story of the twelve blocks south of Market Street that San Diego spent thirty years tolerating, one morning trying to erase, and the next hundred years turning into the Gaslamp Quarter.
Before it was a neighborhood, a stingaree was a fish.
San Diegans in the 1870s used the word for the stingrays that lay in the warm shallows along the waterfront. An 1874 lecture printed in the San Diego Union mentioned "the 'stingaree' in our own bay." The same year, the San Diego Bulletin was calling the tideland parcels at the foot of town "Stingaree lots," because that was what you stepped on if you waded out from them.
The jump from fish to district came fast. In July of 1878 a temperance meeting at Horton Hall adopted a resolution "instructing the District Attorney to clean out the nuisance known as the 'Stingaree'." That is the earliest use of the word for a place that we found, three years before the date usually given.
By 1881 the Union was describing a butcher assaulted in his shop "on lower Fifth street, in what is known as the 'Stingaree' block." In 1882 it called it "that odorous part of town known as Stingaree block." By 1886 the paper was writing "Stingaree town."
The joke that stuck, repeated by historian Elizabeth MacPhail in the Journal of San Diego History, was that the people who went there were likely to get stung. The fish infested the waterfront flats. The district sat right on top of them.
The ground the Stingaree grew on was bought for almost nothing.
William Heath Davis had tried a "New Town" near the foot of Market Street in 1850, and it went nowhere. On May 10, 1867 Alonzo Horton bought about 800 acres of pueblo land, six lots, for $265. Two years later he added another 160 acres for $4,000 and built a wharf at the foot of Fifth Avenue.
That wharf is why the Stingaree ended up where it did. Fifth Avenue ran straight down to the water. Ships tied up, sailors and dock hands walked uphill, and the first thing they reached was lower Fifth. The saloons, rooming houses and card rooms set up where the foot traffic came ashore.
In 1880 the city had 2,637 people.
Then the railroad came.
The Santa Fe depot opened in 1887 and a fare war between the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific dropped the price of a ticket west to almost nothing. San Diego went from a town to a land rush in about two years. The History Center's own timeline puts the peak population of the boom somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000. Assessed property in the city went from about $2.4 million before the boom to about $40 million in 1888, according to historian Richard Pourade.
Ida Bailey, in MacPhail's words, "came with the boomers of the Eighties." So did Wyatt Earp.
The Stingaree in the boom years ran roughly from First Avenue to Fifth, and from Market Street, then called H Street, down to K. About twelve blocks. The wider vice district, depending on who was counting and what year, stretched from the waterfront up to F Street and east toward Sixteenth, close to a hundred blocks. Historian Clare McKanna drew it from H Street to the bay, Second to Sixth.
Inside those lines were saloons, dance halls, gambling rooms, opium dens, cribs and parlor houses, and on the blocks between Island and K, First and Third, San Diego's Chinatown.
The Union ran a headline on November 3, 1887 that summed up how the respectable town saw it: "Vice Rampant: Crime's High Carnival in the 'Stingaree' Section."
Earp came to San Diego in the boom with Josephine, the wife he had met in Tombstone. He was in town by 1887 and stayed, on and off, into the 1890s.
What he did here is better documented than most people realize, and a little different from the legend.
The legend says Earp ran gambling halls in the Stingaree. The Gaslamp Quarter Association says he leased four saloons and gambling halls. Other accounts say three. The secondary sources disagree, and none we found cites a lease.
The newspapers are more specific. During the December 1888 council inquiry, the Union placed the gambling room Earp shared with E. B. Gifford "over Thornburgh's saloon," and a related gambling house "on F street, between Fifth and Sixth." The 1890 fight between Manning and Cassidy put Earp's faro game "near the corner of Sixth and F Streets."
F Street is north of the old H Street line. So the faro bank most firmly tied to Earp in the record sat on the respectable side of the boundary, a few blocks uphill from the Stingaree proper. The money that kept it running, if the testimony is right, went to the same police who were supposed to be watching the district below it.
The rest of Earp's San Diego paper trail is about horses. In July of 1889 the Union reported he had driven back across the Colorado desert from a mining camp in Arizona Territory. He went to the Los Angeles races with Gifford. He judged races at the Escondido fair in 1890 and trotting races at the Coronado track in 1892.
In January of 1890 he placed a classified ad. Four work horses and a wagon, for sale or trade "for real estate." Inquire at the Belle View Hotel, Fourth and G, "to Wyatt Earp."
A gambler trading draft horses for land in a city whose land values were collapsing around him. Pourade wrote that Earp eventually "sold out the investments he had made in San Diego with the aid of boom-time gambling, and departed."
The Oyster Bar in the Louis Bank of Commerce building at 835 Fifth Avenue is often called Earp's place. The Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation says the Oyster Bar opened there in 1893, after the bank moved out, and "became a favorite of Wyatt Earp." That is a long way from running it, and it opened after his busiest San Diego years. We would not put money on him owning it.
The boom ended in 1888 almost as fast as it had started. By 1890 the city's population was 16,159, less than half the boom estimate. Pourade puts assessed values at about $25 million in 1890, down from $40 million two years earlier.
The bust did not empty the Stingaree. It did the opposite. The respectable money left town or went quiet. The saloons stayed, because sailors, soldiers, railroad men and dock hands kept coming, and because the Stingaree had something the rest of downtown did not: steady cash business.
In the 1890s two men ran the district, according to Madeleine Kei Meyer's 2024 thesis on the Stingaree at Cal State San Marcos.
One was Charles England, who called himself, or was called, the King of the Stingaree. England ran a saloon at the southeast corner of Third and I, now Island Avenue, called the Tub of Blood. The name was not an accident.
The other was Pete Cassidy, born Cavanaugh, who ran his place at Fifth and I and was said to have killed a police officer in Minneapolis before he came west. Years later a Union columnist wrote that city appointments in the old days were decided "in the rear part of a butcher shop and in Pete Cassidy's saloon."
That is the Stingaree in one line. The saloon was where City Hall did business.
On March 27, 1899 a man named Dan Cassidy, who ran the Pacific Squadron saloon at Fourth and J, was shot in the head in an argument over change. The San Diego Union headline the next day was "Dan Cassidy Killed." The man who shot him was known as Russian Mike.
The violence ran heaviest against the women. Historian Linda Parker counted sixteen women of an estimated hundred working in the district who were killed or violently assaulted between 1880 and 1900. That works out to a rate of 80 per 10,000. For other American women in the same years, the figure was 2.3.
The best known name from the Stingaree after Earp is Ida Bailey.
MacPhail found Bailey arrested in 1887 for selling liquor without a license, and listed in the 1889 city directory at 253 Sixth Street. By 1903 she was running the Canary Cottage, on the west side of Fourth Avenue between Market and Island. It was painted, MacPhail wrote, "a faded yellow." A Gaslamp historical marker at the Cotheret Building, 536 Fourth Avenue, says the Canary Cottage stood behind it, reached by the alley to the right, which also led to a gambling house called the Pan Tan.
Bailey died broke.
There were others. MacPhail names Mamie Goldstein and Kate Clark of The Turf, a parlor house at the northeast corner of Fourth and J. The district had houses with names like the Oasis, at 416 Fourth, and the Green Light.
Meyer's thesis argues that Bailey's fame was inflated by later reminiscence, and that the real story of the district is the hundreds of women whose names show up only in arrest books. She found that some of them pooled their money, cared for each other's children and moved between the Stingaree and ordinary jobs as rent required. McKanna's census counts put at least 48 women working in the district in 1900 and 143 by 1910. The largest house held eight in 1900. By 1910 some held more than twelve.
The Stingaree's western blocks were San Diego's Chinatown.
The four blocks between Island and K, First and Third, were, in MacPhail's words, "almost entirely occupied by Chinese." Lottery drawings ran in the open on J Street between Second and Third. The man the city treated as Chinatown's unofficial mayor, Ah Quin, came around 1879, supervised Chinese railroad crews and ran a restaurant at Third and J. He was killed by a motorcycle at the same corner in 1914.
Chinatown and the Stingaree got lumped together by the reformers, and the opium raids that followed the 1912 crackdown hit both. When crews tore down a building on Second between J and K, they found fifty one opium cans under the floor. A single raid on August 15, 1915 arrested forty nine people. A man named Tom Kay bailed them all out for $490.
In 1909 San Diego got a police chief who did not want to close the Stingaree.
J. Keno Wilson had joined the force in 1899. MacPhail described him as "Six-feet-four" with "a regal bearing." He became chief in 1909 and kept the job until 1926. His view of the district was practical. The women would be somewhere. Better they be in a few known blocks, under watch, than spread across the city.
By 1912 that view was losing.
San Diego was getting ready for the Panama California Exposition, which would open in Balboa Park on January 1, 1915. The city expected the country to come look at it. MacPhail wrote that the five years of preparation gave "impetus to the cleanup." A Vice Suppression Committee formed, led by Rev. L. A. DeJarnett, Rev. William E. Crabtree and Dr. Charlotte Baker, with Mrs. R. C. Allen as chair. They were planning to get "Jane Doe" warrants issued against the women, and against the heads of the police department for allowing them to work.
The Union reported a "well-defined belief that the closing of the Stingaree is a political move" aimed at Wilson and his boss.
On October 1, 1912 Wilson wrote a letter laying out the situation. On November 9, Superintendent of Police Capt. John L. Sehon wrote across it: "Approved. Close the red light district."
The night before the raid, Wilson said what he thought, and the Union printed it.
"When all is said and done, these women are still women. They are outcasts, but not criminals."
And: "I do not believe it is practical to close this district. Others will come, and I see no means of preventing it."
He did it anyway.
At eight o'clock Sunday morning Wilson sent thirty patrolmen into the district. Half an hour later a second squad and the entire detective force followed. The first stop was the Oasis at 416 Fourth.
Nobody was surprised. Messenger boys had carried the word around the night before. About a dozen women had already left on an early train with what the Union called their "male consorts."
The rest were taken to the station. The Union's reporter watched them in detention and wrote that they "laughed and joked," "chewed gum, smoked cigarettes," and that some danced a two step. The Union ran photographs under captions like "Leaving Home Under Guard" and "Some Hid Their Faces From Camera Man."
The questioning ran from ten in the morning until a quarter to six at night. Each woman was offered a choice. Accept the help of the reform committee, or leave San Diego by three o'clock the next afternoon.
The next morning's headline in the San Diego Union and Daily Bee: "138 Women Are Arrested in Stingaree Raid / 136 Promise To Leave City; Two Agree to Reform."
Two.
Among the 138 were four Japanese women held for deportation and one Chinese woman. The Union noted "a large number" of Black women. About 95 percent named Los Angeles as where they were going.
One of the women was Flora West, twenty eight, who told the committee she supported a crippled mother and a sister. She said she had once saved two thousand dollars and quit the life, then lost it to a hairdressing school that cheated her. When the reformers offered to help her, she answered: "No, thank you. When I see an opportunity to reform that looks good to me I will take it."
Wilson asked a question of his own on the way out. "Why will not the women of other towns flock to San Diego for the same reasons that the women we are driving out are going to Los Angeles?"
By Monday the Union reported about half the women were gone. Two bought tickets to San Francisco. One bought a ticket to Denver. The rest went to Los Angeles.
"The Stingaree district was dark last night," the paper wrote.
One messenger boy, known as Frisco, married a woman from the Green Light and left town with her.
The story ran up and down the state. The Long Beach Press Telegram put it on the front page as "Famous Stingaree District of San Diego Closed." The Sacramento Star and the Stockton Mail picked it up.
Four days after the raid, City Building Inspector W. J. Kirkwood announced he would rip up the floors of the cribs with picks, condemn the shacks, and serve notice on the owners.
The owners, the Union reported, included "names of well known San Diegans."
That detail is easy to skip and should not be. The Stingaree was not built by outsiders. The cribs sat on lots owned by people with respectable addresses who collected rent from them every month. The raid closed the businesses. The question of who had been profiting from the real estate under them was never really asked in public.
Over the next four years the city's health and plumbing inspector, Walter Bellon, did most of the tearing down. Between 1912 and 1916, MacPhail found, he removed 120 structures and condemned more than 500 interior rooms. The old Tub of Blood at Third and I came down on October 2, 1915. A place called the Cozy Cottage was burned with kerosene. Demolition crews turned up a hidden copper still.
In 1913 California passed the Red Light Abatement Act, which let a court close any building used for prostitution for a year. The first San Diego case hit a rooming house on Fifth, across the street from City Hall.
Keno Wilson had said it would.
McKanna went through the police registers. Between 1912 and 1925, at least 3,064 women were arrested in San Diego on sex work charges. The business did not leave the city. It left the twelve blocks and spread out into rooming houses and hotels across downtown, harder to see and harder to police, which was exactly what the chief had warned about the night before the raid.
The Exposition opened on schedule on January 1, 1915. Visitors walked from the trains through a downtown that had been scrubbed for them.
With the women gone and the saloons closed or quieter, the old Stingaree blocks slid. Through the middle of the century the area south of Broadway became a district of cheap hotels and sailor bars. By 1976 there were still about 4,600 inexpensive hotel rooms in the district. The buildings from the boom survived mostly because nobody had money to replace them.
That neglect is why there is a Gaslamp Quarter today. Downtowns that boomed in the twentieth century tore down their Victorian blocks. San Diego's sat there, unpainted and unwanted, long enough to become valuable for being old.
The city created the Centre City Development Corporation in 1975 to rebuild downtown. In 1976 it designated the old district a historical district and adopted design rules for it. On May 23, 1980 the Gaslamp Quarter Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, number 80000841.
The district covers about 38 acres and more than 90 historic buildings, most built between 1880 and 1910. By 1980 the city had put nearly $8 million into public improvements and private owners about $22 million into more than forty restoration projects. More than 80 percent of the property owners in the district were new since 1970.
On August 9, 1985 Horton Plaza opened next door, a $140 million shopping center designed by Jon Jerde, on ground named for the man who had bought all of downtown for $265.
Inexpensive hotel rooms in the district fell from about 4,600 in 1976 to fewer than 3,500 by 1985. The same blocks that the 1912 reformers could not empty, the 1980s real estate market did.
You can walk the Stingaree today. Most of it is under newer buildings, but some of it is not.
The Louis Bank of Commerce, 835 Fifth Avenue. Built in 1887 or 1888, depending on whose plaque you read. San Diego's first granite building. The Oyster Bar opened in it in 1893.
The Yuma Building, 631 Fifth Avenue, built in 1882 and one of the first brick buildings downtown.
The Cotheret Building, 536 Fourth Avenue, 1903. Its marker says the Canary Cottage stood behind it.
The William Heath Davis House, 410 Island Avenue, a museum now, named for the man whose New Town failed in 1850.
The Horton Grand Hotel, 311 Island Avenue, which is two hotels from the 1880s, the Grand Horton and the Brooklyn, moved there brick by brick and reopened in 1986.
Three kinds of record carry this story.
The San Diego Union, read in full text through the California Digital Newspaper Collection at UC Riverside, from 1874 through 1912. That includes the 1888 council inquiry in which Earp testified, the 1890 Manning and Cassidy fight, Earp's 1890 classified ad, and the four days of raid coverage from November 10 to 14, 1912.
The Journal of San Diego History, published by the San Diego History Center: Elizabeth C. MacPhail, "Shady Ladies in the 'Stingaree District'" (1974); Clare V. McKanna Jr., "Prostitutes, Progressives, and Police" (1989); Robert F. Heilbron, "Horton's Purchase" (1987); and Richard Pourade's The Glory Years.
And the work of a newer historian: Madeleine Kei Meyer, Sex Work and Sisterhood: Surviving in San Diego's Stingaree District, 1880 to 1912, a 2024 master's thesis at Cal State San Marcos, which went back into the voter rolls and arrest books to find the women and saloon keepers the earlier histories left out.
Where accounts conflicted, we went with the 1912 newspaper. The Reader in 2000 said the raid began at 6 a.m. The Union, which had a reporter there, said eight.
Start with the tickets. On the Tuesday after the raid, the Union reported that the women leaving San Diego had, "almost without exception, bought return-trip tickets." Wilson had told the reformers they would be back. The women apparently agreed with him.
Then the hotel. The Horton Grand advertises its connection to Ida Bailey. Meyer's thesis, working from Charles England's 1892 voter registration, puts the Tub of Blood at the southeast corner of Third and Island, "where the hotel now stands." So the most charming hotel in the Gaslamp sits on the site of the saloon owned by the King of the Stingaree. The year after the raid, England was arrested in a federal opium raid at the Grand Pacific Hotel, where agents found drugs valued at $12,000. He ended up in San Quentin.
And then the pets.
On November 14, 1912, the Union ran a story nobody planned. The women had left behind their dogs, their cats and their parrots. And the respectable women of San Diego, the same city that had just cheered the raid, were "fairly storming the police department" to adopt them. The department had to detail a sergeant just to handle it.
The headline: "San Diego Women Offer Good Homes To Stingaree Pets."
They ran the women out of town on Sunday. By Thursday they were lining up for the parrots.
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