San Diego's Barbary Coast

RAY BRANDES, SUSAN CARRICO, TONI NAGEL CASE STUDY, 1985

If you sailed to San Diego in 1886, you disembarked at the foot of Fifth Avenue. Before dredging made the bay smaller — the Convention Center, for example, would have been underwater — the bay piers and wharves were closer to present-day Island Avenue. And the “Gateway" to San Diego, especially for visitors accustomed to civilized locales, was a brusque, disturbing scene.

There were no trees. You could search all of “Horton’s Addition” and not find a single palm tree or many flowers or shrubs — or anything green. lust lots of brown wooden structures, most unpainted, and grimy dirt streets veined by wagon wheels and pocked by horses' hooves.

Bales of goods piled high on docks, even on the street. Sailors roamed around, looking for work or play. Dockworkers cursed. Stray dogs lurked. As you headed north up Fifth Avenue, both sides of the street were thick with warehouses and shanties. The most permanent-looking buildings: the Pacific Steamship Company Victorian warehouse and the Grand Pacific Hotel. Farther up Fifth, at K and I Streets, you came to brick hotels, rooming houses, and wooden-frame saloons.

Between 1886 and 1900 two separate districts grew in a nine-square block area around the Gateway. The Chinese Quarter included small businesses — import sales, grocery stores, and laundries — and restaurants. The Stingaree District became San Diego’s den of unrepressed iniquity.

In 1912, the San Diego Sun wrote: “The Stingaree is as old as San Diego.... Ever since the early settlement...there has been a restricted district.. .several times it has been raided and closed.” Some of the bars and brothels had a “world-wide reputation. The worst of these is the Pacific Squadron.... In the old days it was the Tub of Blood, which flourished for many years."

The stingaree is a raylike fish with a long, thin tail and sharp barbs. It stayed close to the bottom of the tidelands and the bay. If you stepped on one, it would release a barb into your foot or ankle, causing a great deal of pain. Swimmers learned to shuffle their feet along the bottom to avoid stepping on a stingaree.

“Newspapers of the late 1880s carried stories of such accidents and told of how fishermen, when catching the stingaree, would cut off the tail and throw the otherwise harmless fish back into the water."

In Shakespeare’s time, Shoreditch became a restricted area. Situated across the Thames from London, the district had 100 brothels, bear-baiting, gambling, and, because rents were so cheap, theaters. Constables and gendarmes looked the other way, the theory being if you limit vice to one area of a city, it won’t infect the rest.

By 1912, San Diego’s “restricted” district, the Stingaree, thrived. “Shootings, fist-fights, prostitution, crime, and drugs became a matter of fact...buildings were often put up as fast as they could be made out of board. Absentee landlords lived off the profits of the saloons, the ladies of the evening, and the drunks who could be robbed.”

Maggie McCutcheon — alias “Maggie Bangs” — was a sporting woman found dead in 1881. Typical of the look-the-other-way policy, the police couldn't determine if her consort, Charlie Gordon, shot her or if she committed suicide. The court declared a case of insufficient evidence.

Frank Klaiger, owner of a bar on Sixth Avenue, accused Ada Maxwell of stealing $65. He described her as “a young woman with raven tresses, coal-black eyes, powder-white complexion, a queenly carriage, and a tarnished reputation."

Klaiger grabbed a gun, went to Ada’s home at Fourth and island, and fired through a window. Her “Enforcer,” J. “Bull" Conrad, raced outside and punched Klaiger. All three went to jail.

The Stingaree got so tough, when a newspaper reporter toured “the Pagan Settlement of San Diego” with five others, they demanded a police escort.

An intrepid reporter “disguised himself as a denizen” and toured the district, “for few know of the habitues, corruption, vice, debauchery, and crime in the Stingaree... as theatric pianos, discordant banjos, and fiddles and half-drunken voices” make the area as bad, “if not worse, than the notorious Barbary Coast district of San Francisco. The Hub is around 2 or 3 saloons at I or K Streets."

Down on “Rabbit Row,” between Fifth and the bay, Till Burnes ran a saloon unlike the rest. Instead of decorating the place with “lifeless pictures or objects,” he had a “Happy Family," including quail, doves, a pigeon, a rooster, several rabbits in a large cage, “and all seemed satisfied with their quarters." Spiderwebs a foot thick hovered over the patrons. Burnes also had hound dogs and a bat, with a two-foot wingspread, he claimed was a vampire.

Burnes found a leopard seal at Ballast Point. He put the seal on exhibition, but it “took cold during a rainstorm and died of quick consumption. Its demise threw a gloom over the lower end of Fifth Street. A friend, in order to cast a new ray on the place to forget the seal, gave Burnes a 16-inch-long Gila monster.”

When the Gila monster died a few months later, the local taxidermist, Robert Campion, performed last rites over the animal before stuffing it.

The pet bear, kept in a cage instead of chained to a post, was too vicious. When Frank Nelson was feeding the bear it bit off a finger on his left hand.

Burnes had monkeys, but they kept eating the bar's hard-boiled eggs. So Burnes gave the monkeys very hot eggs, which they dropped quickly. “Reportedly the air was blue with monkey swearing and chattering for a few minutes.”

When the last of his monkeys died, Burnes decided to give up what was, in effect, San Diego's first zoo.