Wyatt Earp in the Stingaree

Wyatt Earp arrived in San Diego in eighteen eighty-five, a few years after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral had made his name, and he was not here to rest on his reputation. He was here to make money. He leased four saloons and gambling halls in the sixteen-block district south of Market Street that San Diegans called the Stingaree, a name derived from the stingray, on the theory that you could be stung as badly in this neighborhood as you could in the bay.

The Stingaree at its peak contained more than one hundred twenty establishments: saloons, gambling halls, opium dens, and brothels running around the clock in a contained vice economy that the city's respectable classes had decided to tolerate as a kind of pressure relief valve. Earp's flagship operation was the Oyster Bar in the Louis Bank of Commerce building on Fifth Avenue, where he ran gambling on the ground floor. Above the Oyster Bar, on the upper floors, the Golden Poppy brothel operated. The two businesses were, at minimum, under the same roof. He also invested in real estate during San Diego's land boom of the eighteen eighties and lived for a period at the Horton Grand Hotel, which still stands nearby.

He was still here in eighteen ninety-three, which means his Stingaree years overlapped with the boom, the bust, and the slow retrenchment that followed. In nineteen twelve, a police commissioner led a coordinated cleanup raid that shuttered most of the district's establishments overnight. Within a few years, the brothels and gambling halls were gone, and the Stingaree's sixteen blocks began the long process of renovation that eventually produced what is now the Gaslamp Quarter historic district.

Earp's gambling halls are today bar and restaurant space. The Louis Bank of Commerce building is still there. The Golden Poppy is not named on any current business license.