The Old Tub of Blood, and the corner that has nothing left to show

Four corners of nothing in particular

There is no plaque at Third and Island. Nothing marks it, nothing interprets it, and a visitor standing in the crosswalk would have no reason to look twice. That is worth knowing before you read the rest, because everything below happened inside a few hundred feet of that spot and none of it survives above ground.

On the southwest corner stood a saloon called the Old Tub of Blood. Directly across from it, on the southeast corner, stood a second saloon called the Seven Buckets of Blood. Neither name was ironic. Just south of them was the Green Light, a parlor house, and running east from Third toward Fourth were two long rows of one-room cribs known as the Stables, or the Bullpen. Yankee Doodle Hall anchored Third and J. The Pacific Squadron Hall anchored Fourth and J. The single block bounded by Fourth, Fifth, J and K held twenty-one saloons at its peak.

This was the Stingaree, San Diego's restricted district, roughly twelve blocks between First and Fifth and between Market and K. Where the name came from is genuinely unsettled. One account traces it to the stingrays in the mudflats along the waterfront, on the logic that anybody who came down here was going to get stung. Another traces it to an older row of buildings on lower Fifth. The historian who laid out both accounts declined to choose between them, and so do we.

The women of the cribs

Behind Pete Cassidy's saloon on Fifth was a second compound holding at least fifty more cribs. A woman paid fourteen dollars a week for a single room, plus a percentage of what she earned, plus, usually, a further cut to whoever was calling himself her protector. Over each door was a name. Rosie. Dolly. Inside there were plaster cherubs on the walls and, often enough that more than one visitor remarked on it, a printed copy of the Lord's Prayer.

It is worth saying plainly what that arrangement was. This district ran on the sale of women, a number of whom were teenagers by their own account, and the rent structure was designed so that almost nobody got out from under it. The 1974 historian who first assembled this material treated those women with a good deal more sympathy than her era asked of her. That is the right register for the story and we are not going to lower it.

The men who walked in and stopped existing

Detectives working the early 1900s knew this block and hated it. Their complaint was specific and strange: a man they were chasing would turn off Fourth Street into the compound behind the halls, into a courtyard with one way in and one way out, and then simply not be there. Not run. Not fight. Officers described it as though the man had vanished by magic.

The city plumbing inspector who eventually dismantled the place had a flatter theory, and he is the reason we have any of this. Blind rooms, he thought. Sealed chambers built behind the back wall of the cribs, with no window, no marked door and no opening on any elevation a policeman standing outside could see. He offered that explanation himself, which is a useful thing in a source. He was not selling a mystery.

There is a second set of stories from the demolition, and these come with a caveat attached. When the cribs behind the Yankee Doodle and Pacific Squadron halls came down, workmen said they were finding things under the floorboards. Silver, according to more than one of them. One man dug out two hundred and fifty beer bottles and sold them across the street at thirty cents a dozen. Another is said to have found a cache of something, put his coat on, and walked off the job in the middle of the day without stopping to collect his pay. The inspector relayed all of that as what the workmen claimed, not as something he witnessed, and it should be read the same way. What is not in question is that police knew caches of drugs and liquor were hidden through this block, and that the buildings came down faster than anyone searched them.

Walter Bellon

The man who documented the Stingaree was a plumber from New Jersey. Walter Bellon became San Diego's City Plumbing Inspector in 1909 and spent the next six years dismantling the district building by building, on the authority of the health code.

He walked into Cassidy's compound alone the first time. Two men wearing shoulder holsters stopped him at the entrance and told him it was private ground. He quoted the law at them and walked through anyway, with the whole yard watching him from the doorways.

Anonymous letters followed, promising to kill him. The Chief of Police eventually refused to let him travel the district alone and assigned him two officers, Walter Weymouth and Reg Townsend, both over six feet and over two hundred pounds. Townsend was among the first Black police officers in San Diego. Some time after the detail ended, Weymouth was shot in the stomach on the waterfront at night. Bellon had left him only minutes earlier. The two men were often mistaken for one another, and Bellon believed for the rest of his life that the bullet had been meant for him.

Between 1912 and 1916 he removed a hundred and twenty structures from this district. He wrote his memoirs afterward and then sat on them for decades, on the view that the story could only be told properly once enough time had passed and enough people were gone. He handed the manuscript over shortly before he died in 1972, at ninety-one.

October 2, 1915

The Old Tub of Blood came down on the morning of October 2, 1915. The San Diego Sun ran a piece on it the same day, called the place a center of all-night debauchery, and closed by observing that none of the falling landmarks had more real history attached to it than the shanty that went down that morning, and which was now only a memory.

That is the whole reason this corner is worth standing on. There is no ghost story here and it does not need one. A named eyewitness, a health department map, a demolition date printed in a newspaper, and a district that fits inside twelve blocks you can walk in twenty minutes. Most hauntings are not this well attested.

Sources

Elizabeth C. MacPhail, "Shady Ladies in the Stingaree District," Journal of San Diego History, Spring 1974, Volume 20 Number 2. Source for the district boundaries, the saloons on each corner, the Green Light, the Stables and Bullpen, the halls at Third and J and Fourth and J, the twenty-one saloons in the Fourth to Fifth block, and the two competing origins for the name Stingaree, which she declines to choose between.

Walter Bellon, Memoirs, unpublished manuscript, Serra Museum Research Library, San Diego History Center, reached here through MacPhail. Source for the crib rents and the names over the doors, the suspects disappearing off Fourth Street, the blind-room explanation which is Bellon's own, the workmen's accounts from the demolition, his bodyguards Weymouth and Townsend, the shooting on the waterfront, and the count of a hundred and twenty structures removed between 1912 and 1916. The floorboard finds are Bellon reporting what workmen told him, and are presented here as report rather than record.

San Diego Sun, October 2, 1915. Source for the demolition date of the Old Tub of Blood and for the quoted closing line.

Richard F. Pourade, The Glory Years, Union-Tribune, 1964, and San Diego Union, November 3, 1887, for the wider picture of lower Fifth in this period.

Bellon's hand-drawn map of the Stingaree is held at the San Diego History Center and has not been pulled for this article. It would place every building named above on its own parcel.