Posts Tagged ‘prostitution’

He has been called the greatest benefactor in San Ysidro history–a mining engineer turned rancher who donated land for churches and schools, and funded the community’s first public library. Dimly remembered today as the namesake of streets and schools, Frank B. Beyer is less known as the “gambler from the owner’s side of the table,”a man with a colorful career below the border, who spent his last years giving back his wealth to his adopted community.

The story Frank “Booze” Beyer and Tijuana.

San Diego Union, Jan. 18, 1904

There are men and women, boys and girls, steadily, but surely, patrolling the path that leads to eternal ruin. It is for us to rescue them. –Mrs. R. A. Rood, vice-president, Purity League of San Diego

On Friday afternoon, August 7, 1903, forty gravely concerned San Diego women went to church. Meeting at the First Methodist Episcopal Church on the corner of D (Broadway) and Fourth Street, the ladies discussed the growing moral peril found in city’s notorious Stingaree District home to “houses houses of impurity” and unfortunate women “caught in the toils.”

The story of San Diego’s first attempt to close the “Stingaree.” The Purity League.

What has become of the police force? The archives of the city show that there is such an organization here, yet . . . the criminal element has been holding high carnival during the last few days, “the guardians of the peace” have done nothing to indicate they are on duty. –San Diego Union, August 6, 1887.

Fighting crime in 1887 San Diego: Policing the City.

 

The closing of the Stingaree.

Strolling down Fifth Street any evening, the ear is rasped by the notes from asthmatic pianos, discordant banjos and fiddles, and half-drunken voices that sing boisterous and ribald songs. The eye is pained to see one, two, or perhaps three men on each corner, so intoxicated that they can barely stand . . . the lower Fifth Street in San Diego is fully as bad, if not worse than the notorious Barbary Coast district of San Francisco . . .

Read about the Stingaree.