Wyatt Earp arrived in San Diego around 1885, a few years after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. San Diego in 1885 was a boomtown — land prices had more than doubled in two years, speculators were arriving on every train, and the waterfront district called the Stingaree was the kind of place that suited someone with Earp's particular skill set.
The Stingaree occupied the blocks between Market Street and the waterfront, near where the bay met the downtown. It was a port district in every sense: ships tied up within walking distance, sailors who had crossed the Pacific arrived with money, and the businesses that grew up to serve them did not specialize in quiet evenings. Saloons, gambling halls, hotels of varying reputability, and a general atmosphere of commercial vice made it one of the liveliest districts on the West Coast.
Earp leased four saloons and gambling halls in the Stingaree and is listed in the 1887 San Diego city directory simply as a "capitalist." His most famous establishment, the Oyster Bar, operated on the ground floor of the Louis Bank of Commerce on Fifth Avenue. That building still stands.
The San Diego land boom collapsed in 1888, as sharply as it had risen. Real estate values crashed. Businesses that had seemed inevitable contracted or closed. Earp stayed through the boom's end and eventually left San Diego for other ventures — Alaska, Nevada, Los Angeles. He had been in San Diego for roughly five years.
The Stingaree itself was eventually reformed — in 1912, a raid organized by the police department shut down the district's most conspicuous establishments over a single weekend. The area was redeveloped over the following decades, its character slowly changing from waterfront vice district to warehouse district to, eventually, the Gaslamp Quarter — San Diego's entertainment district, restored and rebuilt in the 1980s and 1990s as a historic commercial neighborhood.
The Louis Bank of Commerce building at Fifth and G Streets is on the National Register of Historic Places. The ground floor that housed Earp's Oyster Bar is now occupied by other businesses, but the facade and the bones of the building are the same ones Earp walked past daily in 1887. The Gaslamp Quarter's Victorian-era commercial buildings — approximately 90 of them — represent one of the largest concentrations of Victorian commercial architecture in the United States.
From the water, the Gaslamp Quarter is not visible — it sits a few blocks inland from the Embarcadero. But the waterfront it faced, and the commerce it depended on, ran right along the bay you are sailing on now.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Wyatt Earp in San Diego"; 1887 San Diego City Directory; San Diego Historical Site Board records, Louis Bank of Commerce.
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