The quarrying economy that named the area eventually gave way to denser development. Today Quarry Bay is a residential and commercial district in the Eastern District of Hong Kong Island, bordered by Sai Wan Ho to the east, Mount Parker to the south, North Point to the west, and Victoria Harbour to the north. One Island East, among Hong Kong's tallest buildings, anchors the district's skyline. Government departments have relocated offices here from Central and Wan Chai over the years; multinational companies including Ernst and Young, BNP Paribas, LVMH, and Boston Consulting Group maintain offices in the district. Cityplaza and Kornhill Plaza together form one of the larger shopping mall complexes on Hong Kong Island. The MTR's Island Line and Tseung Kwan O Line intersect at Quarry Bay Station, making the district a transit hub as well as a destination.

At some point — the exact moment is hard to pinpoint — a cluster of five interconnected residential towers in Quarry Bay acquired the nickname 'Monster Building.' The name refers to the complex of Fook Cheong Building, Montane Mansion, Oceanic Mansion, Yick Cheong Building, and Yick Fat Building — five high-rises whose internal courtyards and connecting corridors create a dense, layered residential world of extraordinary visual intensity. Seen from below, looking up through the central atrium, the towers stack and crowd against the sky in a way that feels genuinely excessive. Photographers have made the shot famous; it has appeared in films. The buildings are not remarkable by any individual measure — they are simply residential towers from the dense-construction era of Hong Kong's expansion — but together, in the particular arrangement they happen to occupy, they produce something that people travel specifically to see.

In Quarry Bay Park, in the Central Concourse, a retired fireboat named the Alexander Grantham sits in permanent dry dock. It was a working vessel of the Hong Kong Fire Services Department, named after former Governor Sir Alexander Grantham. On 10 March 2006, the boat was hoisted into its current location — a careful operation that moved a large vessel into a space designed to display it. It opened to the public as the Fireboat Alexander Grantham Exhibition Gallery in 2007. Inside, multimedia exhibits cover the boat's history and the history of firefighting in Hong Kong. The fireboat has been replaced in service by newer vessels; its function is now entirely memorial and educational. It is a peculiar and effective monument: a working machine preserved in the middle of a park, doing the thing that museums do best — making the past physically real.

The hillside above Quarry Bay has not forgotten the war. Along the Mount Parker Road Green Trail and the Hong Pak Country Trail, wartime remains — Wartime Stoves and Anti-Air-Raid Caves — have been preserved in the landscape. Hikers encounter them between the benches and pavilions of what is now a recreational trail system. Mount Parker itself, along with Mount Butler and Siu Ma Shan, offers hiking that connects further to Jardine's Lookout and the Tai Tam Reservoirs. Stanley is reachable from Tai Tam via Violet Hill. The trail network makes Quarry Bay a gateway into the eastern hinterland of Hong Kong Island, where the second-growth forest and granite ridgelines feel far removed from the dense residential towers visible below. The Woodside Biodiversity Education Centre, housed in a building known as the Red House on Mount Parker Road, introduces visitors to Hong Kong's wildlife through three themed exhibition galleries.

The largest private residential development in Quarry Bay is Taikoo Shing — 61 mansion blocks distributed along Taikoo Wan Road and Taikoo Shing Road, developed by Swire. The development represents a particular phase of Hong Kong's residential history, when large private estates created self-contained neighbourhoods within the city. Nan Fung Sun Chuen, built in 1978, sits nearby: 2,827 apartment units in 12 buildings along Greig Road and Greig Crescent, developed by Nan Fung, and considered a benchmark for Hong Kong residential development of the late 1970s. Together, these estates and the commercial buildings around them constitute a district that grew from a quarry and a creek into one of the denser communities on Hong Kong Island — a transformation that took roughly a century and a half, and left almost no trace of the beginning.