The Oyster Bar on Fifth Avenue was among the Stingaree's most popular saloons. Upstairs was a brothel called the Golden Poppy, where each room was painted a different color and each woman who worked there wore a matching dress — an arrangement that doubled as both organization and advertisement. This kind of layered commerce — respectable establishment below, vice above — was common in the district. The boundaries of the Stingaree were contested even at the time; the Health Department placed them at First and Fifth Avenues east to west, Market and K Streets north to south. The neighborhood functioned as a pressure valve for a city growing rapidly and unevenly.

The southwestern corner of the Stingaree — between Market, K, First, and Fourth — was San Diego's Chinatown from the 1860s until the 1930s. Chinese residents in California faced organized and sometimes violent exclusion: laws that made hiring Chinese workers a crime if non-Chinese workers were available, police powers deployed against Chinese-owned businesses, and broader anti-Chinese movements that operated with civic sanction. The Stingaree became a site of labor conflict more broadly. When Emma Goldman came to speak in San Diego, vigilantes drove her out of the city. Her manager Ben Reitman was kidnapped; the letters IWW were branded onto him and he was tarred and sagebrushed. What followed were years of demonstrations by the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Federation of Labor, and other labor organizations — demonstrations the police often suppressed with force.

On a single night in 1916, city authorities conducted a sweeping vice raid across the Stingaree. Hundreds of people were displaced — women who worked in the district's brothels, residents of its rooming houses, operators of its saloons and shops. The raid was framed as a public health and morality campaign, but it functioned as the erasure of a neighborhood that the city had decided was incompatible with its self-image. The character of the area as a red-light district persisted in attenuated form through subsequent decades, until the massive redevelopment of the 1980s cleared what remained.

The Gaslamp Quarter, which now occupies the former Stingaree's territory, was built as an 1880s-themed upscale retail and entertainment district. Its Victorian architecture and gaslit-era aesthetics reference the period of the Stingaree without referencing the Stingaree itself — without the labor fights, the Chinatown, the brothels, the working-class residents displaced by eminent domain and tax increment financing. Historical recreationism of this kind is common in American cities, where the surface of an era can be marketed without its substance. The neighborhood that replaced the Stingaree is an attractive place to eat and drink. It is essentially fictional.