Posts Tagged ‘Purity League’

11th January
2012
written by Richard

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.

23rd April
2010
written by Richard

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.