The Cotheret Building still stands on a quiet stretch of downtown San Diego, but behind it once lay a hidden world accessed through a narrow alley.
From the street, the structure reads as ordinary commercial architecture, its 1903 balcony one of the last surviving details from an earlier version of the city. Despite everything that has changed around it, the building’s outward presence remains largely intact.
Hidden secrets
Just to the right, a narrow alley once cut between buildings and opened into a concealed layer of downtown life — rear-lot structures tied to the Canary Cottage and the Pan Tan Gambling House. It was a passage most people would have missed unless they knew where to look.
At left: Cotheret Building, photo by Maja Tajima, Feb. 16, 2012. At right: Alley to the Canary Cottage & Pan Tan Gambling House, photo by Dean Whittle, 2012.Both courtesy hmdb.org.Behind the façade of storefronts and rented rooms, the city operated in a different register entirely.
A layered red-light district once existed here — compressed into small blocks, concealed behind commercial fronts, and woven into the gaps between buildings rather than announced by them.
Who was Bailey?
Within that world, one name appears repeatedly in fragmentary historical references: Madam Ida Bailey.
Bailey is most consistently associated with the Canary Cottage, described in preservation-era and secondary historical accounts as one of the more established houses operating in the district during its most active years.
What survives of Bailey is limited. There is no confirmed portrait and no known personal archive. Her presence in the historical record is reconstructed primarily through references to the Canary Cottage, reform-era reporting, and later historical interpretation of the district.
Because of this, much of what is known about Bailey is tied to place rather than biography. The Canary Cottage remains the most consistent anchor for her name within the surviving record.
Bailey did not operate in isolation. The Stingaree District contained multiple competing houses run by different madams within a very small geographic area.
Competition
Some historical accounts suggest that Bailey operated alongside contemporaries whose names appear inconsistently in the record. One such figure is sometimes identified in secondary accounts by the surname Desmond, though documentation is not consistent across sources, and details of individual rivalries are not fully verifiable.
What can be stated with confidence is that Bailey’s Canary Cottage existed within a crowded and highly competitive environment shaped by San Diego’s port economy, transient labor population, and shifting enforcement pressure.
Rather than a single defined hierarchy, the district functioned as an overlapping network of small establishments operating in proximity, often changing names, operators, or locations as conditions shifted.
The Stingaree District — later absorbed into what is now the Gaslamp Quarter — was a tightly concentrated area of downtown San Diego in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It included saloons, boarding houses, gambling rooms, and other businesses operating within a few compact blocks near the waterfront.
The district became the focus of repeated reform-era crackdowns in the early 1900s, leading to raids, closures, and eventual redevelopment. Over time, it lost its informal identity as the city moved toward a more regulated commercial downtown.
View of the Stingaree district of downtown San Diego. The Stingaree district was located in the area of Third (3rd Avenue) and Island Avenue. This view is looking at the west side of 3rd Avenue south from Island Avenue in the early 1900s. (Photo and caption info courtesy of the San Diego History Center)Still standing
The Cotheret Building remains one of the few physical structures from this era still standing. Its location and surviving architectural details help illustrate how downtown was organized in layers — street-facing commerce in front, with alley-accessed structures and rear-lot buildings behind.
While the building itself was part of the commercial streetscape, its proximity to these rear access points places it within the broader geography of a district where visible and hidden economies often existed side-by-side.
Today, the Canary Cottage survives only through references in historical accounts and preservation-era documentation. Ida Bailey remains a figure known primarily through those fragments, tied to place rather than personal record.
View of the map of Stingaree in 1912 used by Walter Bellon. The map shows the outline of buildings in Stingaree, including Canary Cottage, Woo Chae Chong [Company] mislabeled as Quon Mane’s (which was on 5th Avenue), and Ah Quinn’s residence. (Photo and caption info courtesy of the San Diego History Center)Even the suggestion of rivalry among madams in the district reflects a broader truth about the Stingaree: it was a densely populated, highly competitive environment, but one where individual histories were rarely recorded in full detail.
View of a copy of a newspaper front page from the San Diego Union newspaper in November 1912, where 138 women were arrested in the Stingaree Raid. Stingaree was also known as the Red Light District. Walter Bellon sought to clean up prostitution, saloons, gambling, and other activities. (Photo and caption info courtesy of the San Diego History Center)What remains is a partial history, built from buildings, alleyways, newspaper fragments, and later interpretation.
And among them, the Cotheret Building still stands, marking the edge of a downtown layered with histories that are visible in structure, but only partially preserved in record.
Read more history stories here, and do you have a story to tell? Send an email to DebbieSklar@cox.net.
Sources:
San Diego Planning Department – Uptown Community Plan.San Diego Historical Resources Board – historic context and preservation records.San Diego History Center – archival photographs, neighborhood history, and regional documentation.Other various reports.
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