Spenard is arguably Anchorage’s most colorful neighborhood, steeped in a history of vice with its seedy underside clearly visible to all who cared to look, or simply drive along Spenard Road, the curving thoroughfare that winds over two miles through the town’s westside.
The community takes its names from Joseph “Joe” Arthur Spenard, a bootlegger who squatted on land that was designated at the time as a national forest. In 1916, Spenard nonetheless blazed a trail to a scenic lake about four miles from downtown Anchorage. He claimed to have improved the land and made a lakeside resort. Failing to secure title to federal land was only one of Joe Spenard’s transgressions. He was also a bootlegger and something of an impresario who bounced from town to town; he ultimately left Southcentral Alaska for good within two years. His so-called resort burned down and little evidence of it may be found in the area today.
Nonetheless, it might be fitting that Anchorage’s most notorious neighborhood is named after lawbreaker. The built environment of modern-day Spenard no longer includes muddy impassable roads jutting into a boreal forest. Nor does it include the same number of illicit businesses and fronts. But the community nonetheless bears a patchwork of architectural oddities; each one partly reveals the highly spirited history of Anchorage’s most infamous neighborhood.
Spenard remained a lightly settled part of the greater Anchorage area through the 1950s and 1960s. But as a western town with a heavily male work force, Anchorage’s history has long included adult entertainment of one variety or another. As early as the 1910s city leaders, many of whom were on the federal payroll organizing the construction of the Alaska Railroad, supported the establishment of a red-light district in what is now South Addition, just south of Anchorage’s downtown. The men who arrived to work on the railroad spurred demand in the nascent vice district. In the years immediately after, it was barely a secret that many downtown businesses doubled as fronts for gambling, bootlegging, drugs, and prostitution.
In the postwar decades, Anchorage’s economy, like the rest of Alaska remained mostly tied to federal spending. Much of the economic activity in the region centered on Southcentral Alaska’s two large military installations: Fort Richardson and the Elmendorf Air Force Base. However, the construction of an eight-hundred mile oil pipeline set the stage for Alaska’s next major economic boom. It would alter the culture and physical landscape of Anchorage in profound ways.
As the nation’s economy sagged in the 1970s, Alaska’s took off, fueled by the discovery of North America’s largest oil field along the Arctic Slope. A population of young and well-paid workers flooded into Anchorage to work in the oil industry. Perhaps not surprisingly, the demand for adult entertainment rose precipitously. Indeed, the average Anchorage resident’s age dropped into the low 20s, and, as during all previous Alaska booms and rushes, far more men than women made the move North. Bars, adult theaters, strip clubs, massage parlors, and brothels proliferated throughout the Anchorage bowl, but Spenard would become the indisputable epicenter of such activity.
Anchoring the neighborhood on its north end is Chilkoot Charlie’s, arguably Alaska’s most famous bar. Chilkoot Charlie’s began modestly enough as a small wooden structure, reminiscent of a log cabin, in 1970. It was known as an Alaskan theme bar that catered to locals in the community and those who looked for an alternative to downtown. But over the next several years, the bar continued to add rooms and space until it turned into a sprawling entertainment complex that was even named the #1 Bar in America by Playboy magazine in 2000. Chilkoot Charlie’s is uniquely suited to Alaska’s cold climate, offering an indoor labyrinth of adult entertainment, including sawdust-covered floors, three performance stages, three dance floors and ten bars, all wrapped into one patchwork building. Each bar has its own theme; there is a “Russian Room,” “Rustic Alaska Saloon,” “Piano Bar,” and even a small bar with walls covered in undergarments.
Over the years, such artists as Metallica, Ted Nugent, Bad Company, Bon Jovi, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ratt, Journey, Ozzy Osbourne, and many others have either played at Chilkoot Charlie's or come through to party after their Anchorage concerts. Much credit to the explosive growth and popularity of Chilkoot Charlie’s should rightly go to the bar’s longtime owner and manager, Mike Gordon. Gordon maintained that the business largely benefited from the oil boom and an influx of young people who were looking for a place to party and spend their disposable income. In Chilkoot Charlie’s, they certainly found one.
Aside from Chilkoot Charlie’s, Spenard’s entertainment options tended towards the illicit. In fact, Anchorage quickly earned a national reputation as a town where sex workers could double their Lower 48 income and adult establishments were plentiful. The more popular adult performers also received round-trip travel, housing, and living expenses. As early 1952, well before the oil boom, there were roughly 305 bars and night clubs in greater Anchorage. Per Variety magazine, an estimated 90 percent of these offered some form of adult entertainment, including private dances and strip teases, burlesque shows, female impersonators, and prostitution. One club owner declared, “The U.S. paid $7,200,000 for the whole Territory of Alaska when they bought it from Russia in 1867. I figure we’re paying that much a year now to get acts up here!”
This trend grew even more exaggerated in the booming 1970s. One dancer claimed, “it was nothing for us to make 3 to 5 thousand [about 13-22 thousand dollars in 2020] a night during the height of the pipeline.” And she worked at one of the less respectable establishments. Other adult workers from this time recalled the exotic and expensive items tossed onto stages as tips, including bits of ivory, gold, and vials of cocaine.
Spenard had a rough reputation before the oil boom, but the 1970s was when the neighborhood perception became intricately linked to vice and crime. "Spenard Road in the '70s was just a parade of massage parlors and bars," said area icon and musician, Mr. Whitekeys. For example, at the intersection of 36th Street and Spenard Road is a newly constructed Cook Inlet Housing Authority building. But for decades prior, that was the site of PJs, an infamous strip club owned and managed by Joseph “Papa Joe” Miljus. PJs closed in 2010 after the subsequent owner, Hallie Dean McGinnis, was convicted of drug trafficking.
The building at 710 W. Northern Lights Boulevard, immediately east of a McDonald's fast food restaurant, currently houses a salon and tailor. But for decades, this was the site of the Swinger Theatre, an adult bookstore and movie theater that opened in 1976. During the late 1970s, pornographic movies played around the clock. In 1993, a fire gutted a VCR viewing room after a careless customer dropped a cigarette. In one of the more recent reclamations, what is now the Writer’s Block café and bookstore was previously a squat, gray adult theater known as the Adults Only for its last remaining outdoor sign. The new owners are more open about the building’s past, even hosting an erotic art show in 2016 before demolishing the old structure.
The Adults Only store was in many ways typical of these buildings. They were built with low cost material, usually wood and cinder block, and constructed in haste to accommodate the rush of workers who demanded entertainment and had the disposable income to spend on it. Aside from the raucous bars and adult parlors, one could find an array of cheaply built hourly- and low-rent motels that catered to itinerant men and women who used the rooms for illicit and illegal purposes. Two of the more well-known that remain in the neighborhood today are the Chelsea Inn Hotel and the Spenard Motel.
Many of the 1970s and 1980s massage parlors and escort services were open about the available services, whether through signage or the name itself. Massage parlors listings from the 1977–78 Anchorage phonebook included racy establishments such as the “Touch N Glow,” “Sensuous Lady,” and “Bill’s Massage for Ladies.” Both major Anchorage newspapers, the Anchorage Times and the Anchorage Daily News, regularly ran advertisements for various forms of adult entertainment along Spenard Road and elsewhere.
One of the more notorious Spenard brothels that hid behind a front was the Pagoda. The Spenard Pagoda building was three stories tall and mimicked aspects of Asian pagodas, including curled eaves and a tiered structure. The building was completed in 1973 with 800 tons of Granite Creek stone on the exterior. The original design also featured two “fire-breathing” stone dragons at the front and an interior waterfall that fell from the second floor to a first-floor fishpond.
The Pagoda’s first floor opened as an Asian imports furniture store but soon transitioned to food. Other businesses soon took over the second floor: gambling and prostitution. There, the next owner of the building discovered eight rooms—prostitute cribs—and a money chute that led outside. This new owner relocated his restaurant to the building, but first had the stone dragon heads removed and replaced with more Alaskan-themed walrus heads. The curled eaves remain. The dining establishment that currently occupies the space is Gwennie’s Old Alaska Restaurant, a beloved breakfast spot to many longtime Alaskans, newcomers, and tourists. Most are unlikely aware of the building’s illicit history.