Digital Bob Archive

The Red Light. That was the name of the place, according to the invitation. It was an elegant invitation, printed in script type, using gold ink on a red velvet-finished paper. It read, in full:

\"Yourself and Friends are cordially invited to be present at the Opening of the Red Light, by Miss Gertie Joseph, on Saturday Evening, Feb. 15, 1896. Main Street, between Front and Second, Juneau.\"

Who received the invitation? How were they delivered? Did they go through the mail? How many attended on that Saturday evening, the day after Valentine Day?
The newspapers answered none of those questions. They did not even publish a guest list.

Was Miss Joseph attempting to move Juneau's red light district from a couple of blocks on Lower Front Street up to Main Street? If so, she failed. The district pretty much stayed on Lower Front, beginning at a point near the triangle corner. But Jueanu's red light district was never a restricted district, surrounded by high fences as the districts were at Nome and Fairbanks after those towns came into being.

At the time the 1904 edition of the Sanford fire map was drawn, four buildings on the water side of Lower Front, between the triangle corner and the Alaska Steam Laundry, were labeled on the map \"Female Boarding.\" One of these had three floors and two others had two floors each, with saloons on the street level. In all of them the upstairs consisted of tiny rooms known in street slang as cribs. The inmates of the cribs commonly promoted their trade in the several dance halls in the area although there was a local ordinance prohibiting women from \"loitering\" in the saloons. The ordinance seems to have been largely ignored, but what were not ignored were orders of the U.S. District Courts that closed every dance hall in Alaska on July 1, 1908. The Lourvre, now the Imperial, closed its doors entirely; the Germania and Peerless covered their dance floors and became straight saloons.

Not all of the occupants of the upstairs cribs were women. In January, 1909, Robert F. Straud, whose nickname at that time was \"the Peanut Kid,\" and his girl, Kate Dulaney, also known as Kittie O'Brien, were living in Room 12 in one of the buildings. One night Kittie went out on a call to a little house on Fourth Street, and after she returned Straud went up to Fourth and shot her customer to death. Subsequently, in prison, he gained his second nickname, \"The Birdman of Alcatraz.\"

On the opposite side of Lower Front, commencing at George Forrest's Juneau Iron Works where the Senate Building is today, the 1904 map shows a \"row of cribs.\" These were small cabins, some of them not much more than shacks.

By 1913, as the town experienced a building boom and began to expand southward, the red light district moved down toward where the Alaska Juneau Mining Company was planning to build its mill.