Digital Bob Archive

Notes Along the Way

The Guffy Building has probably had fewer occupants than any other business building of its age in the Juneau Historic District.

In the summer of 1913, when a building boom was getting started in Juneau, J.H.
Guffy came down from Nome and took a long term lease on property owned by the Olds Estate on what was then Lower Front Street. Guffy tore down an old building that was occupied by the Green Bros. second hand store and put up a one-story commercial building. It was ready for occupancy by the end of October and the first tenants were Nelson & Osborne, Jewelers, and The Fashion, a women's apparel shop run by Mrs. Edward Jones and Miss Ellen Anderson.

Early in 1914 both these tenants moved to other locations and Guffy, who owned the Butler, Mauro Drug Store in Nome, began remodeling his building for a Juneau branch of that firm. It opened in July, 1914, and remained in business there for very nearly 50 years.

The next tenant was the federal government which rented the space for the district offices of the Federal Aviation Agency. The opening of the new Juneau Federal Building in 1965 left the Guffy Building vacant and in October of that year Gordon and Virginia Kanouse moved their Red Dog Saloon into it from the location across the street where they had opened it 15 years earlier.

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Some six months after Governor Bone took office in 1921, the late \"Stroller\" White wrote in an editorial column: \"If the new governor tries to do one quarter of the things some people want him to do, he might as well burn his bed or offer it for sale - he will have no chance to use it.\" No bonfires at the Mansion this time around. So far!

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The Swede Hill Tunnel was one of the names for it when the Alaska Juneau Gold Mining Company began driving a haulage tunnel from Last Chance Basin to the Juneau side of the mountain, back in 1913. Today the tunnel is used by the City of Juneau for water storage and it has been the subject of some contention. That is nothing new. It had hardly been started when John Reck, Sam Kohn and J.B. Caro filed a suit seeking an injunction to stop the work. The three owned the Black Diamond and other claims on Mount Roberts and asserted the tunnel would damage their claims. There was an out-of-court settlement \"satisfactory to all parties.\" The plaintiffs were to have the right of access to their claims by means of the tunnel and to take samples from the rock in the tunnel. The claims proved to have held too little gold to be worth working, which may say something about the relaxed attitude of some mineral surveyors of early years.