Creek Street

Ketchikan’s Creek Street was early Alaska’s most infamous red-light district, a concentration of bawdy houses created after a 1903 city order moved prostitution into a single area along the creek. Built on pilings on both sides of the water, its ramshackle houses served a male workforce drawn by mining, fishing, and later timber, and crews from the North Pacific halibut and salmon fleets were lured there by the porch lights of women such as Black Mary, Thelma Baker, and Dolly Arthur, along with many others using stage names. Creek Street became both a center of vice and a social, news, and job hub for fishermen returning from the fishing grounds, with the Star dance hall at No. 5 standing out as a larger establishment run by Black Mary Thomas and later Thelma Baker. Fourteen houses operated in 1914; in 1920, 31 female boarders occupied 21 houses; and after World War II some 33 houses were listed. Though abatement efforts shut the district briefly in the teens and twenties, prostitution flourished there for more than 50 years until its final closure in 1954 followed a federal grand jury investigation that exposed police graft and city tolerance, putting 22 girls and 18 houses out of business. Its long history of scandal, mayhem, and sordid notoriety endured even after the district was banished.

Saxman, Alaska · United States