'Cat' Houses & Sporting Women

Ketchikan's Creek Street was early Alaska's most infamous red-light district, a place of speakeasies and sporting women whose porch light globes, inscribed with their names, drew crews from the North Pacific halibut and salmon fleets. In a city that served first mining, then fishing, and later timber as a transportation and supply hub, prostitution flourished for more than 50 years among a large male-worker population. The district was formally concentrated in 1903, when the City Council ordered all bawdy houses moved to a single location in the Creek Street area, where ramshackle houses on pilings rose along both sides of the creek. Fourteen operated in 1914, and in 1920, 31 female boarders occupied 21 houses; after World War II, some 33 houses were listed. Repeated abatement efforts shut the area briefly in the teens and twenties, but the final closure came in 1954 after a federal grand jury investigation exposed police graft and city tolerance, putting 22 girls in 18 houses out of business. Though notorious for scandal, mayhem, and occasional corpses floating downstream with empty hootch bottles, Creek Street also served the fishing fleet as a social center, news exchange, and job clearinghouse. Among its best-known figures were Black Mary, Thelma Baker, and Dolly Arthur, whose fame outlasted many women using stage names. Dolly Arthur, born Thelma Dolly Copeland in 1888 near McCall, Idaho, came to Ketchikan in 1914 after working in Spokane, Seattle, and Vancouver B.C., bought her own house at No. 24 Creek Street in 1919, and still owned it when she died in 1975. Another exception to the usual small houses was No. 5, the Star Dance Hall, a 12-room establishment with live music and dance partners, associated first with Black Mary Thomas, who bought it in 1917, and then Thelma Baker, who took over in 1924. Thelma Baker died in a fire there in 1972, long after the district had closed, and the gutted Star remained boarded up until its restoration in 1991.

Saxman, Alaska · United States