McKinnon Apartments
The MacKinnon Apartments is a historic apartment building at 236 Third Street. The building is a three-story wood-frame structure, finished in stucco with corner quoining and a dentillated cornice.
The MacKinnon Apartments provided modern housing in Alaska's capital and largest city, and is representative of the size and scale of the buildings constructed during the boom that occurred in Juneau during the 1920s.
When it opened in 1925, it was 80 feet (24 m) long and housed six single-bedroom and 12 studio apartments. In 1959, 20 feet (6.1 m) allowed five more studio units to be added. The building is representative of Juneau's boom years in the period between World Wars I and II, 1921 to 1939, which been defined as Juneau's Peak Gold Mining Era.
During that period, the town was the center for the territorial government, for the Alaska-Juneau Gold Mining Company's huge hard rock operations, for salmon and halibut commercial fishermen, and for supplying southeast Alaska.
Following placer gold discoveries in Silver Bow Basin in 1880, prospectors and businessmen established the town of Juneau. Within a decade, companies organized to mine the hard rock gold deposits in the area. Between 1880 and 1944, the three major mining companies in the Juneau area produced $158 million in gold. The Alaska Juneau Gold Mining Company was the largest low grade ore gold producer in the world from 1910 to 1944.
Juneau quickly grew to be the largest community in southeast Alaska. In 1920, with a population of 3,058, it was the largest city in Alaska. The federal government designated Juneau the capital for the District of Alaska in 1900, although the move from Sitka was not made until 1906, and in 1912 designated it the capital for the Territory of Alaska.
After a cold storage plant opened in 1913, Juneau became the home port for a number of fishermen. The timber industry flourished with the building of a sawmill around 1910. Juneau became the regional trading center for communities in southeast Alaska. Steamships arrived and departed regularly.
In the summer months, steamships brought visitors to town. World War I created shortages of skilled labor to work in the mines and materials needed for mine operations. Production slowed. After the war, with new capital and improvements in technology, the Alaska-Juneau Gold Mining Company was profitable and expanding operations. As a result, the town prospered. Juneau business people invested in new, more substantial buildings. One of the new buildings was the three story MacKinnon Apartments.
Lauchlin "Lockie" MacKinnon, an immigrant from Nova Scotia, constructed the apartment building. He came to Alaska in 1886, MacKinnon drifted around mining camps in Alaska and the Yukon, working as a miner and businessman. For a few years in the 1890s he mined at Porcupine north of Haines. In 1893, he crossed the Chilkoot Trail to seek gold in the Fortymile.
Back in Juneau, in 1895 and 1896 he and George Miller, his partner at Porcupine, built and operated the Circle City Hotel on Third Street. The hotel had eighty rooms, a bar and dining room.
He married Martha Maline Lokke, who came to work at the hotel, in April 1896. The family continued to move around the north, spending several years at Atlin, B.C. and in the Fairbanks area, before settling in Juneau around 1911. Back in Juneau, MacKinnon managed the Zynda Hotel, later known as the Juneau Hotel, on Main Street.
In the 1920s, MacKinnon sensed that apartments were replacing boarding houses and hotels, and built the MacKinnon Apartments. He and his wife lived in an apartment in the building until their deaths in the late 1940s.
The MacKinnon Investment Company prospectus appeared August 17, 1925, seeking investors in a three-story frame apartment house to be located at the corner of Third and Franklin Streets.
An article in Stroller's Weekly, a local newspaper, dated October 10, 1925, noted that the new MacKinnon Apartments offered numerous modern conveniences. In particular, the article said the builder wired each apartment for electricity.
After his second term as territorial governor ended in 1933, George Parks lived in the MacKinnon Apartments for three years. The building has been continuously used as an apartment house since construction.
Sons J. Simpson MacKinnon and Donald L. MacKinnon operated the apartment house after their parents' deaths. In 1959, perhaps anticipating the increased need for housing in the new state's capital, they added five studio units to the back of the building. Other than this addition, the building has not been significantly changed since its construction.
The apartment building is located two blocks outside of the Juneau Downtown Historic District, which were listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. The McKinnon Apartments were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
Historic Pioneers W-Z
Primary Name: Jack Zavodsky
Filed as: Zavodsky, Jack
Also known as: John Zavodsky
Born: May 16, 1864 – Bohemia
Died: February 17, 1951 – Chicago, Illinois
Occupation / Association: Bartender; cook; hotel worker; night patrolman
Associated places: Juneau, Alaska; Circle City Hotel; Occidental Hotel; Seattle, Washington; Chicago, Illinois
Organizations: Juneau Men’s Igloo
Keywords: Circle City Hotel, Occidental Hotel, introduction of cocktails in Alaska, Juneau pioneers, Alaska Gold Rush era
Biography
Jack Zavodsky was a charter member of the Juneau Men’s Igloo.
Zavodsky was born in Bohemia on May 16, 1864. He came to the United States in 1889 to join his father on a farm in Kansas.
At age fourteen, he had run away from home to Wild Horse, Colorado, where he worked as a railroad section hand. He later returned to Kansas and eventually made his way west to the Pacific Coast, working as a cook and bartender.
Zavodsky arrived in Juneau aboard the steamer Alki in 1896 and went to work at the Circle City Hotel, owned by George Miller and Lockie MacKinnon, where he worked in the dining room and kitchen.
According to local accounts, Zavodsky introduced the cocktail to Alaska. When a patron asked for a cocktail in the hotel bar, Jack stepped behind the bar and asked what kind he preferred. “Make it any kind,” the man replied. Zavodsky mixed a whiskey cocktail, and it quickly became popular among other patrons.
George Miller later made him head bartender until Jack Olds, owner of the Occidental Hotel, hired him at $60 per month plus room and board.
Zavodsky spent several years working for Juneau businessmen as a night patrolman for business houses.
He left Juneau around 1941, moving first to Seattle and later to Chicago. Zavodsky died at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Chicago on February 17, 1951.
Sources
- Daily Alaska Empire, February 23, 1951.
Bergmann Hotel
The Bergmann Hotel is significant for the role it has played in state and local history; and for commemorating the name of a pioneer Alaskan woman, prominently associated with leading Juneau hotels from 1896 to 1916.
The present capital city of Alaska came into existence with the first major placer gold strike in the Territory, in 1880.
As the placers declined, hard-rock mining developed and eventually these consolidated into two world-famous properties, the Treadwell Mine and the Alaska-Juneau Mine.
Juneau was made the capital in 1900, but the executive offices were not moved from Sitka until 1906. Because of gold, fisheries, shipping and government, Juneau has played a prominent role in Alaska's 19th and 20th Century history.
The Bergmann Hotel, built in 1913, is among the oldest surviving hostelries in Juneau. It was built by Marie E. Bergmann, a German emigrant who came to the Gastineau Channel in 1896 following the death of her husband in Seattle.
Her initial employment was at the Franklin House, a pioneer board-and-rooming establishment for miners. She then worked at the Perseverance Mine and as a nurse at the Simpson Hospital, established in 1886 by a prominent early-day physician.
About 1907, she began managing the Circle City Hotel, owned by businessman George Miller; acquiring the location, she selected a new site, just off the principal business district and central to the leading residential area and built the 50 room, rectangular, three-story, full basement apartment-hotel, which held its grand opening on December 16, 1913.
Her initial hopes, with outside capital, was to build a 64 room structure, steam-heated, with electric lights, hot and cold water in every room, with both baths and showers on every floor, it was considered—even in its scaled down version—as the best in Juneau.
Widow Bergmann, however, did not long enjoy the fruits of her success. Stricken with brain hemorrhage, she died on March 18, 1916. The hotel was left to relatives in Germany, but management was placed with a former employee, Mrs. Mary Bernhofer.
The Alaskan Daily Empire in a front page obituary story, called Mrs. Bergmann "one of the best known and best loved women of the city. . .friend, comforter and counsellor, and often banker, to those in need."