Creek Street, a Walk on the Wild Side

Strolling along historic Creek Street is not much different than any modern-day boardwalk of shops and restaurants. It has obvious appeal to tourists who pour through here in the summer, the cruise hordes numbering nearly a million this year alone. It’s conveniently located only a few blocks from the cruise terminal.

You would never know that it used to be a bunch of buildings erected along Ketchikan Creek to appeal to a different clientele, a red light district in the first half of the twentieth century.

At one end of Creek Street are a fish ladder and rapids that salmon need to get past in order to spawn upstream, the inspiration for the humorous aside on Dolly’s House.

I find it amusing that many preserved buildings were once brothels and that tourists titter at the innuendos. Creek Street is now on the National Register of Historic Places.