Spenard Landmarks #3: Charlie & The Bird
You can see the complete Spenard Landmarks Series here.
This is an EASY Multi Puzzle! Start at the posted coordinates, answer a quick question, and find the cache less than 500 feet away! This is not a promotion of any establishment, just a history lesson on the area you see here.
From Koot's website, here's a quick history on the bulding you stand near:
Located in the heart of historic Spenard, Chilkoot Charlie's first opened its doors on January 1, 1970 in what had been The Alibi Club. "Koot's," as it is affectionately called by locals, began as a neighborhood watering hole with a live piano bar. The bar was very limited in size then, occupying only the part of the building that is now the South Long Bar. Owner Mike Gordon and a partner bought the bar having convinced themselves that an Alaska-Theme bar would be successful in Anchorage.
Upon purchasing The Alibi Club, Gordon promised the doubtful former owner, Skip Fuller, that he would triple the gross sales within a year. At the time, Gordon was also working at KHAR radio and NY Life Insurance Co. in Anchorage. It was at KHAR that he met Alaskan author and radio personality Ruben Gaines, and the two quickly became friends. It occurred to Gordon one day that one of Gaines characters, Chilkoot Charlie, would be an excellent icon for his new bar. It had once been suggested that the bar should be named the Humpie Bar or Chilkoot Charlie's. Gordon invited Gaines to lunch and told him the idea. The bar would get exclusive rights to the name Chilkoot Charlie, and in exchange, Gaines could sell his books, cartoons, records, etc. from the bar. Gaines thought it was a great idea, and with a hand-written contract, Chilkoot Charlie's was born. It is interesting to note that this one lunch meeting has arguably done as much to add character and flavor to Spenard and Anchorage as a whole, as any other event to date.
The large building here on Spenard Road is Chillkoot Charlie's, which first opened in 1970. Just before opening Koot's, the proprietor, Mike Gordon, had owned The Bird House in Bird, which is about halfway between here and Girdwood on the Seward Highway-- about 25 minutes away, but it was closer to an hour in the 1960's when the highways were less direct.
The Bird was a quirky place. Almost nothing I can describe in detail would make this cache kid-friendly. I'll let the facebook comments section for Anchorage History do some talking:
Mike Gordon cut his teeth as a bar owner on the Bird House, a diminutive shack dive bar with lots of character. He sold it after just one year and opened Chilkoot's a few years later. Mike spent many years making Chillkoot the legendary place it has become while watching the Bird House out of the corner of his eye. Koot's now is a weird conglomeration of a bunch of little ecosystems, each with its own name and style. The most distinctive, however, is the shack annex at the posted coordinates. You see, the original Bird House burnt down in 1996. Mike kept it on his heart for a while and eventually bought the name and marketing rights to the house in 2002 and rebuilt it in the backyard of Koot's shortly after.
From Mike's article for Alaska Public Media in 2013:
There was an open area at the rear of Chilkoot Charlie’s where we had horseshoe pits and held a free meal every Sunday afternoon for many years. Amazingly, the Bird House fit perfectly into that space. Believe it or not, the old place had an extant as-built survey, as well as a scale model made by some Bird Creek fan, and, of course, there were photos and videos available. The fact that I had worked the place every weekend for a year didn’t hurt either.
Having been everyone’s favorite little bar, I was determined to make sure that it was an exact replica, and it is, right down to the bumper stickers around the inside of the bar. The crew at Chilkoot Charlie’s, with the help of architect, Jeffery Wilson, built the place and when our crew got the bar installed they excitedly recruited me from my office nearby to take a look at it. When I noticed the bar angle was not right and needed more of a slant to it, Craig, my property manager, said, "We can’t do it, Mike. If we raise it on the outside end any more you won’t be able to see inside and if we lower it anymore on the inside we’d have to tear the floor out and start all over." My immediate reply was, "Start tearing."
To my great satisfaction, no one has ever criticized the reincarnation. It is a virtual time machine, though the only thing in it that was actually in the old Bird House on the highway is the stove, singularly unaffected by the blaze. Thus, the Bird House Bar had been the parent of Chilkoot Charlie’s and now Chilkoot Charlie’s is the parent of the Bird House Bar, under whose wing it is protected by a modern fire sprinkler system.
So now the Bird lives on in Charlie's backyard. To find the second and final stage, take a look at the sign you see near the posted coordinates and then answer the following question on certitude as ONE WORD with no spaces:
What is the final "B" offered at this establishment? It is two words, but enter it as one word with no spaces in the checker.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.