The Bird House Tavern

Back in 1984 when I first moved to Alaska and met my wife Kathy. She took me south of Anchorage to Bird Creek, just before you get to Girdwood on the Seward Highway. She pulled off the highway into a little dirt parking lot. Then I saw this little log cabin with a blue bird sticking out of the gable end. I remember thinking to myself "just what in the h*** is this?". It's a real small, cramped old log cabin. During the big earthquake of 1964, the log cabin half sank. Putting it on about a 10 degree angle. You go inside and see that the bar was on a slant too. You had to hang on to your beer or the fellow down from you would be drinking for free all night!
But the first thing you notice when you walk in is all the stuff hanging everywhere. Bra's, underware (hers & his.. *shudder*), business cards, driver licenses, military ID's and there was even someones fake leg hanging on a post. After you have a beer or two, the bartender will come up to you with a jar of pickles. He'll calmly ask you if you'd like a pickle. He'll then take the lid off and all of a sudden you get a whif of the most obnoxious smell. Then he'll inform you that if you can eat one whole pickle that you can drink the rest of the night for free. I have to tell you, when I was younger I thought I was pretty daring and would do a lot of things on a dare. But, there was no way one of those pickles was even going to touch my lips. Don't get me wrong, the thought of drinking the rest of the night for free was a real temptation. I figured though that after eating one of those pickles, there was no way my stomach would be in any mood to have alcohol added to the mix.Notice the comfortable stumps for stools? Needless to say, people didn't sit there for more than a couple of beers.

As you can see the Bird House was a fire hazard and the odds finally caught up with the owners and the it burned down about 1996 or so. Since then a bar in Anchorage called Chilkoot Charlie's built an addition to their bar and made a replica of the Bird House for tourists to visit. It's not the same thing but gives you an idea of what it looked like.

All the above pictures are pics that I found online. I had pics of this from before but can't find them.