Burned building recalled as focus of downtown

The fire that ruined a downtown building a month ago also destroyed a piece of Juneau's youth.

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To Susan Woods, co-owner of J&J Deli, it was home in the late 1950s, when she lived in an apartment over what would later be the Dragon Inn restaurant. To others the building at Front and Main streets was an anchor to an era, and its burning on Aug. 15 sent memories flying by phone and e-mail.

Long before the building housed a Subway sandwich shop and a Chinese restaurant, "it was the best place in town to get fishing gear," recalled Chuck Pilcher, of Kirkand, Wash., who e-mailed photos from the fire to other members of the Juneau-Douglas High School class of 1961. "You just hate to see part of your childhood cave in."

Various people and public agencies called the building by different names recently. Most commonly it's been called the Skinner building, but it's also been Endicott, reflecting the names of two previous owners. It started out in 1896 as the C.W. Young building.

The property's current owner called it the Town Center Mall. Eighteen businesses leased commercial and office space there.

"We always wondered why people called it the Skinner building," said Woods, who will always remember it as the Rusher building. Her father, Buck Loidhamer, was a part owner of the building with Carl Rusher. It contained a hardware store on the ground level and a furniture store upstairs.

Rusher's Hardware "was one of the biggest stores in town," said John Gissberg, a 1961 JDHS graduate who lives in Seattle. "It was like going into Fred Meyer today. It was always Rusher's to us."

Helen Abbott Watkins, whose family moved to Juneau so long ago that she can remember World War II blackouts, said that before the fire, Front Street always looked the same.

The buildings didn't change even though the businesses did. Across Front Street from Rusher's was Percy's Cafe, where the Viking bar is now, Watkins said. That was where kids got together with Coke floats at the fountain and Elvis Presley records playing on the juke box.

At the corner in the building where McDonald's now stands was a grocery store.

"They would deliver to your house," Woods said. People would call and tell them what to send over and put the bill on their account. "They would put it in your refrigerator if you weren't home."

That was a long time ago, when nobody locked their doors, she added.

Woods said she was thinking of all the things that went wrong at the building.

"We were pipefitters," she said, recalling action that needed to be taken when pipes froze.

But that was nothing compared to the day a bus drove through a window of the hardware store after losing its brakes uphill on Seward Street.

"I remember my mother saying, "Get your bus out of here,'" Woods said.

Woods said she sometimes saw wharf rats at the back of the building. Front Street used to be at the waterfront, before the city filled in the tidelands.

Gissberg recalled being able to smell the tide.

"When we were little kids, we could see the ocean under the store," which he said was atop pilings.

"You always knew when the tide was up or down by the smell," Woods said.

Gissberg said he and his friends spent more time across the street at Percy's Cafe as they got older. But Rusher's was the place to go as a kid for fishing gear, the fish eggs they used for bait, and bicycles.

"We all tied fishing hooks to make spending money," Woods said.

The building was at the center of things in those days, she said. The second-floor display window for the furniture store was where people watched Fourth of July parades if it was raining. And there were always kids around the business, with two Loidhamers and three Rushers - all within eight years of each other.

Dexter Rusher was killed in a freak accident when he was 12, she said. Bobby Rusher was an airline pilot who died in an accident while flying a private plane. Ron Rusher lives in Coffman Cove.

Gissberg said he would like to see the downtown lot become a memorial park, although he doesn't expect that to happen.

"It was nice to remember the good days when you walked by the building," he said. Inside Subway, there was nothing to trigger cherished memories, but his deceased childhood friends, Bobby and Dexter Rusher, came to life for him when he saw the building. "It made it a special place."

"I see all the ruins now," said Watkins, who believes it would be nice to put a replica of the building on the spot. "It's not Juneau without Rusher's."

• Tony Carroll can be reached at tony.carroll@juneauempire.com.