The longtime owner of Chilkoot Charlie's, a historic Spenard watering hole that is perhaps Alaska's best-known bar, is selling the business to a group of employees.
At the same time, a real estate group headed by the owners of the popular Bear Tooth and Moose's Tooth restaurants will purchase the Spenard property the bar sits on, becoming its landlord, with plans to use the large parking lot for its own new project across the street.
The deal will likely be finalized by August, said Mike Gordon, who opened the eclectic labyrinth of bars-within-a bar on New Year's Day in 1970.
Gordon, who is 72, said he has lost money on the operation for years and had been looking to sell Chilkoot Charlie's for some time.
"Our business model got old," Gordon said. "All the kids in Anchorage became infatuated with downtown, and these days people's idea of a good time is to go out and have a couple glasses of wine and go home. And we also got marginalized by competition from brewpubs. I should have closed the doors the day the Moose's Tooth opened. I'd be a lot better off."
The new bar owners will be Chilkoot Charlie's general manager Doran Powell, who already holds a 30 percent stake in the business, as well as a group of longtime employees.
Powell said the group plans to rebrand the bar and adopt the moniker favored by locals -- ''Koot's." It will also revamp the menu, host more big outdoor concerts and put more effort into featuring local bands and locally brewed beer. The biggest anticipated changes to the structure include a new front deck and, perhaps, another on the roof.
"You will see music trivia, retro pinball, Burlesque, Karaoke, comedy, and DJs filling all three dance floors," Powell wrote in an email. "We have a very young adventurous group of shareholders coming on, and we are very excited about that."
The bar, site of many a drunken melee over the years, will also have more hosts and security personnel at the front door.
The new owners aspire to become neighborhood stewards. They plan to attract more vendors and lengthen the hours for the popular Spenard Farmers Market, where food and produce vendors and live musicians transform the bar's parking lot into a family-friendly venue on Saturdays. Powell also envisions hosting a community flea market three times a year.
"We want to see Spenard continue to grow and be known as the food and entertainment center of Anchorage," Powell wrote.
Rod Hancock, the co-owner of the Tooth restaurants and one of four owners of Moreland Properties, the real estate group buying the property, emphasized his restaurant group will not be involved in ownership or operation of Chilkoot Charlie's.
"Neither Moose's Tooth, Moreland Properties, or any other company owned by members of the Tooth Family has any connection with the business of Koot's," he wrote in an email. "We hope that Doran Powell and his team can move Koot's forward as a well-run, safe, and relevant bar and gathering place for Anchorage."
They are buying the property to guarantee more parking for the chronically crowded Bear Tooth and a new, as-yet-undescribed project that will occupy the former La Mex building, across Spenard Road from Chilkoot Charlie's. Anchorage bakery Fire Island was "very interested in some of the space" in the La Mex building, Hancock said, but the bakery decided to open a second location in the Airport Heights neighborhood instead.
Gordon said he plans to be at Koot's every Friday and Saturday night until the deal closes on Aug. 21. Patrons may catch him reviving tongue-in-cheek costumes he once wore with a swagger in the bar's earlier days. His signature character, "Rocky the Flying Motherf----r," wears a World War I infantry uniform, goggles and a scarf.
Another of Gordon's favorite get-ups involves gray long underwear, bunny boots, an Outback hat and a fur-lined jockstrap.
"It'll be an opportunity for people to stop by while it's still my operation," Gordon said. "I can get rowdy and be myself without being thrown out."
Pulling late nights isn't as easy anymore. Gordon said he's normally in bed by 10 p.m. and has to take a nap and drink a Rockstar energy drink for those rare nights he spends at Koot's.
For Gordon, the sale is bittersweet. He had assumed for a long time that he would sell the bar, but take on the role of landlord and keep collecting lease payments himself. Instead, he said, he is walking away from the sale with nothing.
"This is not the way I thought I'd retire," he said, but "I'm happy it is going into the hands of people who care about it."
But it will be a relief to unburden himself of all the responsibilities he has shouldered during his 45 years as Chilkoot Charlie's owner, spend more time in Homer with his wife, Shelli, and follow his passion for writing. He recently earned a master's degree in writing from Alaska Pacific University and produced a book-length memoir, among other works, that he hopes to publish.
"I'm gonna miss it, but I'm not gonna miss it all," he said. "I'll never miss being responsible for everyone who comes in the bar, and I won't miss those 3 a.m. phone calls. They're never good news."
Still, Gordon doesn't like the sound of the word "retirement," and already has his eye on Homer's most famous drinking establishment.
"If the Salty Dawg Saloon is for sale," he said. "I'd buy it."