Chatter Marks EP 142 The Notorious Bars of Alaska with Doug Vandegraft

For nearly 30 years, Doug Vandegraft has been writing about bars in Alaska. In his book, “A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska,” he uses the state’s longtime watering holes as a way into its broader social history. Doug spent decades traveling throughout Alaska during his career as a federal cartographer, and along the way he became interested in the bars that seemed to function as more than just places to drink—they were gathering places, landmarks, and repositories of local history. He eventually spent years researching their histories, digging through liquor licenses, newspapers, business records, and archives, while visiting bars and talking with the people who owned them, worked in them, and drank in them. The result is a history of Alaska told from the barstool, where stories of gold rushes, fishing, military expansion, Prohibition, boom-and-bust economies, and colorful characters all come together in the places people gathered at the end of the day.

When Doug moved to Anchorage in 1983, one of the things that struck him was just how many bars there were—and how each one seemed to have its own identity. If you liked reggae, there was a bar for that. If you liked blues, rock and roll, or country, there was a bar for that, too. And these weren’t just weekend destinations. Bars could be crowded any night of the week, something Doug came to see as a reflection of an Alaska economy where jobs were plentiful and people had money to spend. That early experience shaped the way he came to understand bars as reflections of the communities around them, places where music, work, personality, and local culture all came together. And after visiting more than a hundred of them, he developed a simple rule for walking into any bar, no matter how unfamiliar: act like you’ve been there before.