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architectural remnants of the old Alaska Commercial Building by sftrajan

© sftrajan, all rights reserved.

architectural remnants of the old Alaska Commercial Building

The Alaska Commercial Company building, built in 1908 and demolished in 1975 had not only walruses but also icicles and sea serpents, representing the environment of the far north from which they derived the corporate wealth.

San Francisco
May 2014

The Alaska Commercial Company and its successor company Northern Commercial Company was involved in fur trading and other businesses in Alaska. Gustave Niebaum, Lewis Gerstle, Louis Sloss, William Kohl were all San Francisco businessmen involved with the enterprise, which bought out the old Russian Alaska company in 1868. The Alaska Commercial Company was formed on January 1, 1868, with Louis Sloss as president. The ACC became the fount of the Sloss-Gerstle dynastic fortunes, and the de facto government of Alaska. by 1889, when its lease on Alaska's Pribiloff islands ran out, the company had harvested a reported 1,850,000 seal skins, for which it had paid the U.S. government nearly $9.5 million. Its stockholders had harvested a reported $18 million in profits over the same period.

read more about the company, the families and their causing the near-extinction of the seals here: foundsf.org/index.php?title=ALASKA_COMMERCIAL_CORPORATION

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