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Fuelled by limitless avarice, Dawson between 1898 and 1900 exploded into a full-blown metropolis of 30,000 people - the largest city in the Canadian West and the equal of places like Seattle and San Francisco in its opportunities for vice, decadence and good living. There were opera houses, theatres, cinemas (at a time when motion-picture houses were just three years old), steam heating, three hospitals, restaurants with French chefs, and bars, brothels and dance halls which generated phenomenal business - one Charlie Kimball took $300,000 in a month from his club, and spent the lot within days. Show girls charged miners $5 - payable in gold - for a minute's dance; slow dances were charged at a higher rate. Cleaners panning the bars' sawdust floors after hours were clearing $50 in gold dust a night. Rules of supply and demand also made Dawson an expensive town, with a single two-metre frontage fetching as much in rent in a month as a four-bedroom apartment in New York cost for two years. Only a few of the many intact heritage buildings around the town date from the earliest days of the rush, dozens having been lost to fire and to permafrost, whose effects are seen in some of the most appealing of the older buildings: higgledy-piggledy collapsing ruins of rotting wood, weeds and rusting corrugated iron. Most of these, thankfully, have been deliberately preserved in their tumbledown state. Elsewhere, almost overzealous restoration projects are in full flow, partly financed by profits from the town casino. Permafrost precluded the construction of brick buildings with deep foundations, so restoration has had to work doubly hard to save what are generally all-wood buildings, most notably the Palace Grand Theatre on the corner of 3rd Avenue and King Street (1899). The theatre was originally built from the hulks of two beached paddle steamers, and but for the intervention of the Klondike Visitors Association would have been pulled down for scrap timber in 1960. Tours run daily in summer ($5) and every night in summer except Tuesday. There's a performance of Gaslight Follies (mid-May to mid-Sept daily 8pm; $16 on the main floor, $18 on the balcony; tel 993-5575), a predictable medley of cancan, frilly knickers and gold-rush cabaret, though if you're tempted this is among the best of several such shows around the region. Nearby on the corner of King Street and 3rd Avenue there's the working 1901 Post Office (June-Aug daily noon-6pm; tel 993-7200); opposite is Madame Tremblay's Store ; Harrington's Store on 3rd Avenue and Princess Street has a "Dawson as They Saw It" exhibition of photos arranged by Parks Canada (June-Aug daily 9am-5pm; free); near the same junction stands Billy Bigg's Blacksmith Shop ; elsewhere are the cream-and-brown clapboard Anglican Church , built in 1902 with money collected from the miners. At 4th Avenue and Queen Street is Diamond Tooth Gertie's Gambling House , founded by one of the town's more notorious characters, and still operating as the first legal casino in Canada (opened after restoration in 1971) - it's also the world's northernmost casino (mid-May to mid-Sept daily 7pm-2am; $6); you need to be over 19 to gamble and all proceeds from here and several other town sights go to the restoration of Dawson. Also check out the Firefighters Museum in City Hall (under restoration at time of writing) where a guide takes you on a tour of old fire tenders, water pumps and other old firefighting equipment. In a town built almost entirely of wood these were once vital to Dawson's survival: the town all but burnt to the ground twice in the space of a year in 1898-99. So far you can't visit one of the town's more obvious old wooden constructions, the SS Keno riverboat, moored on the river just down from the visitor centre - it's been under restoration for several years. It was built in 1922 and ran up and down the Stewart River carrying ore from the mines around Mayo. At the Yukon River the ore was unloaded for collection by larger boats and the journey to Whitehorse and the railway. Not all boats were as lucky as the Keno , and a good short hike just out of town will take you to a ships' graveyard . The improvements to transport links, chiefly the completion of the Klondike Hwy, made many riverboats redundant. Some were beached downstream, where their overgrown carcasses can still be seen with a little effort. Cross the river on the free George Black ferry on Front Street and walk through the campsite and then a further ten minutes along the waterfront to reach the ruins.
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