This morning's devastating fire destroyed what may not be a monolith to the downtown commercial core but certainly a cornerstone in the city's manufacturing sector.

From the days it was built in the 1940s as a production and bottling plant for Pepsi Cola, the Fourth Avenue building remained such for almost 50 years until the business moved to the Marwell area in 1991. It also doubled as a dairy in the 1960s and most recently served as the city's only coffee roasting business.

The loss the Midnight Sun Coffee Roasters and The Nest businesses located in the building at the corner of Black Street is probably in the neighbourhood of several hundred thousand collars, fire chief Clive Sparks said this morning.

The cause of the blaze, said Sparks, is unknown, though most of the fire was in the south end of the building where The Nest was located when firefighters arrived at 1:25 a.m, having received the call at 1:21.

There were no serious injuries in the blaze, though two firefighters received minor injuries.

Building owner Con Lattin said human safety is the main concern, but one has to feel for the two business owners who are left today to face the aftermath, and wonder what the future will bring.

There is also emotion when you watch the fiery destruction of a building that has been so much a part of you and your family, said Lattin, who arrived at the scene at about 2:30 after being alerted by Dave Avoledo, the owner of The Nest.

The Lattin family bought the business in 1956, and maintained the manufacturing and bottling business in the south end of the building where The Nest was located, and for several years ran the Whitehorse Dairies business through the 1960s in the area where the coffee roasters stood until early this morning.

'My daughters and I stood there and watched it,' Lattin said in an interview. 'You know, as kids, they worked there.'

He said as the building burned during the four hours he watched, and saw the fire move through different sections, Lattin said he remembered different jobs, in different areas of the building.

It was a cork ceiling above Zola's coffee shop, he recalled, a cork roof protected by some type of tar emulsion to prevent moisture from coming in.

Lattin said in the early days of the Pepsi plant, the company bottled its pop in beer bottles, because it was too expensive to freight empty bottles up to the Yukon.

The plant continued to make and bottle its product up until a fire in the late 1960s, which destroyed the second storey of the building, that was never replaced.

From that time on, Lattin said, it was a distribution hub, with the product made and bottled down south.

'As a manufacturing business, I guess it was one of the older ones,' Lattin said.

He said it's much too early to say if the structure will be rebuilt.

Avoledo said he does have business insurance, though it's too early to tell what the future will bring.

'But definitely, we do not have a job,' Avoledo said late this morning. 'It's too early to tell; we do not know what we are doing. We have hardly slept, and even talking is a bit of a chore.'

And, like Lattin said, the most important thing is that there were no serious injuries or loss of life.

'It is part of your life, really, but yeah, it's a good thing nobody was hurt.'

Zola Dore, owner of Midnight Sun Coffee Roasters, as well as her new Main Street cafe, as well as her shop inside the new Canada Games Centre, was out of the country and unavailable for comment.

The fire chief said when firefighters arrived, the blaze was cooking.

'There was a very heavy fire load,' Sparks said in an interview at the scene.

With no reason to believe there was a concern over life, with the age and configuration of the structure, it was unsafe for firefighters to attempt to get inside to fight the blaze, he said.

The effort consumed about half the city's firefighting resources, with some 20 personnel on the ground, two pumpers and the emergency response truck that can double as a command centre and warm-up shack.

Sparks said problems suppressing the fire were compounded by the building's age, and renovations it had gone through that essentially created two walls, with room for the fire to hide in between.

There was no divider in the roof cavity between the two businesses, he pointed out.

And with the building made out of metal, Sparks added, the firefighters could not gain access to hot spots except through the window and door openings.

He said the city's nightshift, which was already on the scene placing up barricades, was asked for and provided a backhoe to come in and pull down sections of the building so that firefighting efforts would be more effective.

Gary Lachance was on his way home from work at about 2 a.m., and stopped to witness the early stages of the fire.

Strangely, he said, you could see no flames, nothing but heavy smoke that left a plume from downtown to the top of Robert Service Way and probably beyond.

Others, he said, also stood watching in temperatures that were in the -7 range, or much more favourable than the -20 of the early mornings previously.

'It was like this eerie scene.' he said. 'There was no fire, just all this smoke billowing around the building, like big, fluffy cotton balls.'

The storage shed next door owned by Midnight Sun did not burn, though the wall closed to the fallen building is blackened.

Two doors down is the home for the Link Dance, a building and business sponsored by Midnight Sun.

The local coffee roasting and sandwich shop was an ardent support of the arts in the Yukon, and many other organizations. Its Fourth and Black premises served as a gallery for local artists, just as works by Margreit Aasman and John Quinsey hang in its new business on Main today.

'This is terrible,' Brian Eaton said as he stood on Black Street next to the charred remains, like others who strolled through the area to witness the destruction, the loss of two local businesses.

'Zola has given so much to this community,' Eaton said.

'She has for years donated coffee to the Second Opinion Society, and to a number of other community organizations. She is just a wonderful person.'