Evening bike-around: Anchorage remnants

May 8, 2018 at 7:35 am | Posted in alaska, anchorage, photo du jour, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: abandoned, anchorage, reflections, tour

One gets busy with work and life and forgets to stop and smell the abandoned buildings.  Tonight for a couple hours I got back out there and checked on the condition of the less celebrated parts of the city.

When I stopped to take this photo of this small multiplex on San Roberto Ave., three kids playing in the yard next door shyly asked why I was photographing the building.  “I like how it looks, with those concrete block walls, wooden bars, metal fencing and pavement.  The things we do for cars, eh?  How to wreck the front yard?”  They laughed a little and probably wondered how long ago I had lost my mind.

Community Park Loop, a street near East High School.  It was installed in the mid-1980s and was planned as the future home of a variety of social service institutions and agencies.  It entered into an ownership dispute of some sort involving the Alaska Mental Health Trust.  I don’t know the details and they don’t matter so much to me.  The net result is an interesting juxtaposition of a finished street and sidewalk running through a pristine forested tract of land, an experience increasingly rare.

This little house fronts E. Dowling Road just east of the New Seward Highway.  Property tax records show it has 1,035 square feet, two bedrooms and one bath and was built in 1950.  The property is owned by the State of Alaska DOT/PF — assuming it was acquired for a future expansion of the roadway interchange.  The six lane elevated highway bridge a block away contributes a dull roar and there’s a lot of traffic on Dowling during the day, but not so much when stopped to look.  There’s a piece of the residential neighborhood still extant on a couple streets north of this house.  Along Dowling, a couple other houses can still be seen integrated into sites of auto repair shops, warehouses and storage lockers.  In 1950 Dowling was part of a winding route leading out of Anchorage to the south.  The outbound road had only been open a couple years and was rough and partially complete.  It must have been quite an expedition, especially in winter to get from this house to the nearest grocery store downtown.  It was probably quiet and peaceful most of the time, which is difficult to imagine now.

This building next to the 1950 vintage house was a busy gas station convenience store in the ’90s.

Ten Commandments banner and front of this tidy little church on E. International Airport Rd., directly across the street from the Great Alaska Bush Co. Show Club, a strip bar.  Churches are doing a little better than bars at this moment in time.  Either this building, or another nearby [can’t remember for sure] was the longtime location of Hansen’s Hubcaps.  I must have a photo of it someplace in my film archives.  Someday I will organize it.  There must be some gems in there!

Part of the street facade of the old Sears Mall Carrs grocery store, opened 1968 and closed 2015.  Recently Safeway [owner of Carrs since 2000] announced they will build a new Carrs at the other end of this same mall in the space just vacated by the closing of the Sears store.  The mall owner has plans to redevelop the former Carrs for a new anchor tenant to be determined.  The new scheme is really nice looking, and updates the exterior while somewhat paying homage to the original gold and dark brown scheme here.  Safeway remodeled all the other Carrs locations to a greater or lesser degree, but this one when it closed still looked just like it always had.

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