New Hotel Rises in Midtown

New hotel as seen from 36th Avenue.

 I usually don't care to report on suburban style hotels that are under construction as Anchorage has seen more than enough of these unoriginal and often straight-up ugly buildings being built over the last 20 years. I'm not about to write that this project here is an exception, but rather I just wanted to point out two positive attributes that this project carries. The first thing I want to note is that this building will not have the same tiresome slanted roof and beigetone colors. That said, a quick Google search for Aloft shows me that this will be a clone of every other Aloft hotel in the mainland United States. The architecture is refreshing for Anchorage standards, but not really original. But I do appreciate that this hotel will be close to the street. Placing buildings right up to or near the street helps to give the street definition, and an area like midtown is definitely in need of that. 

Plaza 36 as it looked in 2002 and in 2020 (right).

The other point that I appreciate about this project is that unlike all previous chain hotels in Anchorage, this will be the first to involve redevelopment. Instead of being built on vacant land, the Aloft hotel will replace a large strip mall that has sat at the corner of 36th Avenue and C Street for decades. Upzoning to a higher density is almost always a good thing, and it is actually just the continuation of the story that has played out in this part of midtown for the last 20 years. Until construction of the 10-story ASRC building in 2002 kicked things off, the site was home to a trailer park, a go-kart track, and the aforementioned strip mall. Four low-rise buildings and the 14-story JL Tower have since been built in the area. It is actually quite an uninspiring site of single-use office buildings surrounded by a sea of asphalt. At night, it is a complete dead zone. Amusingly, the hotels developers, who are the same developers behind the rest of the office park, say that hotel guests will be treated to live music on Friday nights. I'm sorry to say, but unless surrounding areas both within and outside the office park dramatically change, this area of town will never be "cool" with both guests and residents. 

While it is unfortunate to see the land developed in such an unattractive car-centric style over the last two decades, the addition of the hotel does eliminate the last low-density building in the area and brings everything up to a higher level of density. Also, a hotel will mean there will technically be "residents" staying overnight, thus making this office park "mixed use"; but that might be too generous of a bestowing. 

A Slew of New Apartments For Muldoon

A before and after of just some of the new buildings in Muldoon

It's great to see higher density development coming along in Muldoon. Located in the southern half of the Creekside Town Center, five new apartment buildings were completed in the time that I've been gone. Creekview Plaza 49, made up of two buildings with 49 units total, is a mixed-use site with units limited to seniors. Creekview Plaza II, which sits next to Creekside Plaza 49, also contains retail space at the ground level (currently occupied by Northrim Bank) and is open to all ages. Lastly, two buildings making up Woven House lie to the south of the Creekview buildings. Woven House is also limited to senior housing. All five buildings are three stories high and sit alongside the busy Muldoon Road thoroughfare. Together with the new Grass Creek North apartment buildings, it can only be expected that the residential population in the T-intersection of Muldoon Road and Debarr has substantially risen.    

Creekview Plaza II - photo by Ken Graham

Of course this was by design as the intersection of Muldoon and Debarr was designated as a key spot for a town center nearly 20 years ago. In the late 2000s the first housing units were built in what was then empty fields with a dying creek. In 2009 I did a bit of a tour of these housing units. But for a long time after that, there was no new residential construction. A Walgreen's store was built nearby, followed by a strip mall a decade after the first residential developments came into being. But now with the large amount of new residential units constructed suddenly in just five years time, the area seems better able to have residents and commercial business feed off each other. 

Creekview 49 - photo by Ken Graham

Yes, Creekside Town Center is unfortunately in a suburban car-centric landscape. But this setting was dictated by suburban commercial development that came decades before the urban concept of a town center came to Anchorage. It's simply difficult to retrofit big box stores into a more pedestrian-friendly environment. But what makes this place unique is that unlike most of Anchorage's sprawl, this area in question truly is seeing a mix of commercial and residential bumping up against each other. Residents in the new Creekview, Woven, and Grass Creek apartments have 10-15 minute access by foot to two large grocery stores, three banks, a pharmacy/mid-size grocery store, a gym, a library branch, and government services. Oh, of course we can't forget Anchorage's only Krispy Kreme. The dine-in options are quite interesting as residents in the area can walk to a Thai, Mongolian, and two sushi restaurants. There was once an Applebee's in the area, but it has since closed. But then again I'm not sure anyone misses that place. 

New buildings that make up Grass Creek North

Elizabeth Place - Downtown Anchorage

Elizabeth Place includes ground-floor retail.

Unlike in 2010 when I made a list of the top ten projects to rise in Anchorage during the 2000s, I did not publish such a list for the closing of this last decade. But I've thought to myself that if I were to decide on what was the most significant project that would top the list for this last decade, it would probably have to be Elizabeth Place. Yes, there have been multistory housing projects built elsewhere in the city, not to mention more high-profile projects such as a dramatic museum expansion, but the significance of Elizabeth Place is its location in the heart of Downtown Anchorage. Numerous media sources reporting on the recently completed Elizabeth Place have given different timespans, with one source saying this is the first downtown residential development in ten years, another saying this is the first development in 30 years, and still another saying this is the first residential project since 2006. But the residential developments being referred to were not in the heart of downtown. There were of course a number of trendy multistory residential buildings built in the Bootleggers Cove neighborhood as well as in South Addition, but while the term downtown often tends to include those two neighborhoods (and even Government Hill), they do not makeup the downtown core. It is true that in 2006 a four story condominium was built on 7th Avenue and Cordova, but again, it is not in the downtown core. In terms of residential construction in the commercial center (between L Street and C Street), it has indeed been more than 30 years.

I can't say this for sure, but from what I know of, the last significant housing development in the core of downtown is the old Duke's 8th Avenue Hotel, which by the way has recently been restored into apartments by Cook Inlet Housing Authority (the same non-profit behind Elizabeth Place) and is now called Qanchi Place. Though it was formerly a hotel, there have in fact been Anchoragites who called that place home (I personally knew a family friend living there in the late 1990s). This property has been around long enough that you can see it in the 1963 postcard of Anchorage from my last post! Having been built in 1961, it has been over half a century since dense housing came to the heart of Downtown Anchorage.    

Hopefully Elizabeth Place will act as a wetting of the feet from which other developers would come into downtown to build market-rate housing on other sites, particularly those occupied by surface parking. The quest to fill empty lots in west downtown has played out over the course of several years as evidenced by my post back in 2014 when the city sold downtown property it owned in hopes that the land sale would spur redevelopment. For a long time I have looked to the surface parking spaces, including the one now occupied by Elizabeth Place, and imagined them being home to a wealth of five to six story mixed-use residential developments. Whether we see other developments follow remains to be seen. But with trendy developments around downtown's periphery continuing to be built, the area continues to further cement itself with a unique identity which should in turn attract more people and thus more demand for downtown living, including inside the core. With Downtown Anchorage already among the top desired neighborhoods in polling, I'm optimistic for downtown in the long run.

  

Aerial View of 1960s Anchorage

Anchorage aerial as seen in 1963.

Seen here is an aerial view of Anchorage as it appeared before the 1964 earthquake. It's a postcard that I purchased at an online auction around a decade ago thus bringing the postcard's journey full circle back to the city with which it depicts. The back of the postcard is signed, "to Gary" and dated August 1968. While I did wonder to myself, "who's Gary?", I was more interested in pinpointing the year of this postcard, which really didn't take long to figure out. With the J.C. Penny department store in the center right only occupying half of its eventual footprint, it's clear this photo was taken in 1963. A year after its 1963 grand opening, the store would be demolished following the 1964 Alaskan earthquake. The string of storefronts along the northside of 4th Avenue between E Street and C Street are also visible, seen here before their literal downfall due to the liquification of the soil during the following year's quake. 

But what really gets me is just how green the Anchorage townsite looks. It's a jarring contrast to the present-day downtown cityscape, even more so when you realize that downtown's present-day appearance was largely complete just 20 years after this photo was taken with the topping out of the then ARCO Building and Atwood Building, still the city's two tallest buildings, in 1983. It's a visual reminder of the frenetic pace of redevelopment that came with the pipeline era. But it is impossible to ignore the downsides that came with this frenetic change. In this picture, two whole blocks were ultimately replaced with parking structures. A third block, home today to the Dena'ina Center, was cleared for surface parking. While that block is no longer parking, a number of surface parking lots scattered throughout downtown Anchorage remain. It is a reminder that redevelopment does not always equate to progress. Replacing cottages and small commercial buildings with higher-density apartments, condos, and office towers through upzoning is not just a sign of a maturing city, it is also indicative that the city's planning department is serious in responsibly managing a city's growth. However, replacing entire blocks of homes and buildings that house people in favor of concrete structures that store machines on wheels (which sit idle for over 90% of their lifespan) is not responsible in the slightest. It stems from a desire to outside accommodate automobile users by creating parking availability for them. But it comes at the expense of creating a patchwork of buildings surrounded by surface parking and garages which further take away a city's character and further perpetuates the idea of a 6pm city center that is not meant to be lived in.

The same view seen today.

 

Hotel Indigo - Downtown Anchorage

I've been gone for just a bit, but I wanted to go ahead and add the proposed Hotel Indigo development to the record. The project was developed in close cooperation with the Anchorage Community Development Authority (ACDA) and announced to the media in early 2020, just before the pandemic. The 12-story building was to be a mixed-use property with 32 apartment units and space for a restaurant on the ground level, in addition to the 178-room hotel. But what made this project most unique was the nature in which this building was to be built. Modules for each living-space unit were to be constructed in China and barged to Anchorage with each module stacked atop another resulting in a Lego-like rise of the overall structure. Additionally, the parking garage facing 6th Avenue was not to be demolished but rather was to serve as a backbone to the hotel and apartments. 

Construction was originally slated to start in May of last year but was delayed following contractual disputes between the developer and the ACDA over scheduling for the temporary removal of the city's transit center. The construction date was thereby moved to August of 2020. However, as of summer 2021  the project has been indefinitely postponed. In other words, it could perhaps be said that this will be another project that will go into the dustbin of projects that never came to be. It also marks yet another failed plan for the problematic People Mover Transit Center. Five years ago this blog covered a previous grand plan which called for a great reduction in transit center space and the addition of a large retail tenant. As a side note, ironically the doomed Hotel Indigo development would have been built across the street from where the Augustine Energy Center would have been built had that project not been cancelled many years earlier.