I vowed when I left Anchorage in 1986, I wouldn’t be back. But the city is hard to avoid if you’re doing any business in Alaska, so I’ve returned again and again.
For my wife’s green card. For my Little Brother’s graduation from Alaska Military Youth Academy. Most recently I went for the Alaska Municipal League conference, where municipal officials go for training, a kind of dog obedience school for politicians.
The question I ask myself about Anchorage, is this: Does the place ever change? Or will it always be “Los Anchorage,” the large city that’s only an hour’s drive from Alaska?
I first came to Anchorage in 1984, at age 22. The town was booming with strip malls and strippers, fast food, condos and car dealerships. And young people. Alaska’s early oil boom coincided with a national recession and baby boomers with a little ambition went north where the jobs were plenty. Having a pulse and rudimentary spelling skills qualified me for a job as copy editor at the Anchorage Times. A friend with a state-college degree in business administration became manager of two Mexican restaurants.
I found the city crowded, cold and sleazy. On my first night in town, a bunch of us piled into a cab to hit the town’s most renowned drinking hole, Chilkoot Charlie’s. As our cab arrived at the joint’s front door, a van in front of us backed into some parked motorcycles, knocking them down like dominoes. Seeing what he had done, the van driver sped off. Our black cab driver turned around in his seat and said to us, “Now you boys be careful in there.”
Relying on cabs for the first few weeks, I was propositioned regularly by cabbies on whether I’d like to get into in an “after-hours poker game.” Maybe this is code for some other proposition, or maybe I’m prudish, because the idea of going with a pocketful of money to a stranger’s house in the middle of the night to meet other strangers interested in getting my money is not immediately appealing to me.
If there are shallow graves all over Spenard filled with eager card players who fell for the cabbies’ pitch I would not be surprised. Because there’s a lot of trouble that even an innocent person can get into in Anchorage.
I was just a newspaper copy editor and I wound up sharing an apartment with a former stripper in a building with a basement that was a marijuana-growing operation. The manager of the building topped off the sleaze. He wired the electricity for his clandestine pot farm through the apartment of the yuppies in the apartment next-door. They were always wondering why their electric bills were so high.
I also rented a room in a house owned by an “appliance repairman,” who may have never actually fixed an appliance for a customer. For anyone he saw as an easy mark, he would make a diagnosis that their appliance was permanently damaged, but that he would be willing to haul it off for use as parts. Then he would fix the machine and sell it in the newspaper.
A woman I got to know arrived from the Lower 48 on the promise of a new job and was taken in by a co-worker before she found an apartment. On her first night in town, the hospitable coworker invited my friend into her bed — with her husband.
It seemed that in Anchorage, in the heady early 1980s, the money was fast and the rules were off. And everyone drove way too fast, as if they were in a rush to get to — Eagle River? In the springtime, when the snow melted back, dead bodies would be discovered around town.
During subsequent trips over the years, I’ve noticed a certain improvement in architecture, which is to say that many of the whorehouses in Spenard have been plowed under or gentrified. There’s a freeway that can take you from the Captain Cook Hotel to Potter Marsh in about 10 minutes, aptly named the Walter J. Hickel Parkway for one of Alaska’s fastest movers. And there are wine bars and organic grocery stores and some genuinely good restaurants.
But people still drive too fast, the homicide rate is off the charts, and at Chilkoot Charlie’s, patrons and their IDs must be photographed before entering. Maybe that’s how they protect the motorcycles parked out front. In Anchorage, that would amount to progress.