One of our town’s most sublime experiences is a meal in the Hotel Halsingland dining room, followed by a drink in the bar perhaps and a walk around the Fort Seward Parade Grounds on a warm summer evening.
For a short spell, a person can escape the grit, callouses and heartbreak that come with living year-round in a small town in the Far North. With its tiny touch of Scandinavian panache, the Halsingland provides a break from working long shifts, stockpiling firewood or fretting over some unwarranted worry.
The hotel dining room is a quiet place. Its green-lawned location, carpeting and tablecloths ensure that. It’s a spot you can sneak away to with relative anonymity, unlike other restaurants seemingly designed for patrons to see and be seen.
Nearly 70 years old, the Halsingland is a throwback to an earlier era when dinner was a special night out, a mannerly affair that came with a well-dressed waitstaff and a cloth napkin. It wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t fast and it wasn’t shared with passersby. But it was staggeringly pleasant.
That experience is likely gone, and if so, we should mourn it.
Jeff Butcher, who has owned the Halsingland 17 years, is done. The restaurant and bar are closed for summer for the first time in as long as anyone can remember. The Grand Old Dame of Fort Seward is for sale, but don’t expect a savior.
Butcher has previously tried selling the hotel, without success. He says that the most obvious potential buyers – big cruise companies – aren’t interested. And he acknowledges that holding together large, 115-year-old wooden buildings on a windblown spot on Lynn Canal is no mean feat.
Butcher deserves credit for maintaining an ambitious menu and former owner Arne Olsson’s vision of the place as a cut above standard rural Alaska lodging. Arne broke ground in Haines by prohibiting fighting in the bar, sometimes even interrupting loud arguments. “We want happy campers,” he’d say.
Olsson also pioneered ways to make money, including hosting bus tours and the town’s once landmark shore excursion – a salmon bake and Chilkat Dancers performance against the stunning backdrop of the Chilkat Range. In the fall, he brought in tours of travel agents.
Unfailingly polite, Olsson’s Halsingland was rarely sleepy. One summer night at about 7 p.m., I walked in to find Arne and about 20 others in the bar smashed and wearing bread baskets on their heads. A foreman from the sawmill walked on his hands across the floor of the place and rang the bell with his foot.
I don’t remember the reason for the party – Arne certainly never needed one – but I remember dreading the three Scotches placed before me on the bar. Other wild parties came when dozens of actors descended on the place during ACTFEST, the statewide theater festival held in Haines for years. Few individuals are more volatile than amateur actors let out of their hometowns at the end of an Alaskan winter.
The hotel’s Halloween haunted houses are still talked about, its dimly lit rooms providing the perfect, creepy setting. For drinkers prone to excess, the hotel was a hideaway in an era when River Road was still open to car traffic. A quick dog-leg allowed drunks to sidestep city cops before zooming up the highway.
What a spot. Some early-morning parties became so wickedly fun that bartenders pulled down the window blinds so as to not offend neighbors or tip off the police. If the walls of that place could talk, the divorce rate in this town would spiral. Those memories long ago moved the building from the tourist brochures to town lore.
But Butcher wants to enjoy the rest of his life, and who can blame him? Everything’s for sale with the exception of the campground, which Butcher says he’s keeping. He says he’s also willing to sell the hotel buildings separately, which would likely spell the end of the place as we know it.
Times change. Old hotels fade into history, and it’s likely this one will, too. Few visitors want to stay in a small room in a romantic, old hotel anymore. A younger generation of travelers wants king size beds, extra pillows and giant TVs. Few potential owners want to work so hard for a modest return.
Anyone out there with a special fondness for the place and a bit of spare change should come forward. Perhaps they could team with others and save the Halsingland. Or maybe the Haines Economic Development Corporation could help promote the sale to a buyer or buyers with the wherewithal to maintain and improve it.
That’s a dream and a long shot, but it would be nice. Our town will be a poorer place without the old hotel, a grand inn still, by Alaska standards.