Starting around 2013, Chris Thorgesen arrived from Colorado and did a remarkable thing.
He bought five prominent and empty commercial buildings on Main Street, refurbished them and filled them with tenants. Then he bought others.
When retired golf pro Dave Canipe, who owned the King’s Store building, complained to Thor that he’d bought every crappy building on Main Street but his, Thor bought Canipe’s as well. Today it’s the cidery.
What made Thorgesen’s virtual rebuilding of Main Street all the more remarkable was that he accomplished in a few years what the Haines Borough and business leaders had fretted for much longer: What to do with our decaying commercial district.
Afraid it was creating more blight when it tore down Main Street’s primary and elementary schools in 2011, the borough assembly spent $40,000 for a downtown revitalization plan.
The plan was clear and practical, a virtual how-to lesson in rebuilding town cores. Its recommendations included hiring part-time staff, identifying boundaries of an improvement district, and options for funding improvements.
Inspired, the Haines Chamber of Commerce formed a Downtown Revitalization Committee to implement the plan.
The group of Main Street merchants met for about a year and started in on the plan, identifying “low-hanging” fruit that would put some runs on its scoreboard, things like asking the borough to help pay for re-painting of buildings and approaching property owners about addressing downtown’s most prominent eyesores.
But politics intruded when the borough government started talking about what to do with the newly cleared school lot at Third and Main. The chamber committee voted in favor of a park or “town square” there, but that didn’t sit well with people at city hall who wanted the lot developed.
The borough gave the committee the cold shoulder until manager David Sosa called a meeting with the group. Sosa told them citizens needn’t worry about downtown revitalization, the Haines Borough would take over that effort, using the group’s recommendations.
Sosa pulled the classic “capture and kill” tactic in politics: Seize a citizen initiative, promise everything its backers want, then deliver nothing while waiting for the clamor to die down. The borough never again addressed downtown revitalization, though it sold some of the former school property to Haines Brewery at a reasonable price.
Thor didn’t do everything Main Street needed, of course. Businesses have filled in some of its previously empty buildings, but others open in 2013, notably Bear Den Mall, have closed. The $40,000 revitalization plan could stand to be dusted off, as we’re not done improving our core.
A group calling themselves the Town Squares this month revived efforts to preserve Third and Main as a community park. A recent afternoon concert there provided a glimpse of what it could become, a magnet for downtown not unlike Carol Tuynman’s genius “First Friday” events.
Local draftsman Larry Larson has even volunteered a drawing of landscaped park at the site, including an amphitheater. Who knows? Individual, citizen efforts might just lead us to a unified, attractive and vibrant Main Street.
It would be nice for the Haines Borough to be leading that effort, but maybe that’s not necessary.
We’ve come a long way. I was working with another Chamber of Commerce group in the late 1980s aimed at “downtown beautification” that created a “pocket park” in the lot between Main Street’s theater building and liquor store.
We wanted to hear from local businesses what they thought of a new park on Main Street. The lady behind the video rental counter, referring to Tlingit Park, asked me, “What’s wrong with the park we got?”