Anchorage

With lawsuit settled, new owners can move on with plans for rundown Anchorage motel

A dilapidated and boarded-up motel east of downtown Anchorage may soon be rejuvenated after a lawsuit over its ownership ended this week in a settlement.   

Anchorage couple Robert and Serena Alexander are now the unquestioned owners of the Big Timber Motel — a three-story building at 2037 Fifth Ave. with a troubled past. Since last year, the Alexanders have been locked in a legal disagreement with longtime owner Terry Stahlman, who operated it as a hotel and strip club for about a decade until it was foreclosed by the city in 2014 over unpaid property taxes.

Stahlman claimed he still had an ownership stake and was refusing to leave the property, where he was living in a makeshift apartment.

Court records show the terms of the settlement between Stahlman, his representatives and the Alexanders are secret. A court order Tuesday prevents anyone from discussing the settlement.

But now that the case is closed, Robert Alexander said in an interview this week, he and his wife will move forward with renovating the property.

"The plan is to start it back up now that it's over," Alexander said.

Stahlman signed over the deed to the property to Serena Alexander in February 2014, records show, setting off a legal saga. A month earlier, after the city seized the property, inspectors discovered about two dozen people living in the motel in rooms infested with bedbugs and shrews, without heat or hot water.

ADVERTISEMENT

In May 2015, the Alexanders filed a lawsuit to evict Stahlman, who is in his 70s and frail and had turned the lobby's former front office into an apartment. Stahlman and a handful of other tenants were refusing to leave. Stahlman maintained he had a 50 percent ownership stake in the building.

The judge, Catherine Easter, said last year she couldn't order evictions until the ownership dispute was settled.

In August, the city ordered all of the tenants out, saying it was no longer safe for anyone to live there. The motel has been fenced off and boarded up ever since.

A conservator who represented Stahlman in court, Elizabeth Rollins, declined to comment for this story, citing the confidentiality of the settlement. Stahlman's defenders had argued that Stahlman did not have the mental capacity to make the deal with the Alexanders. 

The Big Timber building won't be torn down. But Alexander said the insides have already been gutted, and he and his wife — who operate several other Anchorage businesses, including the downtown LED Ultra Lounge — plan to turn it into a more upscale hotel.

He said the bright-green former strip club behind the hotel will become a restaurant.

Devin Kelly

Devin Kelly was an ADN staff reporter.

ADVERTISEMENT