Anchorage Daily News

Spenard gone from sleazy to hip? No wonder Mr. Whitekeys sold the Fly By Night Club. He got out just in time.

Bear Tooth Theatrepub and Sugarspoon are lively businesses on the north end of the Miracle Mile, but they are not the Spenard of Spam, where the impresario of the "Whale Fat Follies" made an honest living out of parody and the blues.

As the story in Sunday's Daily News pointed out, there's a Spenard flowering -- yes, flowering -- at work that has less to do with comprehensive plans and urban design than artists/entrepreneurs seeing opportunity and seizing it.

Spenard has strong anchor businesses -- Blaine's, REI, Title Wave Books, the Bicycle Shop, Gwennies and a hotel row, so these commercial pioneers aren't exactly hacking a niche out of blight or the wilderness. Both public and private investment have improved Spenard's prospects in recent years.

But what's striking about new life in this old section of town is that it has grown from the work of private citizens, people willing to stake their livelihoods on new ventures.

In that sense the older businesses have become magnets for those willing to take chances. And success will tend to breed more success. That's what will make Spenard, or any other part of town, work well.

Architects Pat Krochina and Bill Tatum are taking a similar risk at 13th Avenue and Gambell Street in Fairview. They've bought a four-story building there and put their Nvision Architecture in its offices. That's investing at what on some days looks like the roughest intersection in town, with its mix of chronic inebriates, prostitutes and drug dealing.

But the architects want to encourage the area, one that has street criminals and derelicts competing with hardworking residents and a lively community council determined to make things better.

Krochina and Tatum won't remake Fairview. But they are part of the change that happens one business at a time, one household at a time over the long haul. People like the architects are vital because they don't just encourage change, they are change. Over time, good people can redefine a neighborhood because they live and work there -- and refuse to yield the streets to the dark side.

Public investment has made a difference in Fairview, as in Spenard. The widening and cleanup along 15th Avenue, traffic calming in residential areas, overhauls for Fairview and Denali elementary schools and more police attention have made the neighborhood more inviting. But without grass-roots decisions -- people who buy and remodel old homes to live in, or build new on old lots or invest in buildings most won't touch -- the public sector finds itself force-feeding a project, like Mountain View in Motion, that just doesn't want to happen.

Spenard and Fairview aren't projects. They're communities. May they prosper along with their new business residents.

BOTTOM LINE: Individual investors show the way in Spenard and Fairview.

Mind-bending

On Sunday, the Daily News reprinted a 1958 Daily News story on plans to build Clark Junior High.

Both the price tag and the glowing description of the soon-to-be built school caught my eye.

The cost for building Clark was $2.5 million. And more than half of that paid by the federal government.

Wow, talk about inflation. Last year we passed a bond proposition to replace Clark for $65 million, more than 25 times the price of the original.

The 1958 story was reprinted as part of a series on the build-up to statehood. The story noted that Clark's design included interior courtyards, and that the school overlooked Chester Creek on the south.

Sounds lovely. I didn't remember either of those features from when I went to school at Clark, around the time it opened.

I still think happily of my seventh grade language arts and social studies teacher, Lucy Frey.

But the building itself? Let's face it: I don't have memories of it being a beautiful school, even new.

Maybe there's a reason for that. One recent news clipping said Clark was designed to do double duty as a bomb shelter.

Another called it "a drab, boxy structure."

All I know is, when the school district tore it down last year to make way for a new school on the site, I thought it was a good idea. No nostalgic twinges.

Let's hope in another 50 years, the new one, also described glowingly as a modern building with skylights and lots of windows, will still be standing.

And that it won't have to be replaced by one costing 25 times more ... or $1.6 billion.

-- Rosemary Shinohara

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