A once-popular Anchorage mall has become an illegal dumping ground

In the middle of the day Wednesday, Dorsey Roland and his son Zachary loaded the mangled carcass of a refrigerator into the bed of their pickup to haul away.

“You can’t get any money for the steel, but I do scrap the rest of it,” Roland said.

He was in a parking lot at the rear of Northway Mall in northeast Anchorage, surrounded by trash in what has essentially become an illegal dumping ground behind the once-popular shopping center. With the sprawling building almost totally vacant, people have taken to depositing huge volumes of garbage all over the property’s backside.

Heaps of household trash bags get rifled through by scavengers, scattering litter in every direction. There were old tires, water heaters, kitchen appliances, broken furniture, a cooler filled with used motor oil. A box of ‘90s movies on VHS cassettes had been picked through and smashed, the long black tendrils of tape unspooling from titles like “Notting Hill,” “The Mask” and “Harriet the Spy” oscillating slowly with each breeze.

“It’s disgusting,” Roland said, pointing toward a cluster of plastic buckets in the distance filled with unidentifiable liquids he won’t go near.

A retiree with time on his hands, Roland had already been salvaging old appliances from East Anchorage when he spotted the debris field behind the mall about a month ago. Since then he estimated he’s hauled off 20 large items to be scrapped and recycled. He even obtained a certification from the Environmental Protection Agency to be able to properly handle the fluorinated hydrocarbons in refrigerators, which can be toxic.

“I make a little extra off of it,” Roland said of the salvage work. “For me it’s a hobby. And it’s my thing that it gets recycled.”

Coming back to the area every couple of days, Roland said there’s a vicious cycle of residents dumping their garbage, then the mess worsening as other people spread it around hunting for who knows what. A dumpster left on site to try to ameliorate the problem was quickly filled.

The Northway Mall, first opened in 1980, had been in decline for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying lockdown measures were the death blow. In August of 2020, the company that owned the building then, Georgia-based Colony Bank, evicted around 25 businesses on short notice when it decided to shut down the mall’s common area. A few larger businesses with their own entrances stayed open. Not long after, the Carrs Safeway grocery store that served as an anchor tenant closed. Then, earlier this winter, a gas leak in the building uncovered a section of roof over the Planet Fitness gym that was in the process of collapsing. Now only a trampoline park on the mall’s corner is left operating, along with an auto-mechanic business in a stand-alone building at the edge of the parking lot.

On Wednesday, the mall’s property manager was patching up damaged plywood with more plywood over an entrance someone had tried to break through. He declined to be quoted and referred questions to Benderson Development, a Florida-based property company that now owns the building. Benderson did not respond to an email or phone call requesting an interview. An Anchorage-based property manager for the company also did not respond to emailed questions.

Because the lot is private property, the owner is legally responsible for keeping it tidy. John Snelson, a manager with the municipality’s code enforcement unit, said the division’s staff is aware of the dumping and has a case open, but declined to provide specifics and referred questions to a spokesperson for the city.

Though there’s a chain link fence running along a length of the mall’s front side facing the street, there’s little in the way of security around most of the perimeter, save boards affixed over windows and doors. Signs of trespassing abound, from a cracked window kicked outward from within a second-story room to a recent social media video showing a group of young people exploring inside the building with cellphone flashlights.

It’s unclear if people are regularly sleeping inside the building. In a wooded slice of public land buffering the mall’s parking lot from the outbound lane of the Glenn Highway were two camping tents and thin footpaths worn in and out of the scrub.

Karen Bronga, who grew up in East Anchorage and now represents the district on the Assembly, remembers when the mall opened in her senior year of high school. (The property is now technically part of the North Anchorage district because of last year’s Assembly reapportionment and revised district boundaries.) She said that before it opened, residents generally headed downtown if they wanted to do any retail shopping.

“This is just super sad to me because basically this was so exciting when it went in,” Bronga said. “When I had a family this is where we went for Santa … it was a community piece of pride.”

Bronga spoke by phone as she was driving behind the mall to inspect the situation for herself for the first time.

“This is just total dumping ... I’m here looking at beds, a whole pile of spruce boughs dumped. And windows, holy moly!” she said. “This is so terrible that it’s surprising.”

“This is a blighted property, it’s a public nuisance,” Bronga added.

She and others have wondered if the building could be repurposed to meet existing needs in the municipality. Across the country, so-called “ghost malls” that have closed or lost most of their tenants are being revitalized by local governments and developers. During the pandemic, shuttered department stores were used to administer COVID vaccines. A few ghost malls have been turned into senior housing. A high school in Burlington, Vermont, was relocated into an old Macy’s after a $3.5 million renovation.

“This is a valuable piece of property,” Bronga said. “Part of it could be rejuvenated to help with our homeless situation.”

That idea has been assessed by three city administrations and two working groups, and the barrier has been cost.

“Generally speaking it would be a very expensive facility,” said Felix Rivera, who chairs the Assembly’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. He said the last time elected officials examined the prospect, the asking price was in the range of $12 million to $14 million. And that was before all the extensive renovations that would be required to make the building functional and safe for occupants.

“There would be significant issues with repairs, and likely replacing the roof,” Rivera said.

According to city records, the parcel is valued for property tax purposes at $2.45 million, most of which, $2 million, is the land. Tax revenues collected by the municipality fell from a recent high of $314,320 in 2020, to just over $41,000 in 2022.

Dorsey Roland thinks even an occasional police presence in the area might dissuade would-be dumpers from trashing the area so thoroughly. But without heavy equipment, he isn’t sure how to clean up damage already done.

On Wednesday’s salvage trip, Roland and his son carted off the fridge and a mutilated dishwasher.

“Keeps me from being a couch potato,” he said of his hobby with a shrug.

Benderson, the company that owns the mall, tries to clean up the dumping as it can through employees on the ground in Anchorage. By Friday afternoon, workers for the company had managed to clear out a large amount of junk. A few scattered piles remained tucked into alcoves and loading docks, with a formidable mound of debris amassed beside a dumpster. But the majority of the eviscerated trash bags, video cassettes, waterlogged couches, spent tires, mattresses and assorted detritus was gone.

The boarded-up door that had been newly patched a few days before was freshly exposed, with chunks of plywood torn off.