Building a better downtown.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: Karen Lavery, executive director of the Downtown Association of Fairbanks - Interview

Karen Lavery, executive director of the Downtown Association of Fairbanks, is leading the charge to recreate the vitality that used to be at the heart of Alaska's second-largest city.

Karen Lavery's grandfather brought the first load of medicine to Fairbanks in the early days of the community. He stayed and opened a grocery store and raised a family. A third-generation Fairbanksan, Karen Lavery is executive director of the Downtown Association of Fairbanks, which is spearheading a drive to revitalize the Fairbanks core area. Since its inception in 1979, the association has successfully brought activities such as the Open North American Sled Dog Championship and the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race to downtown Fairbanks and is now working on other projects to revitalize the downtown.

ABM: What was behind the founding of the association?

LAVERY: Actually, it was at the time stores were moving out to the malls and the downtown people thought they should get together and see what they could do. And what they did, they'd get together just to be a promotion, to do some promotions together, but it soon became obvious to them that they didn't have a whole lot to promote and they'd better get involved in revitalization.

And even though it still looks a lot like somebody knocked the tooth out of a kid down here because of all the vacant land, we have come a long way. We have really mined it around a lot, but you would have had to have been through all the phases to see it. I'm sure those who come in now to take a look at it say, "oh, there's a lot to be done here," but there always is. The downtown doesn't get one way overnight, and it doesn't change overnight either. It's a slow process, a slow evolving process.

ABM: What do you define as downtown Fairbanks?

LAVERY: Downtown to us takes in a lot larger area than most people think. It's from the News-Miner to Airport Road and from the college to the Steese Expressway. It's a large area. The core is what we refer to as the downtown.

ABM: What do you consider to be the elements of a healthy downtown?

LAVERY: I think that it needs to have a strong economy. It needs to have a controlled environment, it needs to have a social environment. It needs to be an area that is healthy 24 hours a day, not just during the working period. It's an around-the-clock environment.

ABM: What do you consider to be Fairbanks' greatest assets?

LAVERY: Our greatest asset is that we have a strong financial base down here. We have government down here, we have banks down here. We have all of those kinds of things. Then we have the tourism industry down here. In the summertime, we have a lot of nice retail outlets for tourists. We have a lot of individual stores that can compete with the malls because of their kind of service. Those are some of the things. And we have the state...