Historic Anchorage Hotel celebrates 100 years.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: VISITOR INDUSTRY

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Last year Anchorage celebrated its Centennial, marking one hundred years since the historic lot sale in 1915 when Anchorage was comprised more of tents than actual infrastructure. Just one year later the Historic Anchorage Hotel celebrated its 100th birthday, having opened in 1916 and housing Alaska's locals and guests ever since.

Owner Bob Neumann purchased the hotel in 1988, though at the time he wasn't actually interested in entering the hotel business. Neumann is the owner of Grizzly's Gifts, located at the corner of E Street and Fourth Avenue. At the time, he had been leasing space in the building that contained both the hotel and the gift shop. Anchorage was going through an economic downturn as oil prices had crashed, but similarly to today tourism was on the rise.

Transitions

He says there was a transition as many businesses left downtown and the malls were becoming popular, "So there I was and I had a valuable location and the owner of this particular building at the time saw that and found a few glitches in my lease and was going to take me over."

Neumann proposed instead to buy the entire building, including the Historic Anchorage Hotel, although he had no interest in running it at the time. He says, "A hotel, are you kidding? I just wanted my gift shop. I was interested in saving my store and I'd just deal with whatever was up here."

And what he found horrified him: there was linoleum nailed to the walls in place of wallpaper, wires for cable television were just hanging in the hallway, the floors in every room were crooked having never been fixed after the '64 quake, it was infested with mice and roaches, and the old kitchenettes hadn't been cleaned since the 1930s. "It was just solid grease and roaches, we'd pull things out and they'd just scatter."

The first day that he owned the hotel, in February, a woman checked into a room that had no heat. She had filled the tub with hot water in an attempt to create some warmth in the room for her children traveling with her. "I shut the place down the next day," Neumann says. "What a shame it was, and what a bad face to put on Anchorage and Alaska to a tourist."

Renovations

For the next three months, Neumann did much of the work himself to make the hotel a livable, comfortable space, having a grand opening the same year in June. It was during that grand opening that Neumann realized the significance of the hotel that had been run almost to the ground. Story after...