Polaris Hotel is more death star than north star for Fairbanks

Nearly a decade ago, I took an unguided tour of the innards of the abandoned Polaris Building in downtown Fairbanks accompanied by another Fairbanks reporter and photographer.

With flashlights in hand, we made our way from the basement, up darkened stairways and through rooms where beds, mattresses and old TVs were strewn like archeological artifacts.

There was broken glass and junk on the floor, broken windows on the walls and bits and pieces of broken furniture. The utilities had been off for many years. It was cold and quiet.

We were there because reporter Chris Eshleman received permission and a key to enter the premises. The hopeless dream that the building could be a candidate for renovation and rehabilitation was still alive, mainly because no one in Fairbanks officialdom wanted to face the high cost of the alternative.

Eshleman said the one thing he remembers about the inside is how low the ceilings were, which made it hard to see how modernization would work. When he abandoned newspaper work, Eshleman wrote a master's degree thesis in which he said tearing the building down and replacing it with office space would be an "irrational gamble."

The building towers over most everything else in downtown Fairbanks, more death star than north star. Its only rival for height is the Northward Building two blocks to the south on Lacey Street. Unlike the Polaris, the Northward remains a going proposition, though it is not the focus of city pride it was 60 years ago.

The Northward, in all its gleaming eight-story aluminum and steel glory, opened in early 1952, billed as the first Fairbanks skyscraper. Novelist Edna Ferber, who was not averse to knocking back a few at the Northward Lounge while doing her research on Alaska, used the building as something of a model for her fictional "Ice Palace" in her book of the same name.

The most amazing aspect of the Northward is not its underground parking, but how during construction a worker fell six stories from a scaffold and suffered only minor bruises on his shoulder.

The speculation at the time was Richard Beckman, who had been a paratrooper in World War II, was used to falling out of the sky and was relaxed when his shoulder hit the cement. "I never had any bad feeling at any time I was falling," he said.

"Fairbanks Has Two Skyscrapers," the Daily News-Miner declared in its 1953 Progress Edition. The second was the slightly taller Polaris, which also opened in 1952, billed as a "modernistic apartment house" with 96 efficiencies and 48 one-bedroom units inside its green concrete walls.

It once was home to the Fairbanks Petroleum Club and was among the downtown  landmarks that had trouble surviving the tumult of the trans-Alaska pipeline and its aftermath.

One thing people in Fairbanks seem to agree on is the city would be better off with demolition of the Polaris, but no one has offered millions to remove it. The latest best hope is that the federal government will provide a grant, which has long been the go-to option for Alaska projects.

Reading the Polaris update by Laurel Andrews, (ADN, March 19), in which she mentioned city official Pat Smith wore a special suit and respirator on his last visit to avoid asbestos, made me think perhaps we should have taken more precautions all those years ago on our inspection.

We went up 100 feet to the top floor restaurant, where the picture windows still offered a million-dollar view — the finest of any building in town — but inside the walls there was barely a hint this was once the home of the Tiki Cove Chinese Restaurant.

If it sounds like an odd location for a cove, that's only because the name originated when the Cove was in the basement of the Mecca Bar on Second Avenue. Before going to the roof, we saw boxes in the basement of Tiki Cove cups, bowls and plates.

When the Polaris opened, the promoters said the top floor was "like an eagle's nest in the sky," with "one of the most sought-after penthouses in Alaska."

I didn't see any eagles on the roof, but there were trees growing and there were plenty of pigeons. The birds were holed up in the mechanical room atop the elevator shaft.

As I walked over to the open doorway and out from the darkness, I could tell an enormous pigeon convention was taking place, as the "cooing" was deafening, if such a thing is possible.

I stepped back carefully without shining a flashlight on the pigeons, hoping to avoid a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds."

As I left I couldn't help but think of the late John Hovenden, who in 1993 rebranded the hotel the "Captain Hook" and tried to rebuild the business. He would tell you the name had nothing to do with the Anchorage hotel named after another captain, and that this was all about a swashbuckling adventure.

He called the top-floor restaurant the "Raven's Nest." One of the best things he did, which cost him dearly, was to close the package liquor store on the ground floor.

When he filed for bankruptcy protection in 1995, Hovenden told a reporter what the city needed was a vision from its community leaders, but when lenders asked him where things were going in five years, he couldn't say.

"I can't tell them the city has a plan because I don't know where they are going," he said.

If the dream of getting a federal grant falls through and local government won't turn to taxes, Fairbanks residents may be looking at the abandoned Polaris for a long time to come.

Columnist Dermot Cole can be reached at dermot@alaskadispatch.com. 

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