Spenard’s iconic neon palm tree takes first steps on its journey home

For nearly 60 years, a neon palm tree sign stood along Spenard Road, a symbol of the area’s colorful past.

Now, after a few years of trading hands and lying dormant in a vacant lot, the sign has a clear path to standing tall over Spenard once more.

In 2017, the tree was taken down from its longtime home at the Paradise Inn when the federal government seized the inn after a previous owner was sentenced to prison for selling meth.

After some legal back-and-forth between the government and a trash company, the tree returned to Spenard in 2018 when a community group purchased it at auction — and then sat for 2 1/2 years in a lot owned by Cook Inlet Housing Authority.

The sign is leaving Spenard again, this time for modest repairs.

Once repairs are complete and construction on a Spenard Road rehabilitation project has finished, new owner Cindy Berger plans to return the palm tree to its original location on land that she’s developing into a “pocket park.” Berger purchased the former Paradise Inn at auction, but the palm tree wasn’t included in the purchase.

She was finally able to buy it from the Spenard boosters for a dollar earlier this year.

“It’s surreal to me,” said Berger, watching Wednesday as workers from Glacier Sign used two cranes to lift the 22-foot structure onto a flatbed trailer before it headed to a repair shop. “I can’t believe that this has been part of my journey for years, and here I am today in the sun, watching this palm tree begin its first phase of the journey to get the work done on it to fix it and get it back up.”

Berger would like to repair the interior skeletal structure of the tree but retain the rusted and broken exterior, including the broken glass neon tubes.

“They’ve told me that from a structural standpoint, the metal is so corroded that they do have to rebuild it,” she said. “I want it to be as close to what we saw today as possible. I want the broken glass.”

Originally, she wanted to replace the neon lights, but the estimated cost — over $100,000 — was prohibitive. She’s still spending around $35,000 on the repairs, funded in part by a GoFundMe campaign.

Jerry Sparkman, who has lived in Spenard since 1958, before Alaska became a state, came out on Wednesday morning to watch the tree being taken away. “It’s kind of nice seeing Spenard revitalized,” he said.

Sparkman remembered passing by the palm tree as a kid, when it was part of the South Seas Hotel and Lounge. “It was quite a nice hotel originally,” he said. “We were clear at the end of the road.”

Since then, the ownership changed and the hotel and bar developed into a persistent neighborhood nuisance. Neighbors tried for decades to shut the business down, according to Tom McGrath, a longtime Spenard-area businessman.

When the Spenard boosters bought the palm tree at auction, they envisioned returning it to its original home as a piece of public art.

“We were looking at how we could bring the palm tree onto some public land,” said Spenard Community Council President Lindsey Hajduk, also on hand to witness the sign being moved. “We as a community really wanted the palm tree to go back to that spot near 30th and Spenard.”

The community council looked at carving out a small part of the property as a mini city-owned park, but the process proved to be too complicated and expensive.

Berger is still figuring out what the future of her property will be. She’s currently planning a parking lot with charging stations for electric vehicles in addition to the pocket park where the tree will be, but work can’t begin until the Spenard Road construction project is completed. Cook Inlet Housing Authority is also developing the vacant lot where the tree has been housed for the past few years, with groundbreaking planned this week on a new three-building, 48-unit housing complex.

“We live in Spenard. This is our neighborhood,” said Mark Fineman, vice president of development at Cook Inlet Housing Authority. “We were happy to give it a home, and we’re happy it gets to stay in the neighborhood.

“We hope it gets another 40 years of life in Spenard.”