Art by Angela Ramirez
Why West Side ‘has all the verve’ By Mary Lochner
I
t’s a thin ribbon now, mud caked, shallow. A brown rivulet in the snow. But when he was growing up, Fish Creek in Spenard flowed full enough to serve as a mini Mississipi to Hans Buchholdt’s childhood Huck Finn fantasies. He and the other kids in the neighborhood floated down it on tacked-together rafts made of scrap wood, navigating its currents by pushing off the bottom with sticks. They caught Dolly Varden and stickleback in the summers of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. And in winter they’d play hockey on ponds created by little weirs that people made in the creek. This was back when Spenard was its own city. Before Anchorage gobbled up its land and its people in 1975, incorporating it into the borough. Later, Anchorage would take its water, reducing Fish Creek to a trickle in order to support a sewer project. The creek wound along Buchholdt’s path to school, which took him by Old Hermit Park, across from an auto shop. It was called Old Hermit for the former railroad worker who lived there in a wooden shack. Buchholdt’s curiosity brought him close enough to the shack to throw a rock at it once, to see if anyone was home. There wasn’t. Another time his curiosity carried him through the doors of a two-story building with stonework around the entrance. Inside, a yellow-gold carpet stretched out under his feet toward the edges of the wide space, where ornately carved wooden Chinese furniture sat small and demure. A woman in a silk brocade dress embroidered with flowers floated down the stairs. She paused to consider him, and looked astonished to see a 10-year-old child there. You know that place as Gwennie’s Old Alaskan Restaurant now. But back then it was a brothel. nchorage was always really snobby to Spenard,” said artist Duke Russell. He’s made a study, he said, of every inch of the neighborhood’s curving main road—and its landmarks—from every conceivable angle. He’s also taken a personal interest in Spenard’s history, culling hundreds of photographs from the Museum’s archives to piece together a pictorial narrative. “A lot of places have their own little section of town where they make their jokes about whores and massage parlors,” Russell said, adding that Spenard’s heyday as a red light district was a
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short-lived byproduct of the oil boom era, and that it’s been overblown in local lore. He said people often latch on to rumors about Spenard’s seedy side, but sometimes fail to see its creative pulse and DIY spirit. “We’re the Greenwich Village of Anchorage. West Side has got all the verve.” Russell doesn’t like what city fathers have done with the place, he said: wiping out many of the brothels by eminent domain in the ‘80s with a road project, and making so-called improvements to the portion of Spenard Road that tourists are likely to motor along on their way to and from the airport. “Anchorage has tried to kill us,” he said. “Kill our color and our pissy charm.” Spenardian charm. It’s what won the audience over one year in the late ‘90s when Fiori D’Italia hosted a neighborhood beauty pageant, and Emily Harris was crowned Miss Spenard. “It wasn’t your classic beauty pageant,” said Angela Ramirez, an artist and author of the blog Life in Spenard. For her talent, Harris got up on stage with boyfriend and fellow musician Trey Wolf. The slender brunette with almondshaped eyes stood dressed in black pants and a black vest, braless. She reached out a slender arm to the lip of the bucket at her feet, lifted the lid and nodded to Trey. He gave a squeeze on the concertina. She removed the lid, reached in, and pulled out a length of golden Christmas garland. On the end of the garland was a formaldehyde-preserved pig fetus. She pulled out the pig fetus, and pretended to walk it across the stage, using the garland as a leash. “Next thing you know, she’s singing, ‘My little piggy, he glows in the dark.’” Ramirez said. “I can’t remember anything else because I was laughing so hard at that point. When she pulled out that pig, a group of five women who for some reason thought it was a real beauty pageant got up and left.” Fiori D’Italia started hosting shows in the late ‘90s, sometime after The Underground bar was closed down. The Underground was run by Buchholdt’s brother Dylan. People came to listen to DJs like Dan LePan spin bands like Nine Inch Nails, Thrill Kill Cult and Ministry. Or they moshed to bands like Black Happy, Guardian Angel and Social Distortion. These were brought up courtesy of show producer and Del Mundo roaster Mike Allen (the company’s Mike’s Mellow Blend is named for him). Ramirez made murals of ghost-like figures on the bar’s black walls, and
as long as she had a brush in her hand, she got her beers for free. That was the place to be in the early ‘90s. At least it was, until the crowd from Chilkoot Charlie’s, that long-running mainstream attraction to Spenard nightlife, moved in and ruined everything. Also, Buchholdt said, someone was murdered at The Underground in 1993. It was shuttered shortly thereafter. The scene in Spenard resurrected the way a weed does when you lop off the part that’s above ground but leave the roots alone. It started poking up in little nodes, at venues with short-lived or inconsistent music scenes, or at annual events that have become cultural institutions: Spenard Jazz Fest, Spenard Block Party, Spring Social. Also, at the weekend get-togethers (small) at Sheila Wyne’s studio, along with her annual spring party (large, at a 2,000 headcount last year). The weekly barbecue at Sheila Wyne’s studio is the nexus where artists congregate, build friendships and exchange ideas, said Out North Contemporary Art House marketing manager and F Magazine editor Teeka Ballas. “We stand around the fire, make food. There’s poetry and music, and general camaraderie,” she said. “I lived here a couple years before I tapped into that scene. It was the first time I felt like I could call Alaska home. I fell into a mix of eclectic, creative and inspirational people.” Sheila Wyne’s Studio is formerly the auto shop across from Old Hermit Park. When Wyne discovered it in 1997, the lot around it was overgrown with grass and rusted metal. Abandoned for more than a year, it had become a small private eddy of Spenard, where its backwater washed up from time to time and left deposits. “I remember going out there with a rake, and just raking up condoms like they were leaves,” Wyne said. After she fixed it up, the studio naturally evolved into a place for artists to hang out, she said. In the year 2000 it also hosted the first annual Sheila Wyne studio party, a major affair with bands, food, beer, and a legendary trebuchet. (A trebuchet, similar to a catapult, uses the release of counterbalanced weights to launch an object.) The trebuchet wasn’t Wyne’s idea. But one year the informal party committee thought to raise funds for artists by charging attendees to launch a missile on one. “So it was built and it was a little dicey at first getting it dialed
April 25 - May 2, 2013