Lori Townsend: Alaskans have dreamed and schemed some big tourism and economic ideas for the 49th state through the decades.

Everything from a giant styrofoam igloo lodge, Unknown: "It's too bad it didn't work out because I think it would have been really cool place and unique."

Lori Townsend: to a city under a dome and a freshwater pipeline to California.

Who were the dreamers and what happened to their grand ideas?

We're looking at Alaska boondoggles tonight on Alaska Insight.

A giant artificial igloo marks the halfway point between Fairbanks and Anchorage along the Parks Highway.

It was supposed to be a roadside hotel, but it never opened for business.

Our field producer Emily Schwing has more.

Unknown: It's a dream that just didn't pan out.

Built in the 1970s, the four-story igloo now serves as an odd landmark for curious passers buying and vandals.

Longtime Anchorage-based artists Duke Russell added the igloos image to a collection of postcards he created in 2013.

You know we have a succession of kind of failed attempts to sort of infuse the economy with things.

Sometimes I think hubris gets in the way.

The igloo is a far cry from being the only so called "boondoggle" in the state.

Russell says Alaskans are surrounded by ambitious and unfortunately failed projects.

He cites a state funded $50 million fish processing plant in Anchorage that sold for half the price to a mega church.

That is maybe an example where some simple logistics could have come into play before the thing was built.

And then there's the airport train depot that Alaskans never even use.

There's no reason why you and me and everybody else couldn't take a train to the airport, when we need to come and go.

Although these efforts might seem like expensive failures, Russell praises the creativity behind them.

He says he's mesmerized by the mathematics required to construct a four story igloo in the middle of nowhere.

You know, it's too bad it didn't work out because I think it would have been really cool place and unique.

And you know, it's it doesn't give me any pleasure at all to see it all kind of beat up and tagged and everything else, you know, because that was somebody's, like, they probably poured every single thing they had into that thing.

During the winter highway maintenance crews with the State Department of Transportation keep a pull out cleared of snow, so that anyone driving by can stop to take photos of the igloo.

According to the Department of Environmental Conservation.

current owners are working to clean up contaminated soil around the igloo site.

And they're monitoring groundwater in the area for contamination for do gressil.

Places like the igloo aren't only fodder for his artwork.

They also serve as a warning.

I love the imagination.

I love people's visions.

And I really encourage people to draw it out, do it on paper, get, get some sense of where you're going with it.

And encourage that creative thinking because that's really more than the story.

for Alaska public media.

I'm Emily Schwing.

Lori Townsend: Joining me for a discussion on some of the big and often colorful ideas through the years are visiting UAA professor and former state lawmaker Willie Hensley.

Also on hand today is Tim Bradner, publisher of the Alaska Legislative Digest and former UAA Atwood chair for journalism.

Thanks both of you for being here this evening.

Unknown: Thank you.

Thank you.

Lori Townsend: Thank you.

So really, I want to start with you.

There's certainly been some wild ideas pitch for Alaska, as we were discussing the late governor while vehicle's ideas for a freshwater pipeline and an undersea train to Russia, or something.

Well, we'll talk about here in a few minutes.

But it seems to me that one of the biggest boondoggles that was proposed for Alaska was the notion in 1958 of building a deepwater port in the Arctic pretty much instantly by detonating six nuclear weapons, known as project chariot and memorialized in Dan O'Neal's book The Firecracker Boys.

It really sounds like science fiction, but it was not!

The idea was stopped by residents have point hope and others.

Tell us about what you remember about this.

You worked on this project.

Isn't that right?

Unknown: Yes, I Lori Townsend: hate to admit it.

I was a young college student in Fairbanks back, way back then in the early 60s, and back then, you know, there wasn't much work around and you took anything that came by and so I had absolutely no idea what this project was.

But my god was gonna pay me like $2.89 an hour or something, it was going to be near Kotzebue, so.

So I was flown up there, by Ray Ferguson, actually, and Gladys Porter, and we landed sort of across the runway because had these huge wings, big wind.

Anyway, as it turns out, it was, in retrospect, a relatively poorly funded project.

I mean, all the buildings were made out of canvas.

Quonset huts.

And I was actually employed as a, on the drilling crew.

And this, this drill, I thought it was the most gigantic drill I'd ever seen.

But in retrospect, it was nothing more than a waterwell drilling outfit on wheels.

And it really didn't have the power to do the job it's supposed to do that, that, that that summer.

And thank goodness, you know, I of course, now I know what how catastrophic that project would have been.

And unfortunately, it had the support of all of the political figures in Alaska, including the president of the University of Alaska was, and it was a, I think it would have had a lasting negative effect in that part of the world.

Did people really understand what was being proposed at the time?

Or was was it was it not fully discussed as to what the intention was, they were just doing some testing, and you were hired to do certain drill tests?

I think the Atomic Energy Commission, they had come up with this idea of peaceful uses of atomic energy.

And they were going to try to reshape the earth, you know, using all these scientists.

And I don't think they had even gone to village to the village of point hope, or even Kivalina for the first couple of years that they were up there working.

And of course, needless to say, the villagers got very, very concerned.

Because the Atomic Energy Commission wasn't really telling the truth about about the potential negative effects, you know, of radiation.

Right.

And so thank goodness, you know, they started asking the questions that eventually led to its demise.

Thank you for getting us started there.

Tim, what are your thoughts about this scheme?

What, what do you know about that era?

And, and, and the fact that it was stopped by, you know, a movement of a small community, very remote community and their allies and supporters is pretty extraordinary.

Unknown: Yeah, that's right.

Of course, the idea is sort of outlandish when you think about these days exploding nuclear bombs, to blast a big hole in the ground, and not not to worry about the radiation effects.

Pretty, pretty amazing that people actually thought they could get away with that.

But I think the I think the fact that it mobilized what's interesting about project charity is it was one of the first times that actually mobilized Indigenous people to, to focus on something that was going to adversely affect their their way of life.

And it really demonstrated to people what they could do when they got organized, and it got unified and taking action.

So I think the legacy of Project Chariot played out years later, when the land claims movement started, people realized what they could achieve by working together.

Oh, interesting.

Pretty fundamental.

Lori Townsend: Yeah, that's a that's a great perspective on it.

This plan, this particular plan, Willie I want to turn back to you for a moment now, this plan for blowing up nuclear bombs didn't come to fruition.

But nukes were blown up underground in the late 60s and 70s.

On Amchitka Island as bomb tests, the waste from that is still in those test wells on the island.

In one of the most seismically active places in the world.

Was there ever conversation in the Legislature that you're aware of either when you were a lawmaker, or that you've heard of through the years, about pushing the Department of Defense to remove that as it is considered a formerly US Defense site and pushing to have that cleaned up?

Unknown: You know, the sad truth is that, um, historically, Alaskans, pioneers primarily, you know, we're just desperate for any kind of spending in Alaska.

You know, and we're, in fact, so desperate that they literally were inviting the federal government to use Alaska as a testing ground.

And that that's how they thought that the economy, you know, would get boosted and, yes, I think the federal government, you know, I think they have spent a lot of money cleaning up messes that they've made from the do line system from the Explorations up there and petroleum reserve number four, where they left literally thousands of barrels of partial use fuel up there.

So, I mean, the government has been tempted to clean up the mess that it's made.

But some of these, like that nuclear project, you know, how do you do anything about something like that?

It's already done, you know?

Lori Townsend: Yeah.

It's in those wells and encased in concrete from what I understand after having read some of the documents, so it's probably going to stay there.

Tim, let's talk about some of former Governor, the late Wally Hickel's ideas for Alaska's economic future, he liked to dream big.

And he pitched the idea of building a pipeline to send fresh water to California.

This was, of course, decades before people normalize the idea of buying water in bottles, because I think, you know, 15-20 years ago, if you would have said, "Let's sell water and bottles," people would have laughed you out of the room.

But now we know that's a multibillion dollar industry.

It probably sounded laughable at the time, but considering the growing freshwater concerns in some Lower 48 states, especially California, Hickel had a vision for future problems.

What do you know about this idea?

And whether anybody took it seriously at that time?

Unknown: Well, no, but nobody, at the time really took it seriously.

But people, people, this is typical Wally Hickel.

I mean, people appreciated him and I, and over the years, I've come to appreciate him more.

As a big vision thinker, he would run things out like that.

They seemed outlandish.

They, you know, obviously, needed a lot of work to see if they were even feasible.

And a lot of them most of them weren't feasible, but he got people thinking about it.

I think, Lori, you're right.

The i ea that that -- two ideas that c me out of that one is the that w could export water that there w s a market for Alaska, clean w ter.

So now we have water b ing bottled here in, in, in t e Anchorage, South Central A aska and shipped out of state a d sold locally, and we have w ter in Southeast Alaska that's b en watered, that's kind of a l gacy of Hickel's ideas.

And w o knows the the idea of a w ter pipeline brought home to a l t of people, the notion that t e Pacific, the West Coast was g ing to be water short, and p ople should be thinking about i .

But Hickel was like, you k ow, he had a lot of other i eas that got people thinking a out things.

Lori Townsend: It seems like it would only be viable in the summertime unless you laid an undersea kind of a pipeline or something.

That would be the The main thing is how would you keep it from freezing?

Unknown: Well the idea is it would be a subsea pipeline, it would be laid on the ground.

Who knows maybe something like that something may be feasible, but it wasn't then.

But it got people thinking about it.

Lori Townsend: Yeah, yeah, such an interesting idea.

Let's discuss another long ago project that developers had high hopes for, but it just didn't work out.

In 1952, an apartment building called the Polaris opened in downtown Fairbanks.

The hope was that a vibrant community would grow up around it, and for time, it was a popular spot.

But it didn't last and for two decades now it stood abandoned and slowly decaying.

Our field producer Emily Schwing has more on this story.

Unknown: The Polaris was supposed to draw up and coming young professionals looking for a hip place to live in downtown Fairbanks.

But in the 1990s, fewer people were living downtown.

So it was renovated to become a hotel.

That close 20 years ago.

And now the building simply sits empty in the center of the Golden Heart City.

I think that it's concerning that our our tallest building in Fairbanks is abandoned.

I think of every other city that I know of, and I don't know of any city that can claim to that.

Jay Jason Lazarus is a professor of photography at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Back in 2009, he and a student managed to convince a real estate company to hand over the keys so they could venture inside the Polaris with cameras in hand.

Once you got up to the, to the second floor.

The beds were actually still made.

There was once a steak house on the ground floor and a popular cocktail lounge on the roof.

The Tiki Cove on the top floor was the hot spot, the night nighttime hotspot at that at that time.

A decade ago, the city was in constant conversation with a developer who planned to renovate and revitalize the building.

But as the years dragged on issues around financing the project grew murky and the plans stalled.

A 700 page Brownfields study released by the EPA in 2017, lists all the contaminants inside the derelict building everything ranging from asbestos to black mold.

The city of Fairbanks has submitted an application to the Department of Defense for military assistance to demolish the Polaris.

If approved, Fairbanks' tallest building could be demolished sometime in the next year.

For Alaska Public Media, I'm Emily Schwing.

Lori Townsend: So, military assistance to bring it down.

Those photographs are just so amazing.

They're really compelling and tell such a story.

Tim, what do you know about this?

Why didn't this work out?

Unknown: I don't really know.

I mean, there was a succession of developed private owners and they had different ideas.

And I want to point out also that there's another building in Fairbanks that was built a little earlier.

It's not as tall as the Polaris building, but it's called the Northward building, which has always been an apartment condo type, the Lynas and head retail on the ground floor, and that was successful.

I mean, it's still there.

It's still occupied.

And why, why that was done and why did the players building didn't work out?

I don't know.

But the city would definitely like to demolish it, and it's going to cost, you know, a fair chunk of change, you know, more than a couple million dollars to bring it down.

Yeah.

But Fairbanks, it's unfortunate because downtown Fairbanks needs, that's kind of like those, those kinds of buildings and the businesses and people that occupy them are sort of anchored for downtown.

So it's a it's kind of a warning to people about letting your downtown decay and in the face of keep people downtown too much.

Lori Townsend: Absolutely.

Willie.

Did you?

What are your thoughts about this or why it didn't work out?

Did you ever visit the Polaris during its heyday?

Unknown: Yes.

Oh, yes.

Didn't the Petroleum Club used to be up there too?

Yes, it did!

Yeah, yeah.

Back in the days when the biplane was going great guns and we're doing a lot of contracting on the North Slope.

Yes.

You kind of tried to hang out where the oily plates were.

So I stayed in the Polaris club when it was a hotel.

And actually, isn't it a prototype though?

Wasn't isn't, isn't it?

The same building that's down here on like Fourth Avenue, where the state used to have offices way back in the 60s?

And it's still now an office, I mean, a apartment buildings, somebody renovated it.

And then isn't it the Mendenhall apartments also this sort of like the same structure in Juneau?

I don't know this.

They look similar to, I think you're speaking of the McKay building and anchorage that Yeah, the market used to be the okay building.

And it was just sat there derelict for years until the safety belt or move down and renovated development and is now leasing it out for office space.

But he could make it was the same developer who tried to do the deal for the Polaris building, and he couldn't make it work in Fairbanks.

Alright, but he did make it work for the McKay building in Anchorage, right.

So those those things really date, they all date from the same period.

And you're right, Willie, they all have sort of the same design.

Lori Townsend: Yep, that kind of reminds me brings to mind, Willie, another grand plan that actually did work out the Hotel Captain Cook, which, while Wally Hickel proposed after the 1964 earthquake to encourage more development in downtown Anchorage.

And some people at that time thought a luxury high rise hotel would be a boondoggle, but almost 50 years later, it's still there.

What did people think?

Why, why at the time, do you do you know, what the thinking was?

And why people thought this is a bad idea?

Was it just that they were overwhelmed by the damage and couldn't imagine that for the small city or?

Unknown: Well, you know, while he was a, you know, he was an active guy.

I mean, he had ideas.

I mean, he did that Travelers Inn here, and they did one in Fairbanks.

And, you know, he was always an optimistic sort.

And, and I think it would shock people when just after the earthquake, he decided to build a sort of a for that day, a mega structure really.

It was steel, you know, and the design was pretty avant garde for its day.

And, and, you know, he was sort of ahead of his time, in a sense, you know, Anchorage, Alaska was growing, Anchorage was growing, and it was a successful investment, which, in those days, a steel, a steel structure, you know, it was a pretty expensive thing to build.

He did well with it.

You know, if I can, Lori Townsend: Yes, please, Tim jump in there.

Unknown: If I can add something to this.

I think what's important to point out is that that was an example, and I'll say another one other example to kind of go along with that, of a decision by by businessman at a time when the city was very depressed after the earthquake, a visionary statement that there was a future for Anchorage and I think it gave a lot of people a lot of hope.

This, the same thing happens.

With the Cuddy family in the construction of the what is what was the first national bank building down to a multi story office building right after the earthquake.

Kind of a real statement of faith that the the Cuddy family had with the bank and in the future of Anchorage gave a lot of people confidence that maybe they can rebuild.

So these things worked out sometimes.

Lori Townsend: Well, and I'm interested to get back to I hope we have enough time to get back to the undersea railroad idea.

But Willie, I wanted to ask you about the Rampart Dam because in an earlier interview, when you were talking about that, I was astounded by this story.

This would have created the largest reservoir in the world.

Tell us about this plan for this remote area 100 miles west of Fairbanks for this mega project.

Oh, Unknown: it was one grand scheme.

In retrospect.

It was proposed by the Corps of Engineers in 1954.

It's about 31 miles from Rampart, a village down the Yukon would have created a lake the size of Lake Erie, and the largest man-made reservoir in the world.

It would have inundated nine villages.

And of course, back then that was an afterthought.

Sad to say, Senator, former Governor, territorial Gov.

Ernest Greuning was a great supporter of the Rampart Dan.

It's one of those ideas that unfortunately, we have in Alaska, where if you build it, they will come, you know, they would have produced just, I think, like three and a half to five gigawatts.

There weren't any users really identified specifically for for that power.

But they were hoping there'd be mines developed and, you know, timber processing and that sort of thing, create lots of jobs.

And it was actually a project that both candidates for president supported back in 60, Nixon and Kennedy both, you know, supported that notion.

Lori Townsend: And then it just went away this enormous project that was proposed and touted even nationally, and it just went away.

Unknown: It would have raised the Yukon River about 400 feet.

Unbelievable.

Lori Townsend: Wow.

It's you know, it's incredible.

Some of these ideas that come along.

Before we run out of time, Tim, getting back to Hickel's big ideas, he also pitched building an undersea railroad to Russia for connecting Alaska Europe for commerce and tourism.

Was there ever any serious talk about this?

Or was it more just another big idea touted by a man who really thought in terms of big future visions?

Unknown: I don't think there was really ever a lot of work done in a while.

This is another one of Wally's big visions that I think he just threw out here to skip people thinking about, but other others picked up on it and there have been other other people talk talk about it.

Willie, Willie remembers.

Did Willie, you remember somebody who had an idea of putting a dam across the Bering Strait?

Actually, two things I remember I was in the Legislature when he first became governor.

He proposed something called the North Commission -- Northern operation of rail transportation highways.

And Morris Thompson, Athabaskan, and later president of Doyon, he was the executive director.

And so so while he, you know, he was some, for some reason, maybe he because he grew up in Kansas, he was impressed with the railroads, you know?

In fact, I know that he had ridden the Trans Siberian railroad.

And so from from the get go, he wanted to build a railroad to Nome, you know, and so, but of course, you got to have something to haul and we never had anything to haul.

Lori Townsend: So that's probably the primary reason why I didn't get off the ground is there just wasn't enough commerce to make it actually pay.

You're not going to move enough people back and forth from Nome to make that viable.

Unknown: And Lori, if I could make a just make a point that what does a lot most of these projects in the end is simply the lack of economics.

Rampart Dam fell apart because nobody could figure out what to do with the power was hopelessly uneconomic.

And so it gives you I guess, some faith that these things they think they have a certain life and then they they peter out when serious people start looking at the numbers and realize things aren't feasible.

Lori Townsend: Do you think Alaska is more susceptible to big schemes and dreams than other places?

Or does every state have their, their wild visionaries?

Unknown: Oh, I think we're big thinkers here.

We, you know, we live in Alaska.

We do things big.

I remember when I when I first came to Fairbanks in the 1960s, the big excitement town and the headlines in the News Miner were the big copper discoveries of bornite in the Northwest, Northwest Arctic.

And you know about building railroads and big mines up there, and that was going to save our economy.

Well, the copper is still there.

As a matter of fact, there is a mine being proposed now up there.

Lori Townsend: Big.

Yeah, big schemes.

I'm sorry, we're gonna have to leave it there.

We'll have to revisit these ideas because there's so much to discuss.

And we didn't get to all of the big schemes from the past.

And we'll have to do this again.

Thank you so much, Willie, and Tim for being with me this evening.

Unknown: Thank you for inviting Lori Townsend: Alaska is known for big dreams and big schemes, and this evening, we heard about just a few of them that have been attempted or at least discussed over the last 50 years.

What will be the grand ideas for the next 50 years?

Tha remains to be seen, but there' sure to be more as Alaskans see to create a strong future fo our economy, culture an lifestyle.

That's it for thi edition of Alaska Insight.

B sure to tune in daily to you local public radio station fo Alaska Morning News and Alask News Nightly every weeknight.

B part of conversations happenin on Talk of Alaska every Tuesd y morning and visit our websi e alaskapublic.org for breaking news and reports from across the state.

We'll be back next Friday.

Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Lori T wnsend.