For nine years I've lived in the Mountain View neighborhood in Anchorage, Alaska. It sits in the northeast corner of Anchorage surrounded on three sides by a military base and cut off from the rest of the city by a highway. The neighborhood is three square miles, 1,000 properties and 7,000 residents -- the most densely populated part of Anchorage. It is comprised of three 20-acre homesteads that were staked in the 1920s and subdivided in 1940. From 1940 to 1965 it was a collection of very small cottages, dirt streets and white picket fences. Many of the residents worked on the base and a lot of the houses were built from surplused materials.
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In 1965, give or take a year or two [the circumstances are somewhat mysterious] a zoning change allowed the construction of multiplex units on small lots. Four-plexes and even six- and eight-plexes began to pop up on 6,250 sq. ft. lots [one sixth of the orignial lots that had been sold for $200 or less in 1940]. A ten year apartment building boom coinciding with the construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline from the North Slope to Valdez ensued. Also in 1965 a bypass section of the Glenn Highway, leading out of Anchorage to points north was constructed to the south of Mt. View. The former Palmer Highway, a couple blocks north was renamed Mt. View Drive.
In the 1960s and '70s many of the original residents began to move out and Mt. View became a transient neighborhood and its property values became permanently lower than the rest of Anchorage. Crime and drug activity was on the rise, spiking in the 1980s with the introduction of crack cocaine and the arrival of gangs from the west coast. A few longtime residents and businesses remained but they did so more out of loyalty and memory than any sense that Mt. View was a vibrant and viable location. Some longtime Mt. View businesses such as Brewster's Dept. Store and Mexico in Alaska restaurant opened second locations in South Anchorage, to cater to their customers who increasingly didn't want to venture into Mt. View.
In the midst of this tense atmosphere, Randy Smith [1943-2003] began to emerge from a pawn shop on Mt. View Dr. he owned with a couple partners. Smith was living in South Anchorage at the time. He recognized early on the intrinsic value of the place, the tranquility and desirability of the original 1950s street scenes still stubbornly visible through thirty years of mayhem and destruction. In a year or two he purchased a split level house on N. Bragaw St. and moved in.
Once he was here, he began to enmesh himself in neighborhood and city political advocacy, through multiple initiatives. He was elected president of the Mt. View Community Council, serving several terms. [Anchorage has 27 community councils and they act as advisory bodies to the Municipal assembly, the mayor and municipal government.] He started a community patrol, the first one in Anchorage. He drove around all of Mt. View's streets and alleys in the middle of the night, making careful notes about a variety of issues -- houses and apartments where drug and prostitution activity was especially prevelant; circumstances with homeless camps [they still rim the neighborhood, in parks and greenbelt areas bordering the air force base]; places where junked cars and trash were accumulating; and a thousand other observations.
He formed alliances with business owners, driving by their shops, offices and warehouses at night, making sure there were no break-ins in return for donations to the community council and patrol. He was big enough and crazy enough to command respect and attention. He could be observed getting out of his car and ordering people off a vacant lot, draining their vodka bottles on the ground. He was a thorn in the side of mid-level municipal bureaucrats, yelling at them on the phone or in person about snowplowing, street maintenance or the condition of parks and trails.
He began an annual neighborhood cleanup effort that is now in its 23rd year. For several years running he and his crew moved 200 to 300 tons of trash, sorting out hazardous materials and recyclables. He marshalled support from hundreds of volunteers, city utilities, the military and the state prison system to help. I first obeserved the clean-up as a volunteer in 2000. We swept every street and alley in Mt. View, picking up old couches and chairs, tires and miscellaneous trash. We worked all day for four days in a row, eating lunch in a church basement, sorting trash, moving appliances, whatever. In the 1980s and '90s he even brought in a car crusher, and smashed abandoned vehicles into three foot square cubes on a vacant lot in the back of the neighborhood. In 2000 I recall riding ten miles up the road to the Municipal hazmat recycling center, in a rusted out Suburban towing a 20 ft flatbed trailer with about 300 cans of old paint and oil. That same year I watched three men saw the hull of a 24 ft. fiberglass boat into three pieces and move it out with pickups.
Five years ago Smith had a sudden heart attack while patrolling Mt. View and died enroute to the hospital [less than a mile away]. He was a bit overweight and a heavy smoker, and he worked way too hard.
His critics called him "the self-appointed mayor of Mt. View" but everyone acknowledged the effectiveness and utility of his actions and convictions. He ran two or three times for the State House to represent District 20, and probably would have won if he'd been a Democrat. [He was a rock-ribbed Republican, NRA member and a redneck, but also with a sweetheart disposition and good humor.]
Anyway, when I hear that community activists are being disparaged on a national stage by Alaskans, it's deeply troubling to me. Randy Smith, an unpaid volunteer singlehandedly saved my neighborhood, on the brink of becoming a war zone, and when it had already been written off by every single politician and 99% of the rest of Anchorage.
There are probably stories like ours all across the country.