Greetings family, friends, and neighbors! Roadside attractions come in all shapes and sizes, however there's an uncompleted hotel in Alaska that's truly unique. Today's snippet takes a peek at the Igloo Lodge ..........Bill
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THE IGLOO LODGE
In 1882, the U.S. Patent office granted James Lafferty the exclusive right to make, use or sell an “animal-shaped building” for a duration of seventeen years. Lafferty went about constructing Lucy, a six story elephant shaped wood framed and tin clad building for the purpose of promoting real estate sales, attracting tourists to an undeveloped area near Atlantic City, and unintentionally beginning a novelty architecture craze that peaked along Southern California roadsides in the 1920’s and 30’s.
Imagination was the only limit of Ice cream stands shaped like cones, hamburger and hot dog stands like pigs and dogs, juice counters like oranges, restaurants as ships and bakery’s built to resemble Dutch windmills. On a lonely stretch of Highway in Alaska’s Denali National Park region at milepost 198, where the grizzly bear population out numbers people, setback from the highway and surrounded by a large empty gravel parking lot, several shuttered cabins, and abandoned gas station stands a slowly decaying four story, hundred foot wide, graffiti covered structure, that from a distance, has a weirdly familiar shape.
Leon Smith and his wife Elizabeth, operators of a gas station in the remote outback in the late 1960’s had the dream of creating a destination hotel with fifty eight guest rooms, restaurant bar, liquor store, gift shop on the ground floor, and a pent house suite reserved for themselves and their family. With a target opening date of summer 1973, Smith began construction of their plywood and styrofoam Igloo Lodge: however financial issues, the regions short summer building season, capped by inattention to local building codes and all of the guestroom windows being built too small, the Smith’s dream turned into an uncompleted nightmare.
As late as 1991 he was still diligently attempting to complete a single room a year, however age and health finally caught up with him, and in 1996 he sold the property to an old friend who has kept the Igloo Lodge standing in tribute to Smith’s unfulfilled dream, while the search goes on for a buyer with $300,000 to spend plus a few million for restoration. Any takers for an uncompleted “white elephant” hotel in Alaska?
-Bill 10/25
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