By Sue Bergstrom for Valdez City News –
Hotel Hill, Hippy Hill, some people call it one and some call it the other. Either way, it’s disappearing before our eyes as the heavy equipment works at digging it up and hauling it away. The hill on South Harbor Drive in Valdez is slowly being removed in readiness for the new portion of the Valdez Small Boat Harbor. It’s strange when a landmark disappears in increments.
The hill has two personalities to go with its two names. Hotel Hill was a beautiful location with a million dollar view. It seemed like a wonderful place to build a hotel. In fact it seemed like such a wonderful place that a hotel has evidently come very close to being built there, not once but twice. Locals talk about someone, possibly Princess Cruise Lines, planning a large luxury hotel on the spot in the 1980’s. I.M. Pei is said to have developed the plans that were brought to Valdez along with a scale model of a five star hotel, swimming pools and all. That would have been a very big deal. A hotel, designed by the man who designed The Kennedy Library and Le Grande Louvre Paris, in that location would certainly have attracted people to Valdez. For reasons unclear, it didn’t happen.
The second time a hotel was proposed in the 1990’s, one of the planners was a local. Dave Beck, the owner of Ketchum Air and a former Valdez City Council member had taken an option to build on Hotel Hill. At the time Rod Hodgin was traveling all over the world, both working on gas and oil exploration and on hunting and fishing trips. He had spent many hours in a float-plane with Dave Beck and he’d always wanted to run a lodge. Hodgin used his numerous contacts to try and find investors to develop the property. But the timing was wrong. People were reluctant to invest money in Prince William Sound so soon after the Exxon Valdez spill. So the second hotel didn’t happen either. Hodgin ended up with property in Port Fidalgo and built Ravencroft Lodge there.
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Hippy Hill is the other side of the coin. What could be more different from a five star hotel than a tent village full of cannery workers? Every summer for many years that hill was inhabited by what locals call, with everything from distaste to fond amusement, ‘fish hippies’. Blue tarps sprouted like mushrooms and young people tromped through the mud, slept, ate and partied between long shifts on the slime line. It was kind of like Woodstock without bands. But fights broke out. People got cold, wet and hungry. Sometimes they went into town and came back with things that didn’t belong to them. One young man, too young, had too much to drink, walked off a cliff and died.
Soon that curve where North Harbor Drive turns to South Harbor Drive will be a parking lot. But we’ll remember the hill.
