Demolition Derby

     I suppose every city has it's share of urban blight.Places like Detroit come to mind. Hoonah isn't exactly a metropolis. We only have about 850 residents who call it home year round, although with the coming of the tourist season there is an influx of tourist related business owners who are flocking to town. Some of them live on their boats which they use to charter out for whale watching or fishing. Some live in campers or travel trailers which they take with them when they go, and still others manage somehow to find a place to rent. There seems to be a surprising number of rentals in town, although none of them are cheap, regardless of the state of the rental. It runs in my mind that $1000.00 a month is the average, although I could be wrong. In any event, if the houses shown above had been maintained down through the years there would have at least been the option of providing the owners with a little rental income. As it is, they have all been condemned and are slated to be torn down. Frankly, I say it's about time. What seems to be the pattern here is that the owner will pass away, leaving the family with the property. Families being what they are, they can't agree on what to do with it; sell it, move into it or hang on to it for sentimental reasons.  In many cases the family doesn't live in town, so there isn't anyone to check on the house and it goes into a state of disrepair. All of the houses shown here have been vacant for years. In the case of the green one at the top, which happens to be next door to me, there hasn't been anyone in it for about ten years. The owner always rented it to school employees. One of my favorite neighbors was a teacher named Joe Digrande. He was a basketball coach as well as the school counselor. I loved his name and asked his permission to name a produce market after him, if I ever owned one. Digrande's. It's a place I'd sure want to shop. Anyway, the owners  never put any money back into the house and eventually there came a time when there was no heater inside and the school stopped renting it and it sat vacant. As you can see the roof is blowing off and the chimney is crumbling. The back porch is sagging and the water line froze some years back saturating the bathroom floor. It's been unlivable for quite awhile and has been slated for demolition. While it will be nice not to see it, I'm a little afraid that the empty lot will be an invitation for the neighbors to expand their collection of junk into the space. If I could afford to, I'd buy the lot and put up a fence to prevent that very thing from happening. Probably not in the cards though. Several of the older houses shown were clan houses. I can't pretend to know all that entails. Within the Tlingit culture there were two primary moieties -the Ravens and Eagles. Then there were a number of sub clans- wolf, shark, snail, frog and others. I'm not certain, but I assume each sub clan had their own meeting houses. To the best of my knowledge, neither of the two clan houses that are on the chopping block have been used for more than thirty years, and yet once word got out that they were going to be demolished, there was an outcry from certain citizens. Human nature I guess. It seems that Hoonah is struggling to balance the modern desire for tourism with the laid back ways of frontier Alaska. While I'll be glad to see the end of some of the houses that are no longer livable, I hate to see the changes come just for the sake of tourism. I really don't think that these changes would be happening otherwise, so it's kind of bittersweet. Anyway, time marches on and change happens -good, bad or otherwise. We'll just have to roll with the punches and hope that we're happy with the end result.