330 E Street, Anchorage · Three-Star · #10 in Anchorage
Historic Anchorage Hotel
The first wooden building in Anchorage, still open, still booking. The most historic stay in town.
The first wooden building in Anchorage, still open, still booking. The most historic stay in town.
"Twenty-six rooms inside Anchorage's first wooden building, opened in 1916 as the city's first true hotel, the Historic Anchorage Hotel is a small downtown property on the National Register that trades a chain hotel's amenity stack for a piece of the city's founding architecture."
The Historic Anchorage Hotel opened in 1916 as the new railway town's first proper hotel, a two-storey wooden building that towered over a tent city of survey teams and rail workers at the head of Cook Inlet. The original 1916 structure burned in 1923 and was rebuilt; the current building, completed in 1936 as a brick-and-concrete annex, became the principal hotel after the wooden original was demolished. The property is on the National Register of Historic Places, retains the original 1936 lobby with its arched entrance and tile floor, and stands at the corner of Fourth Avenue and E Street, the historic centre of the downtown grid.
The 26 rooms are arranged across three floors of the heritage building and are firmly historic in feel rather than chain-renovated. Standards run to 240 square feet with original sash windows, period-appropriate furniture, modern beds, and bathrooms updated in the 2010s. The deluxe and suite categories add a small parlour, a soaking tub, and corner positions; the largest two suites carry the names of mid-twentieth-century Anchorage figures and run with original detailing. None of the rooms are large; the brief of the renovation programme has been preservation rather than expansion.
There is no restaurant on site; the hotel partners with Snow City Cafe two blocks away for breakfast vouchers and a small lobby coffee service is laid out each morning. A continental breakfast is included for room-night guests. The location is the property's operating advantage: half a block from the Anchorage Daily News building, two blocks from the Federal Building and the Performing Arts Center, three blocks from the Cook Inlet bluff. The hotel is also one of the most well-documented haunted hotels in the city, and runs a small monthly programme around the building's ghost lore that has become a quiet cult booking for the right traveller.
The Historic Anchorage Hotel is not for the guest who wants a pool, a fitness centre, or a meeting suite. It is for the guest who wants to stay inside a building that is older than the city it sits in, with a front desk that has the original 1916 register photocopied and framed, and a downtown location three blocks from the inlet. It is small, idiosyncratic, and unrenovated in any chain sense, and the right traveller will book it for precisely those reasons.
Twenty-six rooms, a 1916 building, and a front desk that runs the hotel like a piece of the city archive make the Historic Anchorage a particular kind of booking. For a solo traveller who reads history while travelling, the property delivers a piece of Alaska's founding architecture and the most central downtown coordinates in the city.
Book the named corner suite for a quiet historic weekend. The property has no spa or pool; the trade is a piece of Anchorage's 1916 founding architecture, a soaking tub in the suite, and dinner reservations at the Marx Brothers Cafe two blocks away.
330 E Street
Anchorage, AK 99501
United States
26 rooms and suites
Standard rooms from USD 155/night
Deluxe rooms from USD 195/night
Suites to USD 295/night
Check-in: 3:00 PM
Check-out: 11:00 AM
Star rating: Three-Star
On the National Register of Historic Places (1916)
26 rooms inside the 1936 brick-and-concrete heritage building
Continental breakfast included; Snow City Cafe partnership
Half block to Anchorage Daily News, 2 blocks to Performing Arts Center
Monthly ghost-history programme
Complimentary WiFi throughout
From USD 155 / night. Rates and availability vary by season; book three to four weeks ahead in summer and around major Anchorage events.
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