Alaska Raceway Park Is NOT 60 Years Old
Contributed by Mitzi Van Asdlan
I see from a front-page article in your Mid-May “The People’s Paper” that our friends at the Alaska Raceway Park are still chronically challenged. The “Alaska Raceway Park” entity has not been there for more than about twenty years since E. Sullivan Avenue has only existed since the late 1990s.
In the early 1990s a friend and I started building a house on property directly across from what is now the Red Gate at the track. There was no access to the property from the Old Glenn Highway. What is now E. Sullivan Avenue was a gravel road that only extended to within a couple hundred feet of Bodenburg Creek. A stand of large cottonwoods blocked the view of the creek which did not have a bridge across it at the time. We entered the area off of E. Plumley Road and S. Caudill Road. Even that was an adventure because after S. Butte Airmen Road there was only a faint trail up to the small entrance road to the land some men had leased from the state.
They built a dirt drag strip there and on a few weekends during the summer they brought their cars out there to work on them and do some racing. These were not the big buck, high horsepower, very loud machines that now frequent the “new” track. On the weekends that someone was at the track area in the old days we could hear them but they were ordinary vehicles that made little noise in comparison to today.
In the late 1990s the Borough took down the trees near the creek and built a bridge across it. The road was a narrow two-lane gravel lane that the present day racers would not dare use to bring their shiny new racers out on. Paving of E. Sullivan Avenue did not take place until the early 2000s. So, the racetrack couldn’t really function well until then.
The citizens of the area tried to object to the building of the racetrack but were outnumbered by all the money and people coming out of Anchorage. They didn’t want a noisy track in their backyard but ours was just fine with them. So now most summer weekends are filled with noise and air pollution in our formerly quiet community from an enterprise that has existed for some twenty years, not the sixty they would like everyone to believe.