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Buy the Ugliest House in the Best Neighborhood

Founded a petty over a century ago, Anchorage, Alaska, is a young city whose neighborhoods have a newness and spaciousness you won't discover in denser, older burgs.

Urban districts this far north are spread out and subtly influenced by the yawning wilderness that surrounds them. And yous might be surprised at only how cosmopolitan some of them are: Anchorage is home to the single virtually statistically diverse neighborhood in the United states.

Here are half-dozen Anchorage neighborhoods where you can sample some of the urban center's unique flavors.

Downtown

Best neighborhood for history and museums

Downtown may be the only neighborhood visitors run into when using Anchorage every bit a base for excursions elsewhere in the land. Here is where you'll find the bulk of the metropolis'due south expensive hotels, the country's best museum, and all the requisite shops and restaurants. While on the low-rise, low-fundamental side, the area has its quirks, such every bit the earth'south only urban king salmon fishery, at Send Creek.

Ship Creek is where Anchorage began equally a tent camp, in 1915; the settlement soon relocated to more than-stable bluffs south of the river. These bluffs are home to some of the oldest buildings nonetheless standing in town, including the Oscar Anderson house (now a museum), one of the first solid structures to grace the urban grid. Nearby, another historic property, the Copper Whale Inn, offers one of Downtown's more than atypical adaptation options.

Until the 1920s, woods flourished correct upwardly to the edge of 10th Avenue, and what is now Delaney Park between nowadays-day ninth and 10th Avenues was a firebreak. The more spread-out residential neighborhood that lies to the south – the and so-chosen South Addition – was built in the 1930s and '40s.

Aerial view of a sunset over Downtown Anchorage, Alaska in spring

Downtown Anchorage is divided by Delaney Park, which was one time a firebreak © Jacob Boomsma / Shutterstock

Midtown

Best neighborhood for reasonably priced accommodation

Located 3 miles south of Downtown, Midtown is a symmetrical grid of shopping malls, chain hotels and mod bar-grills plying arts and crafts beer and burgers. What it lacks in dashing good looks, it makes upwardly for with convenience.

With a growing number of affordable, mid-range hotels, this neighborhood can offer better value than Downtown, equally long as you're upwards for a bit of urban walking. And you won't have to roam far to swallow well. Midtown and its adjacent neighborhoods of North Star and Taku-Campbell offering several decent breakfast spots, a good stash of Korean restaurants (an Anchorage specialty) and i of the city's favorite destination breweries: Moose's Tooth, a fabricated-in-heaven spousal relationship of gourmet pizzas and custom-brewed beer.

The neighborhood's but existent light-green spot is fifteen-acre Cuddy Family Midtown Park, which boasts a giant kids' playground and waterfowl-filled lagoon. The southeastern corner of the commune is brushed by the 7-mile Campbell Creek Trail, the western gateway to the rawer realm of Far North Bicentennial Park.


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Hillside

Best neighborhood for trailheads into the wilderness

Spending time in Hillside in southeastern Anchorage feels similar having one foot in the wilderness and ane human foot in an Alaskan version of Bel-Air. Affluent upwardly against the valleys and peaks of Chugach State Park and filled with some of the metropolis's most sought-after homes, this is a neighborhood of sweeping views and sprawling lots where you're but as probable to find a behave rifling through your garbage equally a raccoon.

Set apart from the city's main retail and commercial districts, Hillside is more suited to activity-focused day trips than random wandering. Far North Bicentennial Park, Anchorage'due south largest, contains a wildlife preserve and a small nonprofit ski area inside its 4000 acres. Densely forested and rich in brute, information technology seems mode too wild to be within the city limits.

The vast majority of visitors and locals gravitate a little further s to the Glen Alps Trailhead to tackle the craggy face of Flattop Mountain. Considered Anchorage'due south ultimate fitness test, Flattop is a brusque, rough climb to a wide, rocky summit from which paragliders launch into the sky. It'south eternally pop with intrepid hikers in summertime, when in that location'south a daily shuttle to and from Downtown.

Spenard

Best neighborhood for nightlife

I of the metro area's more than independently minded neighborhoods, Spenard has a character that stems from its status equally a separate urban center until the mid-1970s. While Anchorage began life as a tent city, Spenard, 3 miles to the south, grew up every bit a lumber camp. The surface area takes its proper noun from a Canadian businessman named Joe Spenard, who built the area's original logging road (now Spenard Road) in the 1910s.

By Alaskan standards, its personality is positively bohemian. At the Carry Tooth Theatrepub you lot can eat chicken-chipotle tacos and beverage craft beer while watching the latest Bond picture. Nearby, the Yak & Yeti Cafe introduces diners to the delights of Tibetan cuisine, while establishments like Centre Way Cafe counter Alaska's subsistence-hunting image with a menu filled with vegetarian and vegan options.

Then in that location's the nightlife. Spenard might be the best place in Anchorage to blow your vacation budget, courtesy of places like Chilkoot Charlie's, an eccentric emporium of drinking, dancing and live music that has been loosening collars since 1970.

Seaplanes floating in Spenard Lake at sunset with houses and mountain peaks in the distance

Lake Spenard in Turnagain is next to the earth's busiest seaplane base © Tomasz Wozniak / Shutterstock

Turnagain

Best neighborhood for littoral vistas

Though airport-side by side districts are mostly ignored by travelers unless they're on the lookout for an affordable layover hotel or nurture a hugger-mugger fascination for plane spotting, Anchorage's Turnagain neighborhood is unlike. Inhabiting the western tip of the Anchorage peninsula at the signal where it juts into Melt Inlet, information technology is circumscribed by the beautiful Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, which offers the quintessential Anchorage wheel ride.

What's more, the area showcases a tragic chapter of the city's past: in 1964, the second-biggest earthquake in recorded human being history destroyed 75 houses in the vicinity of Turnagain Heights, sending role of a waterside barefaced sliding into the sea. The event is memorialized in Earthquake Park, which overlooks the mudflats of Knik Arm. Turnagain has rebounded since the seismically unstable '60s and today is one of the city'southward more expensive zip codes.

Closer to the airport, the Alaska Aviation Museum sits on the southward shore of Lake Hood, the world's busiest seaplane base; nearby, a strip of comfortable mid-range hotels (all with free airport shuttles) line the southern end of Spenard Road. The Lakefront Anchorage Hotel backs onto Lake Spenard, the eastern extension of Lake Hood, allowing guests to sentry the comings and goings of the ubiquitous float-planes from their rooms.

Mount View

Best neighborhood for diverse cuisine

A neighborhood 2 miles from Downtown that's rarely visited by outsiders, Mountain View is more intriguing than showtime impressions would suggest: a study in the 2010s ended it was the most diverse neighborhood in the Usa. Native Alaskans, Asians and Pacific Islanders are well established in the community, with Ethiopians, Peruvians and Somalis amongst more recent arrivals.

While not really ready for tourists, the neighborhood can be shoehorned into a short afternoon trip from Downtown. Bicycle the Ship Creek Wheel Trail to its eastern terminus and and then wobble along Mountain View Dr, with its ethnic grocery stores and small restaurants, until you observe a place that looks flavory. Hawaiian-themed Hula Hands concocts authentic pulehu (forest-burn down grilled) chicken, while the fresh-baked pretzel buns at Westward Berlin pair well with a German pint.

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Source: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/articles/best-neighborhoods-in-anchorage

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