the spenard windmill is gone

and it's only half gone.

Monday morning a crew sawed the top off the 60 foot windmill outside Koots on Spenarrd Road and hauled the pieces away. If you drove by Tuesday and felt like something was missing, you were right.

This is a repair job, not a teardown. The general manager says the base needs real structural work, the old neon is getting swapped out for LED, and it'll be several months before the top goes back on.

He also says it's going to be expensive, and they're going to have to fundraise for it.

Something most people who have lived here their whole lives don't know: that windmill never worked. It was never built to. It showed up in Anchorage in the 1960s as an advertising gimmick for a liquor store called Cut Rate Kid.

When that store closed in 1984, somebody hauled it down the road to Koots, and it has been the landmark you use to give directions in Spenarrd ever since.

The city's planning staff have a hand in the work too, and they are treating the whole thing as a historical display.

Which is a funny piece of paperwork for a sixty foot fake windmill, but it is probably the right one.

Forty two years on that corner, and this is the first time the top has come off.