who owns the old nordstrom?

well, two owners, and they just ended up in court.

The empty Nordstrom building downtown has been waiting on a second act for years, and the city's development agency owns eighty percent of it. It's the big quiet block at Sixth and D. The problem is the other twenty percent.

The agency says it's hit a wall with the minority owners, a family company holding the fifth lot under the building. And you can't exactly saw a department store into slices. That's basically the argument in the lawsuit: the building can't be walled off into separate pieces, so split ownership doesn't work.

So the agency is asking a judge to order the whole thing sold, all five lots at once, with the money divided by share.

The plan for the site is the part downtown has been waiting on: housing and retail meant to anchor the block and pull people back onto the street after dark.

The timeline is the sobering part. The agency's own director says the building will sit through another winter, and construction likely doesn't start before fall of next year.

So the biggest empty storefront in Anchorage stays empty a while longer. But for the first time in years there's a real fight over it, with a real plan waiting on the other side.