In Anchorage, "peep show booths in the last and nastiest sex shop on Spenard Road will soon make way for a trendy independent bookshop with folk singers, craft-brewed beer and multiethnic food," the Alaska Dispatch News reported.
Vered Mares and Kathy McCue, co-owners of the Writer's Block Bookstore & Café, will offer the cleaned, repainted and re-carpeted space to artists and musicians this winter, then demolish the building in the spring to make way for a new, 2,500-square-foot space, which should open next fall. Pending a construction loan, the new building will go up over the summer, with room for books, a stage and café.
The owners recalled first "coming in to look at the building when it was still operating as another kind of bookstore. Informed that employees didn't know about a potential sale, they tried to be inconspicuous as a group of five in business suits," the Dispatch News wrote.
"We walked in together and then we stood still," Mares recalled. "How do we pretend we're customers?
"How do we contain the giggles?" McCue said.
"We failed miserably," Mares said, adding: "After I saw what this place was, I just wanted to get rid of it. A community needs to have healthy spaces."
