The demolition crews showed up on Muldoon Road back in March, and by the end of that Monday the Totem Theater was gone. A building that had anchored moviegoers for decades, first as a drive-in and later as a multiplex, came down in an afternoon. Longtime residents who drove past told a local news crew it felt like the end of something, even with Tikahtnu Center still sitting a few blocks away.
A mile and a half north, on the other side of DeBarr Road, a different kind of construction has been going on all year. Fencing wraps sections of Russian Jack Springs Park. A new steel bridge is going in near the Lidia Selkregg Chalet. The old wooden chalet deck has been slated for demolition too, but this one is coming down to be rebuilt, not to disappear.
Same corridor. Same season. Opposite direction. And if you live in East Anchorage, the pattern underneath both stories is worth noticing: the places where this neighborhood used to gather are turning over, and a lot of that gathering is migrating into the parks.
What's Actually Going Into Russian Jack
The Municipality's Parks and Recreation department has been working through a multi-year master plan for Russian Jack Springs Park, and Phase I wrapped in 2024 with 2,800 linear feet of trail rehabilitation and a 65-foot steel bridge over the middle fork of Chester Creek. Phase II is the work you're seeing now, targeted for 2026 and 2027, and it's a different kind of project. It isn't just trail maintenance. It's building the park a social layer it didn't have before.
Here's what's in the plan:
| Feature | What's changing |
|---|---|
| Bridge near Selkregg Chalet | A 40-foot steel bridge replaces the aging wooden one, and the T-shaped trail intersection there is being realigned into a Y |
| Sledding hill | Trees are being cleared from a 0.4-acre runout zone for safety, with two light fixtures removed and one relocated outside the sledding path |
| Nunaka Valley spur trail | New lighting added to the trail connecting the Nunaka Valley neighborhood into the park |
| Chalet plaza and deck | The existing deck is demolished and rebuilt in composite decking, with the golf course's first tee moved roughly 80 feet to make room for a flexible paved plaza |
That last line is the one that matters most for how the neighborhood actually uses this space. The plan explicitly describes the new plaza as built to host food trucks, vendors, firepits, tabling events, and educational gatherings, in every season. A separate round of trail work this year added a dual slalom course and a beginner line to the park's singletrack, expanding who the trails serve beyond the intermediate and advanced riders who already knew the place.
None of this reads like ordinary trail resurfacing. It reads like a municipality building a community living room where a chalet used to just be a warming hut.
Meanwhile, the Old Anchors Are Turning Over
Compare that to what's happening on the commercial side of the same neighborhood. The Anchorage Daily News reported that Muldoon Pizza, open since 1975, changed hands after more than four decades in business. Regulars have noticed. Reviews since the transition describe a remodeled dining room and a different recipe for the same dishes, with reactions split between customers who like the refresh and longtime patrons who miss the version they grew up on.
The Totem Theater's demolition is the sharper version of the same story, because there's no reopening on the other side of it. One resident who watched the building come down summed up the mood simply:
"It's just going to be different. I know a lot of people really enjoyed Totem a lot. And overall, the side of town, I mean, we have Tikahtnu down the street, but it's just not the same."
That's the texture of a neighborhood losing a fixture that had nothing to do with parks or trails. A theater is a private business. When it closes, nobody replaces it with a public plan.
The Public Side Is Picking Up the Slack
Here's where the contrast gets interesting. While Muldoon's commercial anchors have been contracting, its parks have been winning actual popularity contests. Cheney Lake Park, tucked between Northern Lights Boulevard and Muldoon Road, was named the Municipality's 2026 Park of the Year, chosen by community vote over two other nominees. The Anchorage Park Foundation held a celebration there in August with fishing alongside the National Park Service, a guided bird walk, and a look at a completed shoreline restoration project run through the Youth Employment in Parks program. Michelle LeBeau of the Foundation put it plainly at the event:
"Parks and trails are what connect us all to each other and to nature."
Fall will bring more work at Cheney Lake, including a new viewing platform and signage aimed at protecting the shoreline and the migratory bird habitat around it. That habitat is real: Cheney Lake was recently added to Audubon Alaska's new 35-stop Anchorage Birding Trail, and a local birder who lives nearby called it a "sleeper site," pointing to the redneck grebes, waterfowl, and bald eagles that pass through a lake most people drive by without a second look.
A few minutes away, Chanshtnu Muldoon Park has become the site of a recurring Saturday gathering of local vendors, musicians, and artists, the kind of informal market that used to happen in a strip mall parking lot or a restaurant's back room. It's happening in a park instead, on a schedule, with no storefront lease attached to it.
What This Actually Means If You're Here This Fall
If you live near Russian Jack, expect the construction fencing near the Selkregg Chalet and the sledding hill to stay up through the rest of this year and into 2027 as Phase II proceeds. The Lighted Loop and the golf course will both see temporary disruption as the first tee gets relocated and the plaza gets rebuilt. None of it closes the park. It changes the shape of it in stages, the same way Phase I's bridge and trail work did between 2022 and 2024.
If you're the kind of person who used to catch a movie at Totem on a weeknight, that option is gone for good, and whatever replaces the lot on Muldoon Road hasn't been announced. If you're a Muldoon Pizza regular, the building is still there and the ovens are still running, just under different ownership with a different menu feel than the one some families had visited for three generations.
And if you haven't been to Cheney Lake or Chanshtnu Muldoon Park lately, both are worth the short drive. Cheney Lake's loop trail runs a flat 1.2 miles around the water, dogs are welcome off leash in sections, and fall is when the shoreline work and the bird traffic are both easiest to see at once. Chanshtnu Muldoon's Saturday market runs on local vendors and shifts week to week, so it rewards showing up more than once.
The bigger pattern is the one worth sitting with. East Anchorage isn't losing its sense of place. It's relocating it, from buildings that a single owner can sell or a bankruptcy filing can shutter, into public land that a community vote and a municipal budget line keep accountable to the people who actually use it. A pizza place changes hands. A theater comes down. A park gets a plaza built for exactly the kind of gathering those old anchors used to host, and a lake down the street wins a popularity contest it didn't know it was entered in.
That's not nostalgia. That's just where the corridor is putting its weight right now.
If you're watching these changes and wondering what they mean for property values, timing, or your own plans in East Anchorage, Emma Shibe knows this neighborhood block by block, from the DeBarr Road park boundary to the Muldoon Road commercial strip. Let's Connect if you want a local read on what's actually happening here.
