![]() The electrical project started to just fix my own stuff, and it turned into ‘hey, you know, we can end up being a monopoly for the power in town’, and we’re creating this grid so it’s easier for people to move here, or to at least create some viable enterprise during the on-season. All the buildings were in different ways disarrayed. We knew that while there was a hotel, restaurant, and saloon, there really wasn’t a whole lot of stable infrastructure. When I started seriously acquiring property, you could tell that the place was getting a little bit more tattered and gray. I already love travel, and I knew there were lots of cool places, but this place was different because it had that tug of the old stuff that had been abandoned for decades. It really tugged at me - all the old stuff there. They didn’t have Antiques Roadshow as a kid, so didn’t have any reference for people.īut when I first got to McCarthy, there was this ghost town surrounded by spectacular wilderness, a super important part of Alaska that’s speaking to concepts like hardiness and self-reliance and all the things we like as Alaskans. I was always fascinated by the cool old stuff. That was kind of a new thing in the 1970s for the big post offices or other office buildings, and so he got all this old antique stuff along with used toilets and sinks. It was loaded with used plumbing and heating supplies, so as a kid I got to tear out buildings that would be turned into condos. Neil Darish: When I first got here…my dad had a junkyard in Chelsea. Monsters and Critics: So you’ve done basically a very long 30-year flip, like a flip on a house except the house is the town. We spoke to Darish about this upcoming last season, which begins this Sunday, and what the cards have in store for him afterward. Solitude or steady income? This is the township’s dilemma. Unquestionably, Darish has changed isolated McCarthy forever: he is selling off the entire town for a cool $3.7million. This is creating some havoc as Keller and some others are fearful the town’s ambiance and seclusion will be destroyed. ![]() In what was once the territory established by the Athabaskan native people who traded copper, Darish accomplished a great deal with two hotels, Ma Johnson’s Historic Hotel and Lancaster’s Hotel, one a traditional museum hotel, the other more like a luxury hostel, that service the tourists seeking entrance to the Wrangell-St. ![]() Now in its last season, the series has become a tense showdown between homesteader Jeremy Keller and Darish, who came out west about 30 years ago, has previously lived off the grid and is now poised to make a tidy profit on his investments.ĭarish has spent years buying properties in McCarthy and luring travel media to rate his refurbished ghost town, now prettified by 21st century standards. The fans (and grousers) of Discovery’s Edge of Alaska are vocal about their feelings over Massachusetts’ native Neil Darish’s steady 15-year flip of the remote town of McCarthy, Alaska Villain or erstwhile entrepreneur and developer? Edge of Alaska’s Neil Darish disagrees with those who accuse him of ruining the town of McCarthy ![]()
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