Anchorage voters should rally behind Proposition 6 on the April 4 municipal ballot to support Anchorage Historic Properties and the Municipality's plan to save the 4th Avenue Theatre. Considering the gaping hole restructuring the building would leave in the city's cultural fabric, the 65-cents-per-hundred-thousand-dollars property valuation the bond will cost is money well spent.

The issue with the 4th Avenue Theatre isn't the charm and beauty of its art moderne interior, architectural marvel though it be. A deeper meaning lies with the commitment the building represents to constructing a new society, to putting down roots intended to last beyond the next generation. The 4th Avenue Theatre represents a commitment to permanence.

When he opened the theater in 1947, "Cap" Lathrop was already a legend in Alaska and a very rich man. He was the sort willing to take a chance, willing and able to bet on the future. He bet that cities would be built in Alaska, that where there were forests and oceanfront would come urbanscapes. Confident that pioneers were coming to establish a self-reliant foundation on which to transplant American life, he determined to make his money by both helping to construct that foundation and serving its residents. He was not always a pleasant man, and he squeezed all he could out of every penny and every employee. But he had an Alaska vision, and he succeeded brilliantly.

Lathrop was a construction contractor in the Puget Sound country when he came north in 1896. Here he reinvented himself as master of a steam schooner and started a lightering business, running mail and supplies around Cook Inlet. Successful at that, he acquired an interest in a fish cannery and made it highly profitable. Then he bought a trucking company to haul freight on the Richardson Highway. Thriving, he invested in banking, construction, oil and mining prospects. One of his most important ventures was coal mining at Healy. In these enterprises he was never half-hearted; he always went for the best. The coal bunker building he built in Fairbanks was the largest in Alaska and technologically highly advanced.

But it was in servicing the new population of Alaska that Lathrop's confidence in the future most visibly manifested itself. He bought and nurtured two newspapers, one of them the Fairbanks News-Miner. He founded Alaska's first two radio stations, KFAR in Fairbanks and KENI in Anchorage. He also built movie theaters. His "Empress Theater" in Fairbanks was the first concrete building in Alaska. He built his Anchorage "Empress" in 1916 and installed a 2/11 Kimball organ in it in 1917.

Started in 1941, with construction interrupted during the war, Lathrop opened his Anchorage 4th Avenue Theatre in 1947. The first film was "The Jolson Story," with Larry Parks and William Demarest (two Oscars). In 1952 the theater hosted the world premiere of "Twelve O'Clock High" with Gregory Peck (two Oscars). The theater's copper, aluminum and gold-leaf murals on either side of the proscenium, along with one of Mount McKinley in the lobby, together with extensive walnut paneling and marble accents and the "Big Dipper" and Polaris blinking in the ceiling can only be described as lavish. Little wonder the building's inclusion on the National Register of Historic Landmarks. The proscenium murals manifest Lathrop's expansive Alaska vision. They show economic vitality founded in agriculture and resource extraction supporting a populous, active, dynamic new society. The energy fairly leaps from the theater walls.

Lathrop's theater is not for the faint-hearted. Nor is it for the temporary sojourner thinking of retirement in a comfortable Sun City. For Lathrop, the future was right here, in what could be made of this place, how Alaska might be transformed into a new reality for successive generations. It did not reside in what might be put away and later transported south to some other life that Alaska transients might call their "real home."

The corps of Anchorage's truly permanent residents, those never intending to leave, Native and non-Native, is not large, and it grows but slowly. The 4th Avenue Theatre is an essential, even necessary symbol of those permanent residents and their city. Symbolic also would be its demise.

Stephen Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.