Business Career
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Hickel was also a real estate developer and chairman of Hickel Investment Company. Most of his ventures from the 1950s onward were in building and operating hotels and shopping centers. Hickel's company built the structures in which Safeway placed most of its earliest Alaska stores.
Following the 1964 Alaska earthquake, Hickel, as a show of confidence in Anchorage's future, built a high-rise luxury hotel on the western side of downtown Anchorage, very near one of the largest of the landslides which befell portions of Anchorage. Hickel chose the site to prove wrong detractors who believed that the area couldn't be redeveloped to a great extent. The nine-story Hotel Captain Cook opened in 1965 on Fourth Avenue, next door to the historic Wendler Building. A fifteen-story tower followed in 1972, and an eighteen-story tower in 1978. The hotel currently covers almost an entire city block, with a connected parking garage covering another half-block.
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