W00h! I grew up in Whittier, AK. Ask me Anything! Haha, seriously, I moved to Whittier at the age of 2 in 1974 and lived there until 1986.
The big change there since I left has been the tunnel. When I was there you had to drive your car up onto a railroad flatcar (and pay a steep ticket price) to get out. Anchorage is only 55 miles away, but really it's two mountains away. The railroad sold passenger service only as a requirement of the state and prioritized it behind freight. Between that, avalanches and assorted weather problems, you could wait hours and hours for a train. Winter service wasn't even daily, back then. We didn't even have cable. Just PBS and one channel that mixed shows from the three big networks. It was strange.
Yes, most residents live in one big 14 story high-rise in rural Alaska.
I most definitely do not miss it. I recommend this book if you want more info:
I was in Whittier in 1991, two years after the oil spill. I'll say that even then there was other housing and not everyone lived in the one building. You can easily see housing dotted around the area and the building sits back a bit from the water. The pictures in this article shows a remodeled building but when I was there it was in some disrepair. And as fishermen from around the prince william sound used to say, "There's no place shittier than Whittier.'
I was told the main reason Whittier exists is because it's the only port deep enough to dock warships. I was fishing out of Cordova which you can only get to by plane or boat but if you wanted to go to anchorage, you could take a small car ferry to Whittier.
> I'll say that even then there was other housing and not everyone lived in the one building.
When I was there last in `86, there were a few dwellings (maybe 8-12?) at the Sportsman's Inn and two old shacks right down by the railroad owned by one family of three. On google street maps I can see two or three new freestanding houses. The Shens who ran the better bar lived there. The vast majority of people live in Beggich Towers. It looks about the same now as it did then, and does not seem to have been renovated much. Are you perhaps thinking of the Buckner Building?
> There's no place shittier than Whittier
Not that I have found so far ;)
> I was told the main reason Whittier exists is because it's the only port deep enough to dock warships.
Supply ships to support the war effort, more than war ships, per se.
OK, history/geography lesson... The Kenai peninsula hangs down into the Gulf of Alaska and sort of separates those two areas. The landscape around there is very mountainous. However, Whittier has a low mountain pass to "easily" travel between Passage Canal (not an actual canal) on the east side to Turnigan Arm and Anchorage (more of a muddy tentacle) on the West side. Portage Pass was where natives would portage their kayaks through there back in the day, and European explorers adopted the route. Fast forward to World War II, and the US Army developed the site into a town, building pretty much everything bigger than a shack that you see there today. The Japanese were taking US islands in the Aleutians, and we needed to be able to get war materiel up there. You can't take it directly to Anchorage because it's a horrible port, with huge tides. So the Army built two big docks and a tank farm for petrolium. They connected it to Anchorage with a railroad. Unforunately, the old native portage was over Portage Glacier, and impassable in the summer. So they built one of the longest tunnels in the world through the mountains (also a second quite long tunnel). After WWII built Whittier's big residential buildings, Beggich Towers pictured in the article and the abandoned, Buckner Building. The Army pulled out of Whittier in the 50s, only a few short years after the two big buildings were built. Whittier survives as a town today as a port, and on top of that Army infrastructure.
> 2. What are the most jobs? Is there any production?
Most of the jobs are at the port, the railroad and the tank farm. In the summer, there's fishing and tourism. Everything else pretty much hangs off those.
> 3. How did it feel to live in such a small community?
I hated it. Other people liked it. Imagine having 0-4 other kids in your grade. Those are all of your friends. Pick your best friend and your girl friend from that pool. The weather was shit. Summer was SHORT and muddy. Winter was long and DARK. Absolutely everyone is absolutely all up in your business all the time. The views were real nice when it wasn't raining or snowing. It was usually raining or snowing. Opportunities for doing anything beyond school or work were pretty narrow.
Actually it was built in WW2 after the japanese attacked the Aleutian Islands---the Americans were desperate to be able to defend US soil, and Whittier was perfect from a military standpoint: constantly clouded over (some insane number of days a year they get precipitation) deepwater port, surrounded by mountains.
I can answer #1 it is a major cruise port. Many Alaskan cruises start in Whittier. If you ever take an Alaska cruise you'll likely take the train into Whittier then get on the ship without spending a lot of time there.
I'm from Cordova and sometimes my dad and I would dock the boat in Whittier during closures. I remember playing connect four with Irma at the Sportsman and drink Roy Rogers (which is also where I learned how to play pool, I was between 7-14 then)
Fished the sound in one way or another until I was 20 and moved away.
Oh man, I remember Ross and Irma, but I got my Roy Rogers and pool from the Anchor Inn. If I recall correctly, the Sportsman's is actually older than either the Buckner Building or Beggich Tower
It seemed to have about the same crime as anywhere. I could easily imagine a drug epidemic really getting out of hand there, though I never saw that happen.
When I was there, some Alaskan religious group would rotate some "nondenominational" preacher through for a year or three and serve up basic Sunday School type Christianity out of an ugly room in the big building pictured.
There seemed to be a high-ish suicide rate, and working in the fishing industry is fairly dangerous.
I'm curious as to why people choose to live in a place like that. There are far more hospitable places to live in around the world - why would a family choose to live in a frozen remote place such as this. How is it like growing up? Did you have friends to play with? What's teenage life like? As a teenager I'd be devastated if the girl/boy ratio was skewed.
How much does it cost to live there? Like that guy who is running a grocery store? Seems like he could spend his whole day with browsing the web given the customers to expect!
I live in Alaska and have visited Whittier multiple times. Every time we go, my wife and I comment about how great of a setting it would be for a zombie apocalypse movie.
"Oh it's only accessible by water or the main tunnel, it's easy to secure"
"oops we forgot about securing the old train tunnel"
"oh no they're in the apartment building, let's go hide out in the creepy old abandoned building down the street"
... clearly I'm not going to be writing the screenplay, but the location has a lot of potential!
It would be a great place to hold out with a large group if you had a way to obtain and import supplies and you cleared the building first. You'd probably be able to spot anyone coming or going (living or undead), and it would be likely that very few zombies would be in the surrounding land.
Also, of course zombie fiction requires a major suspension of disbelief in this regard, but the damp/cold weather would cause the zombie bodies to freeze (at below zero) or decay faster (at above zero, though I suspect it is rarely if ever above zero)
The Whittier temperature averages [1] seem to indicate a 6-9 month period where highs are above freezing. That would make for some exciting daytime zombie interactions. By comparison, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica [2] does indeed appear to be below freezing on average the vast majority of the year.
To hide out from the zombie hordes behind an impenetrable wall of freezing air, you would just have to set up shop at some place like Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica [3]. Once the jet fuel (what they use for power) runs out though, it will get unpleasantly cold, fast.
Given that zombies usually don't obey the laws of thermodynamics, if I lived in a place like Whittier I'd probably try to harness them to some kind of hamster wheel driving a generator.
Contrary to popular belief, while temperatures do go down on average as you go further north, the really pronounced difference is how much it varies between its extremes. Realize that in the summer in these northern places, the sun is shining (or at least in twilight) past midnight, and comes back up very early in the morning, only a handful of hours later [1]. It actually gets quite warm [2].
This arrangement looks a lot better than the norm in that area. The typical 200-person remote Alaskan town is more of a shantytown, a depressing collection of low-quality single-story shacks. This at least looks like solid construction, probably more weatherproof than the norm, and with some indoor community spaces. Seems like a decent solution for such a town, in the rare case where the capital to build such a building is available (in this case it was only because the U.S. military built it).
It would be interesting if someone tried this in one of these larger cities with high rises like Singapore. You'd create a smaller groups with a sense of community while still giving members the benefits of living in a large city. The reason I thought of this is it reminded me of a strategy of using small bible study groups being employed in a large church that was part of my alma mater. The idea is that it was easier and more intimate in these small groups, so they'd have the ability to hold more personal sutdy sessions. Of course, they still belonged to the main body and had those advantages, such as a larger number of volunteers, etc.
Something like that could create the "small town atmosphere" many city dwellers seek without destroying the city.
This is essentially what college campuses do already, to some extent. My current apartment complex also hosts activities, movie nights, brings in nurses so residents can meet and ask about health problems. This is in addition to the playground, tennis/basketball court, computer room, gym, small theater, and other amenities that help to create a "community" atmosphere.
Also, I think a big reason this model is so "successful" is that people don't have much of an alternative. Really, would you _prefer_ to go to that sketchy-looking grocery store with the mayonnaise next to the cereal, if you had the choice of going a few blocks to a large supermarket? To be honest, I've never spent any time using my own apartment's amenities. I live in the city, because I want to be with people like me, not because I want forced socialization with people who just happen to live together.
> It would be interesting if someone tried this in one of these larger cities with high rises like Singapore.
In Singapore, 80% of people today live in what are called HDB flats. These are government subsidized housing projects (with few of the downsides that phrase entails in the west). These HDB buildings (or just "HDBs") are each, eventually, integrated as part of an "estate" which usually comprises one or two grocery stores, some restaurants, maybe a salon or barber shop, hardware store, etc.
Given Singapore's population density, there are often several HDBs near each other in one "town." But if you want, you can find one that lets you live in relative isolation, with shopping and eating downstairs, and perhaps a direct connection to the metro to get to work. The playground will be outside, but otherwise you could live almost entirely indoors if you wanted...and some people do, since it's 30 degrees Celsius every day.
This was the concept between some subsidized housing in the mid 20th century, and was for the most part a failed experiment in architecture.
The two significant differences here are 1) government officials and law enforcement are part of the housing complex and not external; 2) since they aren't housing projects, the buildings don't have automatic class stigma.
> was for the most part a failed experiment in architecture.
More like a failed experiment in social organization. The same model works fine in Singapore because the government aggressively routes around social problems: for example, they assign ethnic and income quotas in each building in order to maintain a mostly even distribution of population groups, impeding the rise of ghettos and basically forcing different people to get along[1].
The failure of '70s/'80s "projects" in most countries was due to an excess of faith in the ability of mankind to live together given communal spaces, and incomplete information in terms of social dynamics likely to develop in such settings (and around them, e.g. "white flight" was in full swing but it was not completely understood at political level [2]).
[1] Singaporean housing policies are not entirely benign: they are also used to break out political organizations and silence critics of the government. Central planning, as usual, is a double-edged sword.
[2] ... to be kind. A more unkind reading is that upper echelons knew perfectly well what was happening, saw the future coming, and just let it be.
Large cities often have apartment buildings for 200 or more people with units connected by concourses to their own shops and community facilities. Difference is, people there have alternatives.
Sounds like Park Hill, one of the early council blocks in Britain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Hill,_Sheffield . (Mostly a failure, but that Wikipedia article is much more positive than other things I'd read about it, so shrug)
Whittier is also home to the Buckner Building. 250k square feet, abandoned after the 1964 earthquake and left to rot. In other words, a perfect place for indoor skiing. http://vimeo.com/50860740
Why do they build such tall buildings in an earth quake area? Why is such an destroyed inhabited building still around 50 years later? In other parts of the world there would be many smaller buildings and inhabited ugly buildings would be removed.
I like the creative use of the building in the video, great work!
Why do they build such tall buildings in an earth quake area?
The basic answer is that they had no idea what kind of earthquake was possible there. That earthquake is #3 on the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Largest_ea... and was the second megathrust earthquake recorded since the geological knowledge existed to figure out what they were. (The first being Chile in 1960.)
This article makes it sound like some remote wilderness where you would freeze instantly when you go outside. The climate there (according to wikipedia) isn't that cold, right now it's -12c with a high of 3c over the next few days - there are plenty of European cities with colder climates.
Still an interesting place none the less. They have an official website with more details: http://begichtowers.com/ - there is a unit for sale for $40k if anyone is interested :D
> The first thing we noticed when we arrived in Whittier was the wind—we were barely out of the car when a powerful gust pushed us down the hill. People in Whittier get out of their cars carefully; the wind has been known to shatter windshields and bend car doors backwards. Because the weather can be so extreme, kids often walk to school via an underground tunnel. The town averages around 250 inches of snow annually, but some recent years have seen closer to 400 inches. Two winters ago the snowdrifts near Whittier School were piled so high that the principal let students go outside to take pictures of one another hanging from a street lamp.
Coastal Alaska isn't nearly as cold as everyone thinks. The ocean keeps it mild. It snows a lot, and it's often windy, but the actual temperature is rarely below ~ -20C.
I'm in the Yukon, away from the ocean. I rode my bike to work at -37C this morning :)
I read somewhere that Whitehorse has the highest number of bicycle commuters per capita. I rode my motorcycle through there a few years ago, and it was quite beautiful.. but I don't get why so many bike commuters. I guess compared to a big city it has no transit or less transit? But less spread out than a typical suburban area?
The statistic would have surprised me in an area with mild weather year-round; nothing about the area seemed particularly well- (or ill- , for that matter) suited to bicycle commuting. A fairly compact downtown but plenty of rural housing.
The cold winters just made the bicycle commuting stat mind-blowing.
Any feedback about this statistic? Is it like a "yeah, but.." kind of thing? Or does the area really take pride in bicycling? Some kind of history I'm not aware of?
The coldest city in Europe is Helsinki. According to Wikipedia, the average high is 9 C and the average low is 2.9 C. For Whittier, the average high is 7.3 C and the low is 1.7 C.
Can you give some examples of these many European cities that are colder, on average?
Not sure where you got that Helsinki is the coldest city, I'm not even sure it's the coldest capital. There are plenty of colder cities, take a look at Kiruna as an example (which was also featured here a few weeks ago):
Edit: Ah I think I understand, my original comment was referring to being cold in the depths of winter, not the average temperature. Right now I'm in Vilnius the capital of Lithuania, it get's colder than Whittier (and Helsinki) in the winter but a lot hotter in the summer, so the average isn't that bad:
If the comparison is winter temperatures, rather than year-round averages, it would make more sense to compare the coldest month (otherwise you mix together the effect of cold winters and cool summers, which are very different experientially). Helsinki has colder winters than Whittier does, though not by a huge margin. Whittier's coldest month is January, with average high -0.4 C (31 F) and average low -5.1 C (23 F). Helsinki's is February, with average high -1.9 (29 F) and average low -7.4 C (19 F). Whittier has a lower year-round average because it has cooler summers (highs around 60 F / 15 C, versus Helsinki's ~70 F / 20 C).
Helsinki is a pretty temperate city for Finland, though, being on the southeastern coast. Oulu and Tampere are a lot colder!
Readit News
The big change there since I left has been the tunnel. When I was there you had to drive your car up onto a railroad flatcar (and pay a steep ticket price) to get out. Anchorage is only 55 miles away, but really it's two mountains away. The railroad sold passenger service only as a requirement of the state and prioritized it behind freight. Between that, avalanches and assorted weather problems, you could wait hours and hours for a train. Winter service wasn't even daily, back then. We didn't even have cable. Just PBS and one channel that mixed shows from the three big networks. It was strange.
Yes, most residents live in one big 14 story high-rise in rural Alaska.
I most definitely do not miss it. I recommend this book if you want more info:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1578331919/
I was told the main reason Whittier exists is because it's the only port deep enough to dock warships. I was fishing out of Cordova which you can only get to by plane or boat but if you wanted to go to anchorage, you could take a small car ferry to Whittier.
When I was there last in `86, there were a few dwellings (maybe 8-12?) at the Sportsman's Inn and two old shacks right down by the railroad owned by one family of three. On google street maps I can see two or three new freestanding houses. The Shens who ran the better bar lived there. The vast majority of people live in Beggich Towers. It looks about the same now as it did then, and does not seem to have been renovated much. Are you perhaps thinking of the Buckner Building?
> There's no place shittier than Whittier
Not that I have found so far ;)
> I was told the main reason Whittier exists is because it's the only port deep enough to dock warships.
Supply ships to support the war effort, more than war ships, per se.
Deleted Comment
1. Why the town even exists? Article tells nothing about its purpose.
2. What are the most jobs? Is there any production?
3. How did it feel to live in such a small community?
OK, history/geography lesson... The Kenai peninsula hangs down into the Gulf of Alaska and sort of separates those two areas. The landscape around there is very mountainous. However, Whittier has a low mountain pass to "easily" travel between Passage Canal (not an actual canal) on the east side to Turnigan Arm and Anchorage (more of a muddy tentacle) on the West side. Portage Pass was where natives would portage their kayaks through there back in the day, and European explorers adopted the route. Fast forward to World War II, and the US Army developed the site into a town, building pretty much everything bigger than a shack that you see there today. The Japanese were taking US islands in the Aleutians, and we needed to be able to get war materiel up there. You can't take it directly to Anchorage because it's a horrible port, with huge tides. So the Army built two big docks and a tank farm for petrolium. They connected it to Anchorage with a railroad. Unforunately, the old native portage was over Portage Glacier, and impassable in the summer. So they built one of the longest tunnels in the world through the mountains (also a second quite long tunnel). After WWII built Whittier's big residential buildings, Beggich Towers pictured in the article and the abandoned, Buckner Building. The Army pulled out of Whittier in the 50s, only a few short years after the two big buildings were built. Whittier survives as a town today as a port, and on top of that Army infrastructure.
> 2. What are the most jobs? Is there any production?
Most of the jobs are at the port, the railroad and the tank farm. In the summer, there's fishing and tourism. Everything else pretty much hangs off those.
> 3. How did it feel to live in such a small community?
I hated it. Other people liked it. Imagine having 0-4 other kids in your grade. Those are all of your friends. Pick your best friend and your girl friend from that pool. The weather was shit. Summer was SHORT and muddy. Winter was long and DARK. Absolutely everyone is absolutely all up in your business all the time. The views were real nice when it wasn't raining or snowing. It was usually raining or snowing. Opportunities for doing anything beyond school or work were pretty narrow.
It is a town of only 200 some odd people.
Deleted Comment
Fished the sound in one way or another until I was 20 and moved away.
When I was there, some Alaskan religious group would rotate some "nondenominational" preacher through for a year or three and serve up basic Sunday School type Christianity out of an ugly room in the big building pictured.
There seemed to be a high-ish suicide rate, and working in the fishing industry is fairly dangerous.
Do they pay condo fees?
Different people value different things.
> Did you have friends to play with?
Usually one or two. The school had like 55 kids k-12 when I was there.
> What's teenage life like?
I left when I was 13, happily.
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"Oh it's only accessible by water or the main tunnel, it's easy to secure" "oops we forgot about securing the old train tunnel" "oh no they're in the apartment building, let's go hide out in the creepy old abandoned building down the street"
... clearly I'm not going to be writing the screenplay, but the location has a lot of potential!
Also, of course zombie fiction requires a major suspension of disbelief in this regard, but the damp/cold weather would cause the zombie bodies to freeze (at below zero) or decay faster (at above zero, though I suspect it is rarely if ever above zero)
To hide out from the zombie hordes behind an impenetrable wall of freezing air, you would just have to set up shop at some place like Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica [3]. Once the jet fuel (what they use for power) runs out though, it will get unpleasantly cold, fast.
[1] http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/whittier/alaska/united-...
[2] http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather.php3?s=46698
[3] http://www.foresthillweather.com/PHP/Metar2/AntarcticaAverag...
[1] http://www.alaska.org/weather/daylight-hours/whittier/june
[2] http://weatherspark.com/averages/33093/6/Whittier-Alaska-Uni...
http://reedyoung.com/project/whittier-alaska/r-young-whittie...
Not quite the same, I guess.
It's on the rail system and (now) the road system.
Most Alaska towns and villages aren't.
Deleted Comment
Also the full version of the article in OP's link
This one gives a great aerial view of the town: http://www.wildnatureimages.com/Aerial_Photos_Whittier.htm
It is one huge parking lot.
Something like that could create the "small town atmosphere" many city dwellers seek without destroying the city.
Also, I think a big reason this model is so "successful" is that people don't have much of an alternative. Really, would you _prefer_ to go to that sketchy-looking grocery store with the mayonnaise next to the cereal, if you had the choice of going a few blocks to a large supermarket? To be honest, I've never spent any time using my own apartment's amenities. I live in the city, because I want to be with people like me, not because I want forced socialization with people who just happen to live together.
In Singapore, 80% of people today live in what are called HDB flats. These are government subsidized housing projects (with few of the downsides that phrase entails in the west). These HDB buildings (or just "HDBs") are each, eventually, integrated as part of an "estate" which usually comprises one or two grocery stores, some restaurants, maybe a salon or barber shop, hardware store, etc.
Given Singapore's population density, there are often several HDBs near each other in one "town." But if you want, you can find one that lets you live in relative isolation, with shopping and eating downstairs, and perhaps a direct connection to the metro to get to work. The playground will be outside, but otherwise you could live almost entirely indoors if you wanted...and some people do, since it's 30 degrees Celsius every day.
The two significant differences here are 1) government officials and law enforcement are part of the housing complex and not external; 2) since they aren't housing projects, the buildings don't have automatic class stigma.
More like a failed experiment in social organization. The same model works fine in Singapore because the government aggressively routes around social problems: for example, they assign ethnic and income quotas in each building in order to maintain a mostly even distribution of population groups, impeding the rise of ghettos and basically forcing different people to get along[1].
The failure of '70s/'80s "projects" in most countries was due to an excess of faith in the ability of mankind to live together given communal spaces, and incomplete information in terms of social dynamics likely to develop in such settings (and around them, e.g. "white flight" was in full swing but it was not completely understood at political level [2]).
[1] Singaporean housing policies are not entirely benign: they are also used to break out political organizations and silence critics of the government. Central planning, as usual, is a double-edged sword.
[2] ... to be kind. A more unkind reading is that upper echelons knew perfectly well what was happening, saw the future coming, and just let it be.
I like the creative use of the building in the video, great work!
The basic answer is that they had no idea what kind of earthquake was possible there. That earthquake is #3 on the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Largest_ea... and was the second megathrust earthquake recorded since the geological knowledge existed to figure out what they were. (The first being Chile in 1960.)
Still an interesting place none the less. They have an official website with more details: http://begichtowers.com/ - there is a unit for sale for $40k if anyone is interested :D
> The first thing we noticed when we arrived in Whittier was the wind—we were barely out of the car when a powerful gust pushed us down the hill. People in Whittier get out of their cars carefully; the wind has been known to shatter windshields and bend car doors backwards. Because the weather can be so extreme, kids often walk to school via an underground tunnel. The town averages around 250 inches of snow annually, but some recent years have seen closer to 400 inches. Two winters ago the snowdrifts near Whittier School were piled so high that the principal let students go outside to take pictures of one another hanging from a street lamp.
I'm in the Yukon, away from the ocean. I rode my bike to work at -37C this morning :)
The statistic would have surprised me in an area with mild weather year-round; nothing about the area seemed particularly well- (or ill- , for that matter) suited to bicycle commuting. A fairly compact downtown but plenty of rural housing.
The cold winters just made the bicycle commuting stat mind-blowing.
Any feedback about this statistic? Is it like a "yeah, but.." kind of thing? Or does the area really take pride in bicycling? Some kind of history I'm not aware of?
Can you give some examples of these many European cities that are colder, on average?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna#Climate
Edit: Ah I think I understand, my original comment was referring to being cold in the depths of winter, not the average temperature. Right now I'm in Vilnius the capital of Lithuania, it get's colder than Whittier (and Helsinki) in the winter but a lot hotter in the summer, so the average isn't that bad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilnius#Climate
Helsinki is a pretty temperate city for Finland, though, being on the southeastern coast. Oulu and Tampere are a lot colder!
Kiruna: -8.1 to 1.8 Luleå: -1.5 to 5.9 Umeå: -0.8 to 6.7
Luleå and Umeå both have Universities and populations of ~45k and ~80k respectively. Kiruna is a mining town.
I lived in Umeå for a few months, it's actually pretty pleasant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkuta