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Comment by haroldp | Hacker News Reader

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:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1578331919/

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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.

> It looks about the same now as it did then...

That is really impressive. The first thing I noticed looking at the building is how well it looks for 1956 construction and particularly given harsh environment. I suppose it's a testament to the great work of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Most of the Army's engineering in Whittier was pretty amazing. For example, Begich Towers is built on three sections with a gap of six inches through the full height. The gap is closed in with steel, accordion-shaped baffle so that in the frequent earthquakes, they could move independently instead of breaking.

On the other hand, hip-roofs simply weren't in the Army handbook, so everything was built with a flat roof. In a town that may get 400 inches of precipitation in some years, most of it snow, it's a recipe for disaster. Many of the smaller buildings roofs (including the school) were destroyed that way. Begich Tower's roof leaks. I mean, you can be on any floor and have your roof leak due to the capillary action through the cracks. The plumbing sucked. You let the water run until it was clear before you started drinking.

I will grasp this amazing opportunity and flood you with these questions:

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?

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.

It is a town of only 200 some odd people.

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.

> 1. Why the town even exists?

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.

Is there a doctor in the town? A hospital? What happens if someone has a medical emergency - you said the only way to Anchorage in winter was by a train that often didn't come daily.

I just don't understand how these kinds of towns keep any residents. They seem downright dangerous to live in. In Russia, I can understand it, but these are US citizens who can get a flight down to a whole host of warm, easy towns and get any minimum wage job and still quite easily be better off than before.

There are all kinds of small towns around the west that are pretty isolated. This corner of Oregon has a number of them:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Oregon,+USA/@42.8710265,-1...

Some people just like that kind of life.

What's odd about the place in the article is that they're all in the same building, which is probably not what most people who want to 'get away from it all' are seeking.

Generally speaking, there are some EMTs around. Mostly the same crowd as the volunteer fire department. They get some minor training and they do what they can. For anything big, they just transport you to Anchorage.

Back in the day, when I lived there, there was no road, just the railroad. But we had an old Army ambulance that had train wheels that it could deploy to travel to Anchorage on the train tracks. My dad actually took that trip twice IIRC for a heart attack and a stroke (I was pretty young and don't really remember it).

These days there is a road. It closes at times, but the cop has the keys, so they can open it for emergencies.

But yeah, living in the bush, emergency medical care may be a ways away.

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

Interesting how out of the total HN population there is more than one person that lived in this very small town.

Not sure what to make out of it, but certainly interesting.

Nothing to do but write code?

It's a small world. You all read it and now I said it.

I guess there's not much to do besides studying and learning new stuff for a young, smart, introvert person in such small communities. The best and hardest working students I knew came from the tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.

I wish. Maybe that would be my story if I was a kid there now. But I left in `86. There was no Internet. There was no cable TV. Radio came in poorly. Gawddamn telephone calls were prohibitively expensive. I knew two kids that had computers at all. I played some Kings Quest on one of them, and tried to help the other with the Hitchhikers Guide game because I kind of remembered the TV movie that played out of order the year before.

I have wondered how different my life would be if I'd had wikipedia then.

Public libraries were Wikipedia of these times, not sure if you had one there though? I'm not talking about CS specifically, source of math, physics and other sciences are (were) easier accessible, even small school libraries usually have some extended books on these topics. Of course, it's easier to access information these days, but on the other hand, it has drawbacks too as most of youngsters waste their time on online games, social networks, 9gag etc.

Doubtful that Whittier had much in that department. I was in Cordova (with ~1300 people) and our public library wasn't much. I mostly read old sci-fi novels that my dad's crew would leave behind in the bunks.

I never actually lived there, but I was born in a small town across the Prince William Sound called Cordova. I came from a fishing family so we would spend much of the summer bouncing around between just anchoring up in the PWS and (often) spending fishing closures at the bar in Whittier.

I moved away when I was 20 and after a great deal of bouncing around, I've been living in New York for the last seven years. Some people just find their place, I suppose.

Yeah, we were down at the Anchor a fair bit, too. Man, that was a long time ago. I remember my dad getting pissed with me for spending so much of his money on the Pac-Man game, so he gave me fifty cents and a milk crate, and taught me how to shoot pool.

Nice to see a fellow Alaskan kicking around on here.

The Anchor Inn had the nice arcade. It had Ms PacMan, Defender, Burger Time, Tempest, Space Invaders, Time Pilot and a couple pinball machines including "Playboy," oh my! Oh and a decent jukebox, even.

The Sportsman's had Mario Brothers and Galaxian tucked into different corners.

Oh yeah! That jukebox had Whitesnake, man! :D

And yeah, the arcade at the Anchor was way better but the Sportsman was much more chill about me taking up one of their pool tables, if I recall. Sportsman also had Goonies, I think. Not that I was any good at it.

I remember being super fascinated with collecting old railroad spikes from the trainyards as well. That and putting pennies on the tracks when we were waiting for the train to Portage. And I remember those old drive-on cars. When I had to pee my dad would make me wait until we were in a tunnel and then I'd open the car door and pee over the side of the train.

I live in NY now. That seems like another world entirely.

Railroad spikes (and assorted railroad spike art projects) and flattened pennies, check. The very best things to collect/scavenge though were the glass floats lost from Japanese fishing nets.

What's it like having an entire town in one building? Crime? Illness? Religious events? Births? Deaths?

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.

Were there people moving in to replace the deceased? Is the building shown in the article at maximum capacity? And finally, I'm extremely curious about the criminal justice system. The brief article mentions a Sheriff and I assume there may or may not be a deputy also. It also mentions a pot bust. What happens to people arrested? Are they detained until they can be transported to a nearby town with a court system, or do the police just hold them for what they deem to be an appropriate amount of time or until the cell is needed to house the next arrest? I imagine since everyone knows everyone, the police would know anyone they arrest (and their family) quite well.

Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I found these points very interesting.

> Were there people moving in to replace the deceased?

The population has varied considerably over the years. It looks like it's somewhat lower than when I lived there. In a lot of ways, Whittier is not a nice place to live, so people where always moving away, but it had certain appeals that always drew new people in as well.

> The brief article mentions a Sheriff and I assume there may or may not be a deputy also. It also mentions a pot bust. What happens to people arreste?

This is a bit of a change from when I lived there. Back then, there was a separate building that housed the police department (not sheriffs), the fire department and a court room. A judge would come through once a month or so. That building is gone from Google Maps now though, so it must have burned down or collapsed under a heavy snow load or something (that happens). Any serious crimes would be sent off to Anchorage. I would imagine that is how it still works.

> I imagine since everyone knows everyone, the police would know anyone they arrest (and their family) quite well.

Probably? We all pretty much knew who was an alcoholic, or who beat their wife. There seemed to be plenty of petty theft and vandalism to go around. I still wanna know who stole my Big Wheel!

> had certain appeals

Like what?

One man's backwater mudpuddle is another man's relaxing natural paradise.

while i can see that appeal for people who want to get away from it all, but i can't fathom that those same people would want to live in the same building with 200 other people. it seems like the worst of both worlds.

Re the pot bust, it seems the constitutional backdrop may have forced both sides into a tacit understanding that pot is fine so long as it stays at home:

Dave Schofield is the chief of police in Whittier. He is also the only officer who lives in town. Alaska’s laws often reflect the needs of a sparsely populated state, which presents challenges for policing within Begich Towers. For example, the state constitution has written into it a right to privacy; if something is occurring in your own home, you have the right to keep it private. This means that although there is a pervasive smell of marijuana in Begich Towers, the police can do little about it. “The law says you can’t have drugs within 500 feet of a school; there’s not a unit in this building that’s 500 feet from the school, but we have the right-to-privacy issue.”

The pot bust itself appears to have stemmed from this event:

A few years ago, a pot grower on the 10th floor had just finished a harvest and decided to get rid of some of the evidence by flushing it down the toilet. In the process he stopped up the plumbing on the floors below him—a neighbor called city management to complain that someone had flushed large amounts of dog food down the toilets, but it turned out to be pellets of grow medium.

http://reedyoung.com/project/whittier-alaska/r-young-whittie...

For a more extreme example of crime in this kind of very isolated place, I found what happened on Pitcairn island fascinating (and tragic). The criminals had to build their own prison to serve their sentences in, because the island didn't have one. Can't find the original piece I read, but e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/evil-und... .

Could you open the windows in the building or are they sealed against the weather?

Well the Army installed great heavy-duty double paned windows that you could totally open and close. However, they were kind of bulky and ugly, so many people (especially on the North side with a view of the Sound), have replaced them with big unopenable picture windows. Whittier is really not THAT cold most of the time.

Was it a bit stifling, even with air-con/ventilation, not being able to open windows for fresh air? I don't think I could get used to that!

Most houses retained an openable window or two. Every apartment had a big vent with a fan.

When it's -100 outside, you get used to it.

How does property ownership work? Do people rent or own?

Do they pay condo fees?

Yes. Some rent, some own their condo, and all pay condo fees one way or another.

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.

> I'm curious as to why people choose to live in a place like that.

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.

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!

One of the attractions is that rent is REALLY cheap. Everything else is really expensive, but that is true for most of Alaska.

How's the Internet connectivity? Is satellite the only option?

Tell me about the cannabis.

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