All citizens at the same address? There is a place where you don’t have to go too far to meet all the inhabitants. In this remote country at the ends of the world, in fact, almost a whole city is concentrated within a single building.
The CITY where the CITIZENS all live in the same BUILDING
# A couple of doors down
In the city of Whittier in Alaska, 120 km from the capital Anchorage, there is a 14-story building called Begich Towers that houses practically all the inhabitants of the city.
Inside the building, in addition to apartments of different sizes according to needs, you can find all the services that any other city offers to citizens: primary schools and kindergartens, a post office, a supermarket, a central police, a medical clinic and even a bed & breakfast.
# CROSS a MOUNTAIN to enter the city
Whittier can only be reached by crossing a (claustrophobic) tunnel, just over 4 km long and just 4 meters wide, whose direction of travel is alternated by traffic lights at both ends. The Anton Anderson Memorial tunnel crosses Maynard Mountain, one of the three mountains at the foot of the city. Access to the passage to enter or exit Whittier is allowed only between the early hours of dawn and ten in the evening, when the tunnel is closed.
# A STRATEGIC area
To reconstruct the history of this bizarre city, it is necessary to go back to the years of the Second World War and the dawn of the Cold War, when the US state decided to start exploring Alaska, in search of a place where to build a US military and port base. The area, being isolated in the mountains and a few hundred kilometers from the border of the Russian enemy, turned out to be an excellent position for the construction of a real military citadel: also within the walls of a building, the Buckner Building. Now abandoned, its skeleton is still present today, a few steps from the Begich Towers, born at the time as a residential area for the US military and their families.
ALESSANDRO VIDALI
(Original article by Alice Colapietra)
