Whittier: The only town in the world that lives under one roof
We all are attached to our hometown. Isn’t it? The bond that we experience is for everything around us that we grew up with and of course, for our very own home. Now imagine an entire town living under a single roof. Sounds impossible, isn’t it? Well, what if we told you it exists in reality? We are talking about Whittier, a town in Alaska where everyone lives under the same roof. Here, everyone lives in a building called the Begich Towers. Read on to know more.
Where is Whittier?
The town of Whittier is situated on the northeast shore of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, more specifically near the mouth of the Passage Canal. Deemed as the gateway to the Prince William Sound (a smaller water body attached to the Gulf of Alaska), Whittier is 75 miles southeast of Alaska’s most populated town Anchorage and sits as a remote outpost hidden among glaciers, where it snows up to 22 feet every winter.
Origin of Whittier and the Begich Towers
Not many know, Whittier was built by the United States military right after the Second World War and very close to the start of the Cold War. Can you guess why? Because it was strategically important – an Alaskan outpost with a deep-water port, that is close to the Russian border making it a perfect logistics base. In fact, the US military deemed it to be so convenient that they blasted a railroad through the mountains of Alaska to connect the town to the rest of the country alongside building two large infrastructures to house their personnel – the Buckner Building and the Begich Towers (1957).
A few years down the line, the US military realised that they didn’t need an outpost in Whittier after all. This is when the Bucker Building was abandoned that till now stands as the reminder of the town’s shady military past. However, the other building, aka the Begich Towers (built by Anton Anderson of the US Army Corps of Engineers), not only remained available to the locals but was given the status of a condominium (a joint sovereign territory) in 1972.
The Begich Towers
This is the tower that makes Whittier a unique and notable place till date. After all, the entire population of the polar town (ranging between 200-400) lives in the fourteen storeyed landmark which has earned it the nickname “town under one roof.” Interestingly, the Begich Towers was originally named as the Hodge Building, in memory of Colonel William Walter Hodge, a commander of the US Engineer Regiment but was later renamed in honour of Nick Begich, a local Alaskan politician, who had mysteriously disappeared.
The Begich Towers is not only the only residential building, it is also where all the town’s offices, police station, post office exist. In fact, the building has a super functional basement that houses a school, a health clinic, a church, a laundromat, an indoor playground, an eatery and even a convenience store. This is appropriate considering the snowy, windy weather conditions there for major part of a year. In case you were wondering, the primary occupations of people in Whittier are commercial fishing, tourism and transportation. However, the town still remains nearly inaccessible despite its sea route, roadway and railroad.
Whittier Tunnel: A sneak peek
Originally built in 1943 by the US military as a railroad tunnel by carving beneath the Maymard Mountain, it was meant to link the rest of the country to the small port town of Whittier. However, with the turn of the 20th century, the State of Alaska upgraded it into the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel. Popularly deemed as the Whittier Tunnel, it now stands as the longest highway tunnel in North America (it is 2.5 miles long), and one of the few tunnels to service both railways and automobiles. However, the tunnel is too narrow to allow both-way traffic; which is why vehicles leaving the town should go on the hour, while the ones entering should do so at half-hour.