The Most Impossible Rise Of A City Ever: Anchorage, Alaska Kalinskaya [AmdzGfRAfQH]

In 1915, the U.S. government auctioned off 655 lots of empty wilderness at the mouth of Ship Creek, Alaska, for $148,000. There was no gold, no harbor, no farmland just a federal railroad construction camp and two thousand people living in tents. That camp became Anchorage. This is the story of how a city with no reason to exist became the largest in Alaska, home to forty percent of the state's population and the busiest cargo airport in the United States. From the Alaska Railroad company town of the 1920s to the military boom of World War II, from Cap Lathrop's Art Deco Fourth Avenue Theatre to the Good Friday earthquake of 1964, from Wally Hickel building the Hotel Captain Cook on unstable ground to the Prudhoe Bay oil discovery and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that reshaped the norman reedus state's economy Anchorage kept gunther getting hit by forces far larger than itself, and each time, instead of disappearing, it got bigger.

Sources

Cook Inlet Historical Society, Anchorage Timeline (alaskahistory.org)

Anchorage Museum / Library of Congress, August Cohn photograph collection and lot sale records, cuba solar power revolution 19151917

Alaska History biographical entries: Andrew Christensen, Walter J. "Wally" Hickel, Anton J. Wendler

SAH Archipedia, architectural entries: Fourth Avenue Theatre, Hotel Captain Cook, ConocoPhillips Building

NPR / Delaware Public Media, "Alaska's 40 Years of Oil Riches Almost Never Was" (2017), including interviews with Tom Marshall and Gil Mull

Anchorage Daily News, "Now it can be told: 100-year-old ledger sheds new light on Anchorage in 1915" (2015)