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A few Alaska links
Oct. 19th, 2015 11:06 pmThis article in the Alaska Dispatch News on Attu Island (site of the only WWII fighting on American soil) is worth it for the slideshow of the island's fascinating post-apocalyptic wilderness. Well, I guess some people's "fascinating post-apocalyptic" is someone else's "appalling environmental horrors", but I thought it was interesting to see what 70 years of Aleutian weather looks like on buildings, fuel tanks, and other war debris, with its own kind of weird, terrible beauty.
In other Alaska-related linkage, I recently fell down the nostalgia pit at this site: Growing up in Anchorage. A lot of the posts on the site are before my time, since I was born in the '70s, but the part of the site that really sent me down the nostalgia hole was the memories of the owner/founder of Chilkoot Charlie's, a notorious bar in a notorious part of Anchorage where I lived, at various times, off and on through the '80s and early '90s.
My childhood was largely spent in Bush Alaska in a cabin off the road system, but my parents were separated and my dad lived in Anchorage, invariably in the worst parts of Anchorage since he could never afford rent and was perpetually getting evicted from various apartments and trailers; so I spent quite a bit of time there, especially after I started having chronic health problems when I was around 8 or 9 and therefore needed to be in town a lot. A number of those apartments were in Spenard, an Anchorage neighborhood which had cheap rent because it was, well, terrible.
... or at least very unique. It's gentrified somewhat over the last couple of decades, but when I was there, it was full of low-rent motels, biker bars, strip clubs, and X-rated bookstores, as well as a lot of strip malls with more normal sorts of business, such as Anchorage's only comic store (a favorite haunt of mine as a kid) and Blaine's, the local art supply store. At one time we lived just a couple of blocks from Chilkoot Charlie's, just behind its famous windmill. The comic store was across the street and I used to walk past the bar to get there.
A few select posts from the Chilkoot Charlie's guy: trying not to get murdered by bikers (the bit about the guy with the shotgun on the roof, good lord); Anchorage's second gay bar (burned down by the owner of Anchorage's first gay bar); a somewhat less censored version of the windmill story linked at the ADN site above (and now I know why there used to be a two-headed pig on the old Chilkoot Charlie's sign; somehow people never seem to talk about these things with 10-year-olds).
... Anchorage in the '80s, man. I think it was just in the last few years that I realized how different the '80s were in Alaska than everywhere else in the country. The 1980s in most of the U.S.: hair bands, bubblegum pop, and multicolored leg warmers. The 1980s in Alaska: recession, concrete architecture, unemployment, and strippers.
In other Alaska-related linkage, I recently fell down the nostalgia pit at this site: Growing up in Anchorage. A lot of the posts on the site are before my time, since I was born in the '70s, but the part of the site that really sent me down the nostalgia hole was the memories of the owner/founder of Chilkoot Charlie's, a notorious bar in a notorious part of Anchorage where I lived, at various times, off and on through the '80s and early '90s.
My childhood was largely spent in Bush Alaska in a cabin off the road system, but my parents were separated and my dad lived in Anchorage, invariably in the worst parts of Anchorage since he could never afford rent and was perpetually getting evicted from various apartments and trailers; so I spent quite a bit of time there, especially after I started having chronic health problems when I was around 8 or 9 and therefore needed to be in town a lot. A number of those apartments were in Spenard, an Anchorage neighborhood which had cheap rent because it was, well, terrible.
... or at least very unique. It's gentrified somewhat over the last couple of decades, but when I was there, it was full of low-rent motels, biker bars, strip clubs, and X-rated bookstores, as well as a lot of strip malls with more normal sorts of business, such as Anchorage's only comic store (a favorite haunt of mine as a kid) and Blaine's, the local art supply store. At one time we lived just a couple of blocks from Chilkoot Charlie's, just behind its famous windmill. The comic store was across the street and I used to walk past the bar to get there.
A few select posts from the Chilkoot Charlie's guy: trying not to get murdered by bikers (the bit about the guy with the shotgun on the roof, good lord); Anchorage's second gay bar (burned down by the owner of Anchorage's first gay bar); a somewhat less censored version of the windmill story linked at the ADN site above (and now I know why there used to be a two-headed pig on the old Chilkoot Charlie's sign; somehow people never seem to talk about these things with 10-year-olds).
... Anchorage in the '80s, man. I think it was just in the last few years that I realized how different the '80s were in Alaska than everywhere else in the country. The 1980s in most of the U.S.: hair bands, bubblegum pop, and multicolored leg warmers. The 1980s in Alaska: recession, concrete architecture, unemployment, and strippers.