Whittier counted 272 residents in 2020, nearly all in one block

In Whittier, Alaska, the 2020 census counted 272 people. Most of them live under the same roof, in a fourteen-storey tower facing a harbour that never freezes.

The tower wasn't built to put a town inside it. The United States Army finished it in 1957, after four years of work, and called it the Hodge Building: military accommodation, meant to concentrate people and services in a place where winter complicates any journey. When the Army left, the rooms became flats and the building was renamed, years later, Begich Towers.

The grocery shop, a laundry, a clinic and a church are still inside. You go down to buy food and come back up with it without setting foot outside. In January, with a blizzard on, that staircase does the work of a main road.

Outdoors, the annual snowfall is measured in metres and the winds have gone past 100 kilometres an hour.

The school is next door, and you don't have to go outside to get there either. A covered passage joins the towers to the classrooms: the children come down from their homes, cross that corridor and turn up in class without ever having been out in the open.

The floors do the work of streets and the lift does the work of the main road. If you live two floors above your boss, you meet him on the way to the laundry, and there is no pavement to cross to avoid him.

Whittier has other things: separate houses, sheds around the harbour, buildings outside the tower. But of the 272 people on the census, most of them sleep inside the tower.

And the road doesn't let you in whenever you want.

The only land access is the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel. It was cut in 1943 for the railway and wasn't opened to cars until the year 2000. Inside there is a single lane, and cars share that lane with trains.

So the day has to be divided into turns. For half an hour you go in; then you come out; when a train is due, the cars wait for it to pass, because the track is still its own. Nobody can meet anybody head-on in there: before one end opens, the tunnel has to be empty.

At night it closes. Anyone who reaches the mouth after the last turn has no alternative road: they stay on the far side of the mountain until it opens again in the morning. That is why, in Whittier, checking the clock before driving thirty kilometres to do the shopping is part of the trip, like checking the fuel.

The harbour, on the other hand, never freezes, and you can come and go by sea at any hour.

The Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel is 4.05 kilometres long.