Holy Shit, It's Finished
How do I explain this mystifying development to our non-Alaskan correspondents?The McKinley building remodel is finished. It's OPEN for OCCUPANCY.
This subarctic..ahem..modernist structure, seen left with scaffolding, and once the tallest building in Alaska, sat like an enormous pink lump for our entire working lives, losing it's last occupants in 1986, blotting out the mountains and depressing residents for decade upon decade.
Yes, it was pink, with big red stripes, like a demented Brice Marden painting. There were a large number of pink buildings in Anchorage in the 1960s, supposedly because the Army was getting rid of cheap paint after the earthquake, and pale pink and puke green were everywhere. It was peeling pink for 30 years, a cement folly with a skin disease.
Too expensive to fix, too expensive to blow up, too depressing to ignore, it was like a huge benign tumor on the city's face, or perhaps a goiter, not exactly life-threatening but definitely scotching Anchorage's film career.
Well, I'm glad it's fixed. About fucking time. I notice it's trimmed now in puke green.
posted by JAB at 12:08 AM
5 Comments:
My mother worked out of that building for a year or two in the late 70's. The best way I can describe it is to imagine a military office quonset hut, suddenly thrust upwards to become a giant, pink high-rise.
My memory may be playing tricks on me...didn't it have a giant, yet cosmetic crack down the front of it from the earthquake?
I remember that crack, too.
If they had any balls, they would have kept the crack, as a post-modern decorative treatment, a throughput commenting on it's awkward 50 year history.
It is, afterall, luxury apartments.
But credit is due - this is a large apartment block that will help revitalize that dreary part of downtown, and removes a psychic wound to the city.
Looks like it's mixed-income, at least:
The formal ribbon-cutting is today, but 59 of the 100 studio and one-bedroom apartments had already been rented by Wednesday. The new name is McKinley Tower. The top 10 floors are apartments. In a couple of months, the first four floors will open as an assisted-living center.
Young people attracted by affordable rents snapped up many of the studios. The lowest-priced is $550, including utilities and cable. The initial tenants include students, members of the military, a medical doctor, architects and other professionals, say the building managers.
The rents rise with the floor level, to $1,400 for the most spacious one-bedroom, with 770 square feet on the 14th. That's the penthouse floor, where the infamous Neil Mackay, a lawyer accused and acquitted of murdering his wife's brother, once reigned.
That is magnificent. Sterile, impassive, green...it is perfect!
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