A Bit More Detail

Whittier, Alaska, is a sleepy town on the west side of Prince William Sound, tucked between picturesque mountains. But if you're picturing a small huddle of houses, think again.

Instead, on the edge of town, there stands a 14-story building called Begich Towers — a former Army barracks, resembling an aging hotel, where most of the town's 200 residents live.

Writer Erin Sheehy and photographer Reed Young visited Whittier for a report, "Town Hall," in The California Sunday Magazine.

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Finding your way to the remote town isn't easy. You can get to Whittier by sea or take a long, one-lane tunnel through the mountains, which at any given time only runs one way.

"It's still a fairly inaccessible town," Young says. "Plus, at night, they close the tunnel completely."

Then there's the weather: The 60 mph winter winds are brutal. That's why residents inside Begich Towers have everything they need under one roof.

"There's a laundromat, a little market," Sheehy says.

"And there's a convenience store," Reed says. "There is a health clinic." It's not a hospital, but they can handle minor ailments.

There's even a church in the basement.

Can a mall have history?

Malls are all about fashion, and fashion changes fast. New clothes, new decor, and new facades erected out front of once-familiar stores like an ever-changing Hollywood back lot. There’s no looking back, unless a retro style is in for a season.

Yet Yorkdale Shopping Centre turned 50 this year and though it doesn’t look its age there’s some history to be found there. Some of it can be felt on the bridge from Yorkdale subway station, opened in 1978, where the terrazzo floors are worn smooth and the steps have deep grooves where millions of feet have landed. Walking here feels as if you’re sharing a moment with everyone who came before, and is the kind of wear more commonly seen in the ancient stone floors of European cathedrals, a testament to how busy this place is.

When Yorkdale opened in February of 1964 it was on the rural outskirts of Toronto and, for a short time, the biggest enclosed mall in the world. Within a decade the city caught up and quickly raced further north. Not much of the original Yorkdale is left, but the recently added third floor food court, built into the rafters of the old Eaton’s building, has an outdoor patio overlooking the patchwork quilt of building roofs that makes up the mall. It might seem an odd place for a patio, with views of Highway 401 traffic on the near horizon, but there’s a “big sky” quality to it, and better yet, an up-close glimpse of the midcentury-modern geometric brickwork of the old Eaton’s exterior. Today’s new malls are often little more than metal sheds, so this kind of detail — that few got to see up close — hearkens back to a time when such things mattered.

Yorkdale’s history can also be found in another unexpected place: the mall’s archive. Decades of unorganized material was stored in a basement room at the mall and, for the 50th anniversary, Yorkdale’s management hired archivist Ellen Scheinberg to sort through and catalogue it, with the intention of donating it all to a public archive.

“I thought I’d find 10 or 20 boxes but there were over 50,” says Scheinberg of the trove of documents, photos, advertisements, video tape, films, posters, and other ephemera she found, much of it in salvageable shape. So much of it reflects Toronto as it grew rapidly into the mixed metropolis it is today. “There were more events than I ever imagined, and they were very eclectic. Lots of international days. There was Japan Week, Israel Week, Danish Week, and so on. Also art displays from the ROM and AGO.” Though not a true public space — there were no protests or political rallies at Yorkdale — the mall became a community hub. Art Starts, an organization that uses the arts to bring about social change, is even housed in the basement.

In theory, arcologies are great. They're the absolute antithesis of sprawl, since by their very nature they must be efficient in order to prosper. While today a city can expand by annexing land from rural neighbors and throwing open the floodgates to suburban development - this is pretty much the way Mississauga went from a cluster of small towns to a city of 700,000 in fifty years - adding on to an existing arcology would be a major construction project, extremely taxing in time, effort, and money, and so rewards would naturally stem from working within its limits to the best possible degree. Arcologies would, by necessity, advance the frontiers of knowledge in sustainable living.

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Should environmental degradation continue into the future, I can see the concept of the arcology becoming more and more attractive as a means to potentially create islands of social stability. In Oath of Fealty, Todos Santos is portrayed as something of a vampiric parasite on Los Angeles, sucking whatever jobs and wealth from the city it can while constantly planning new methods to come out on top. It might be more appropriate to cast a twenty-first century Todos Santos as the castle of the feudal lord and Los Angeles as a village of serfs, with LA dependent upon the rigidly controlled, self-sufficient arcology for its own stability and survival. In other environments, social stratification and separation between arcologies and neighboring cities could result in rich, powerful arcologies with feral cities, metropolitan centers devoid of central authority or security - effectively, extending Mogadishu to its ultimate conclusion - just beyond their walls.