Anchorage is the largest city in Alaska, located in the Southcentral region. Anchorage is a port city with a population of over 300,000. The published population density is very low as the city covers over a whopping 1900 square miles, compared with Chicago's 225 square miles or New York City's 300 square miles. But most of the land in Anchorage's city limits is uninhabited and mountainous. Anchorage is a municipality: essentially a combined city and county. The urbanized portion of the city is a relatively compact area defined by Muldoon Road to the east, Rabbit Creek Road to the south, and Cook Inlet to the north and west. Several small suburbs are within the Municipality of Anchorage, while physically outside what most Anchorageites would call the "Anchorage" proper area. These include Eagle River and Chugiak to the north and Girdwood to the south.

History

Russian presence in south central Alaska was well established in the 19th century. In 1867, U. S. Secretary of State William H. Seward brokered a deal to purchase Alaska from Imperial Russia for $7.2 million (about two cents an acre). His political rivals lampooned the deal as "Seward's folly", "Seward's icebox" and "Walrussia". By 1888, gold was discovered along Turnagain Arm.

Alaska became a United States territory in 1912. Anchorage, unlike every other large town in Alaska south of the Brooks Range, was neither a fishing nor mining camp. The area surrounding Anchorage lacks significant economic metal minerals. A number of Dena'ina settlements existed along Knik Arm for years. By 1911 the families of J. D. "Bud" Whitney and Jim St. Clair lived at the mouth of Ship Creek and were joined there by a young forest ranger. Jack Brown, and his bride, Nellie, in 1912 to have lived in the Ship Creek valley in the 1910s prior to the large influx of settlers.

The city grew from its happenstance choice as the site, in 1914, under the direction of Frederick Mears a railroad-construction port for the Alaska Engineering Commission. The area near the mouth of Ship Creek, where the railroad headquarters was located, quickly became a tent city. A town site was mapped out on higher ground to the south of the tent city, greatly noted in the years since for its order and rigidity compared with other Alaska town sites. In 1915, territorial governor John Franklin Alexander Strong encouraged residents to change the city's name to one that had "more significance and local associations". In the summer of that year, residents held a vote to change the city's name; a plurality of residents favored changing the city's name to "Alaska City". However, the territorial government ultimately declined to change the city's name. Anchorage was incorporated on November 23, 1920.

Construction of the Alaska Railroad continued until its completion in 1923. The city's economy in the 1920s and 1930s centered on the railroad. Col. Otto F. Ohlson, the Swedish-born general manager of the railroad for nearly two decades, became a symbol of residents' contempt due to the firm control he maintained over the railroad's affairs, which by extension became control over economic and other aspects of life in Alaska.

Between the 1930s and the 1950s, the city experienced massive growth as air transportation and the military became increasingly important. Aviation operations in Anchorage commenced along the firebreak south of town (today's Delaney Park Strip), which residents also used as a golf course. An increase in air traffic led to clearing of a site directly east of town site boundaries starting in 1929; this became Merrill Field, which served as Anchorage's primary airport during the 1930s and 1940s, until Anchorage International Airport replaced it in 1951. However, Merrill Field still sees a significant amount of general aviation traffic.

Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson were constructed in the 1940s, and served as the city's primary economic engine until the 1968 Prudhoe Bay discovery shifted the thrust of the economy toward the oil industry. The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process led to the combining of the two bases (along with Kulis Air National Guard Base) to form Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

On March 27, 1964 the magnitude 9.2 Good Friday earthquake hit Anchorage, killing 115 people and causing $311 million ($2.37 billion current value) in damage. The earth-shaking event lasted nearly five minutes; most structures that failed remained intact for the first few minutes, then failed with repeated flexing. It was the world's second-largest earthquake in recorded history. Rebuilding dominated the remainder of the 1960s.

In 1968 ARCO discovered oil in Prudhoe Bay on the Alaska North Slope, and the resulting oil boom spurred further growth in Anchorage. In 1975, the City of Anchorage and the Greater Anchorage Area Borough (which includes Eagle River, Girdwood, Glen Alps, and several other communities) merged into the geographically larger Municipality of Anchorage The city continued to grow in the 1980s, and capital projects and an aggressive beautification campaign took place.

Several attempts have been made to move Alaska's state capital from Juneau to Anchorage - or to a site closer to Anchorage. The motivation is straightforward: the "railbelt" between Anchorage and Fairbanks contains the majority of the state's population. Robert Atwood, owner of the Anchorage Times and a tireless booster for the city, championed the move. Alaskans rejected attempts to move the capital in 1960 and 1962, but in 1974, as Alaska's center of population moved away from Southeast Alaska and to the railbelt, voters approved the move. Communities such as Fairbanks and much of rural Alaska opposed moving the capital to Anchorage for fear of concentrating more power in the state's largest city. As a result, in 1976 voters approved a plan to build a new capital city near Willow, about 70 miles (110 km) north of Anchorage. Opponents to the move reacted by campaigning to defeat, in the 1978 elections, a nearly $1 billion bond issue to fund construction of the new capitol building and related facilities. Subsequent attempts to move the capital or the legislature to Wasilla, north of Anchorage, also failed. Anchorage contains over twice as many state employees as Juneau, and is to a considerable extent the center of state and federal government activity in Alaska.

Geography

Anchorage is located in Southcentral Alaska. At 61 degrees north, it lies slightly farther north than Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki and Saint Petersburg, but not as far north as Reykjavík or Murmansk. It is northeast of the Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak Island, and Cook Inlet, due north of the Kenai Peninsula, northwest of Prince William Sound and the Alaska Panhandle, and nearly due south of Mount McKinley/Denali.

The city is on a strip of coastal lowland and extends up the lower alpine slopes of the Chugach Mountains. Point Campbell, the westernmost point of Anchorage on the mainland, juts out into Cook Inlet near its northern end, at which point it splits into two arms. To the south is Turnagain Arm, a fjord that has some of the world's highest tides. Knik Arm, another tidal inlet, lies to the west and north. The Chugach Mountains on the east form a boundary to development, but not to the city limits, which encompass part of the wild alpine territory of Chugach State Park.

The city's sea coast consists mostly of treacherous mudflats. Newcomers and tourists are warned not to walk in this area because of extreme tidal changes and the very fine glacial silt. Unwary victims have walked onto the solid seeming silt revealed when the tide is out and have become stuck in the mud. The two recorded instances of this occurred in 1961 and 1988.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the municipality has a total area of 1,961.1 square miles (5,079.2 km2); 1,697.2 square miles (4,395.8 km2) of which is land and 263.9 square miles (683.4 km2) of it is water. The total area is 13.46% water.

Boroughs and census areas adjacent to the Municipality of Anchorage are Matanuska-Susitna Borough to the north, Kenai Peninsula Borough to the south and Valdez-Cordova Census Area to the east. The Chugach National Forest, a national protected area, extends into the southern part of the municipality, near Girdwood and Portage.

Wildlife

A diverse wildlife population exists within urban Anchorage and the surrounding area. Approximately 250 black bears and 60 grizzly bears live in the area. Bears are regularly sighted within the city. Moose are also a common sight: in the Anchorage Bowl, there is a summer population of approximately 250 moose, increasing to as many as 1000 during the winter. They are a hazard to drivers, with over 100 moose killed by cars each year. Two people were stomped to death, in 1993 and 1995, in Anchorage. Cross-country skiers and dog mushers using city trails have been charged by moose on numerous occasions; the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has to kill some individual aggressive moose in the city every year. Mountain goats can be commonly sighted along the Seward Highway between Anchorage and Girdwood, and Dall sheep are often viewed quite close to the road at Windy Point. Approximately thirty northern timber wolves reside in the Anchorage area. In 2007 several dogs were killed by timber wolves while on walks with their owners. There are also beaver dams in local creeks and lakes, and it is common to see foxes and kits in parking lots close to wooded areas in the spring. Along the Seward Highway headed toward Kenai, there are common sightings of beluga whales in the Turnagain Arm. Lynxes are occasionally sighted in Anchorage as well. Within the Municipality there are also a number of streams that host salmon runs. Fishing for salmon at Ship Creek next to downtown is popular in the summer.