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Kitsault, Canada’s $50M 1980s ghost town
- treespace8 4y agoI can see why it's being taken care of. A town with Tide Water access on Canada's west coast could be very very valuable.
- cj 4y ago(At the risk of sounding uninformed) - why?
- pj_mukh 4y agoCanada likes to ship its oil out that way, esp to Asia. Pipelines from Alberta to BC are a political minefield but buying real-estate and then waiting for the politics to “blow-over” is apparently a thing that happens a lot.
- cgh 4y agoIf you're referring to Northern Gateway, it was planned to terminate in Kitimat, which is not a ghost town. However, tanker traffic off the BC north coast was banned, which effectively killed it. If you're referring to Trans Mountain, that pipeline upgrade/expansion terminates in Burnaby, which is a suburb of Vancouver. For other interesting company-owned ghost towns on the coast, see also Anyox and Ocean Falls. Anyox is relatively close to Kitsault and is worth reading about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox There's also Stewart, which is north of these and which has quite a storied mining history that's still being written (the "Golden Triangle" of BC).
- pj_mukh 4y agoYea so kitsault wants a pipeline too. As evidenced by the website someone posted elsewhere in this thread [1] [1] http://www.kitsaultenergy.com/index.html http://www.kitsaultenergy.com/index.html
- Landsubsidence 4y agoIn the next 100 years the tide water will gain several fee in depth. Shipping ports are the most valued geographical asset there is. Even a minor change in water depth would dramatically increase waterfront realestate area. The key here is the abandoned infrastructure origionaly left for the school an shoping mall. People will flee further north with time as our lives become more decentralized and the climate become more temperate.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scythe 4y agoDue to spherical geometry, Prince Rupert is closer to Asia than any other reasonable North American port (sorry, Skagway) south of Anchorage. Kitsault is just up the inlet, and much easier to reach (crossing the Coast Mountains sunk Prince Rupert). It also happens to be easier (lower) to cross the Rockies (CA-16) when you're north of Prince George, so Kitsault could possibly have better access to Chicago than does, say, Seattle (I'm not certain here). However, the col to access Kitsault from the BC central valley is still about half a mile high, so you would need to build a tunnel to get decent rail freight capacity. It would be a short one, easier than tunneling to Stewart/Hyder. Also, the inlet is only about 1800 feet wide, which could be difficult to navigate considering the high frequency of inclement weather in the area.
- elihu 4y agoThere's rail access to Port Edward (just a couple miles from Prince Rupert) currently, going by what you can see in Google Maps. Looks like it follows a pretty flat route, though it winds around to follow the shorelines / rivers. I wonder how much sea level rise or flooding it would take to inundate that rail line and the Yellowhead highway? They seem like they're barely above water level now. Using Kisault as a port is an interesting idea. Worth mentioning that the tides in that area are huge, which makes for dangerous currents. (Random personal trivia: I once passed within about 20 miles of Kisault while travelling to the Queen Charlotte islands by way of Prince Rupert. The 800 passenger ferry we took, The Queen of the North, some years later got off course on a different route and struck a rock at full speed and sank. Almost everyone got off.)
- moistly 4y ago> Almost everyone got off. Rumour is that the acting Captain was getting his rocks off instead of doing his job of not crashing into rocks at full speed. https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/captain-of-b-c-ferry-that-sank-after-crew-allegedly-had-sex-on-bridge-makes-case-for-what-caused-disaster https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/captain-of-b-c-... In the end there was no hard proof. Two people died, bodies never found. The officer was convicted with a four-year jail term (I’ve no idea how long he actually served.)
- jabbany 4y agoAlso given the state of global warming... Something still coastal but further up north could prove to be quite desirable in the future climate-wise...
- themodelplumber 4y agoThis reminds me of NFB's _Welcome to Pine Point_, a web documentary about a vanished community: https://pinepoint.nfb.ca/ https://pinepoint.nfb.ca/
- designium 4y agoAt least if there's a zombie outbreak, I'd go to Kitsault for refuge.
- _jal 4y agoI missed the "1980s" part at first and expected an article about Google's panopticon-town. What ever happened to that?
- frenchy 4y agoI belive it got cancelled (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-cancels-project-1.5559370 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-cancels...).
- OrangeMonkey 4y agoGoogle, canceling a project? Surely you jest.
- fullshark 4y agoProject was abandoned supposedly due to COVID but possibly that was just a convenient excuse. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/7/21250594/alphabet-sidewalk-labs-toronto-quayside-shutting-down https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/7/21250594/alphabet-sidewalk...
- jeromegv 4y agoIt's mostly local opposition, it wasn't really popular within the city and Google was horrible at trying to communicate what they really wanted to do with that place. At the end of the day, giving so much power to develop a part of the city to a private entity was weird.
- StrictDabbler 4y agoFYI: This Justin McElroy is a respected Canadian journalist. He is not closely related to the Justin McElroy of MBMBAM though they do look very similar.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThank you. I was wondering this!!
- InCityDreams 4y agoWhy the italics on 'closely'?
- scythe 4y agoEveryone's related to everyone else if you go back far enough. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt turned out to be sixth (-ish?) cousins.
- thfuran 4y agoOkay, but if someone asks if you have any relatives in town, you probably don't need to mention that technically everyone is related. You definitely don't need to also mention that the geese are also distant relatives.
- brian-armstrong 4y agoWelcome to Hacker News, enjoy your stay!
- Kibae 4y agoAre you closely related to Brian Armstrong, creator of Coinbase, by any chance?
- Maursault 4y agoNot just everyone... everything that ever lived has a common ancestor.
- upupandup 4y agoBC in the 80s, 90s seemed like completely different worlds compared to today. Vancouver especially seemed to have peaked early 2000s before the housing bubble took off. Rainforest Cafe, Playdium, Indy 500, Vancouver Grizzlies, Canucks. It had so much going for it. What was once a fun, soulful city is now something completely different.
- RC_ITR 4y agoExcuse my ignorance, but do you mean something more than there being a rainforest cafe there? Semi-tangential: you’ll probably enjoy this video: https://youtu.be/vA-bjpKvIw8 https://youtu.be/vA-bjpKvIw8 His mate made a similar video with a more positive tone, but this one struck me as funnier.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoI think Canada as a whole peaked in the early 2000s.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cgh 4y agoThe Achilles heel of Vancouver was the insane liquor licensing, which lead to the moniker of "No Fun City". That's what you get when your city is founded by a bunch of Scottish Calvinists. But otherwise, I have great memories of my early 20s seeing bands at the Niagara Hotel and hanging out three nights a week at the Ivanhoe while paying $500 a month for a decent studio in the West End. Commercial Drive was in full swing as a sort of '90s Haight-Ashbury. Now all those places are gone and the city feels sleek and generic, like a cut-rate Hong Kong.
- jabbany 4y ago> sleek and generic > Hong Kong Idk, but I would not call Hong Kong sleek and generic... If anything it's kind of the opposite.
- 4y ago
- marcodiego 4y agoRant: Please give-me real links to images. I love ctrl-clicking them and then later looking at them on the open tabs. This clicking an image and having a modal overlay prevents me from reading the text.
- gwbas1c 4y agoRight-click to open in a new tab works.
- marcodiego 4y agoNot as simple as ctrl-click.
- curtis3389 4y agoTry middle click
- marcodiego 4y agoGreat! It worked! Thanks! It is a good thing that middle click is a three finger tap on my trackpad.
- dang 4y ago"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mkl95 4y agoI'm no real estate developer, but isn't $50M very cheap?
- jonny_eh 4y agoIn 1980's dollars?
- jjulius 4y agoFrom the article: >Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50 million in 1981... >It is a long way from any major city, and not accessible by road... Edit: From Wikipedia... >In 2004, the ghost town was bought by Indian-Canadian businessman Krishnan Suthanthiran for $5.7 million; he has spent $2 million maintaining the town.[2] In the end, he would have spent over $20 million more to fully update the town. He has also since closed the town to the public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsault
- danans 4y ago> and not accessible by road... That doesn't seem to be true: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Port+Edward,+BC,+Canada/Kitsault,+BC+V0J+3T0,+Canada/@54.6917264,-129.9163499,8.47z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x5472d7a92d082449:0xde633fe039af4b4a!2m2!1d-130.291393!2d54.228354!1m5!1m1!1s0x540b0911144d46c7:0xd002a59ea61c3873!2m2!1d-129.472385!2d55.454649!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Port+Edward,+BC,+Canada/Kits...
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoThe author even mentions driving in "Which means, for a fee, you can drive two hours down a barely passable road. The caretakers will open the locked gates"
- jjulius 4y agoYeah, I missed that detail, but it still helps my point - that it's relative inaccessibility is why it's so cheap. The town itself might not cost much, but accessing it, or making it more easily accessible, is going to come with a price.
- mortenjorck 4y agoAmong the commercial spaces, one of them is about as close as they come to the popular, liminal-space conception of The Backrooms: https://justinmcelroy.com/2022/07/26/visiting-canadas-50-million-1980s-ghost-town/#jp-carousel-4155 https://justinmcelroy.com/2022/07/26/visiting-canadas-50-mil...
- julianlam 4y agoWhen we visited NY a month ago, we—on a whim—stopped by the deserted village at Watchung, same deal, although the buildings are mostly all condemned. To have essentially a town frozen in time, maintained as such, is such a treasure.
- patentatt 4y agoOut of curiosity I looked it up on a map [1]. It appears two of the closest settlements [2],[3] are also ghost towns or otherwise pretty much abandoned. Kind of nice to know there are habitable but uninhabited places left in the world. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Kitsault+%2C+BC&ia=web&iaxm=maps https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Kitsault+%2C+BC&ia=web&iaxm... [2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Arm,_British_Columbia https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Arm,_British_Columbia [3] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 4y agoIf one looks at the area of the Discovery Islands and other places in BC there is a lot of uninhabited area. If you go north on the island highway from Nanaimo BC on Vancouver Island the population density and town size starts getting small pretty quick. BC is huge.
- jjulius 4y agoHell, go take a look at the Northern Territories and almost all of Northern Canada. You can even Street View the entire drive from Dawson City in the Yukon to Tukoyatuk, basically as far north as you can go. It's beautiful and eeeeeeempty. Edit: I suppose I missed the part about a locale being "habitable but uninhabited". The Northern Territories aren't very inhabitable, but I still find the vastness absolutely fascinating at any rate.
- ggcdn 4y agoIf you follow the inlet back to the ocean a short ways, you reach Gingolx (Kincolith) [1] which has < 400 people. It would be a fairly unremarkable place except they randomly started having a big festival called crabfest, which has brought bands such as Trooper, Tom Cochrane, and Nazareth to this tiny village. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ging%CC%B1olx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ging%CC%B1olx
- rr888 4y agoLooking at the map I only just noticed how small the BC coastline is and how Alaska takes most of it. Looks like it goes back to agreement between England and Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Saint_Petersburg_(1825) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Saint_Petersburg_(18... And there were never more than 700 Russians in Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_America#Sale_of_Alaska_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_America#Sale_of_Alaska...
- pcthrowaway 4y agoI believe BC has more coastline than every U.S. state other than Alaska, so don't feel too bad about it.
- ZanyProgrammer 4y agoYes, since US states are much, much smaller than BC, that's not surprising.
- bilsbie 4y agoEven Florida?
- bonestamp2 4y agoProbably, especially if you consider the coastlines of all the large islands.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoBC has roughly twice as much coastline as Florida
- deanCommie 4y agoBC is 5.5x the area of Florida.
- cgh 4y agoThe Alaska Panhandle (the part of Alaska that extends down the west coast of BC) and the coast of BC are actually roughly equal length (BC's coast is slightly longer, I believe). You are probably looking at a Mercator projection which distorts sizes. Try looking at a more accurate map projection.
- bitwize 4y agoOh, man, the liminal-spaces YouTube videos this will generate...
- Jonovono 4y agoI just emailed them asking if they are doing anything with it. They responded and sent me here: http://www.kitsaultenergy.com/index.html http://www.kitsaultenergy.com/index.html
- FirstLvR 4y agoThis is so weird and creepy, I just applied!
- bilsbie 4y agoLet’s start a hacker news town!
- samstave 4y agoUhm, The infra looks super depressing... https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Kitsault,+BC+V0J+3T0,+Canada/@55.454649,-129.472385,3a,104.3y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipP0ca0otTjjnRwXkXohFyCTu_lQ4k-nUuoZ_KoU!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipP0ca0otTjjnRwXkXohFyCTu_lQ4k-nUuoZ_KoU%3Dw129-h86-k-no!7i720!8i480!4m6!3m5!1s0x540b0911144d46c7:0xd002a59ea61c3873!8m2!3d55.454649!4d-129.472385!10e5 https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Kitsault,+BC+V0J+3T0,+Canad...
- qbasic_forever 4y agoYeah read the blog post, that's by design--the town was abandoned in the 80s and has been maintained by a private owner. I think it would be kind of cool to live there as an escape from the hustle and bustle of cities. Like living in a shack in the woods, except the shack has most of the amenities of modern life (circa 1980).
- samstave 4y agoI agree! I would totally move there assuming life support. Health, Food, Power, Heat, Water. What do for work - and if trying to make a Hacker Commune, how structure (I actually lived on a commune and know how badly they are managed)
- HeckFeck 4y agoImagine if it was preserved as a historic model town, much like the Cultra Folk Museum, but for the 1980s instead of the 1940s. Some photos of that museum here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cultra+folk+museum+geograph&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cultra+folk+museum+geograph&t=fpas... It won't be long before the 1980s are as remote as the 40s were, and we wonder what life was like in a slightly more innocent time before the web and 9/11. Also I am surprised that it hasn't featured in any 1980s films or series.
- jabbany 4y agoInteresting. Would love to visit some day, possibly during a trip to northern BC. One thought I had after looking at the pictures is that... it really doesn't look that old/historic. I live in the PNW right now and a lot of the houses and public infrastructure still look just like this! Heck, I live in a '80s house that's still in original condition just like in the pictures...
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI doubt you can visit unless you're a blogger/journalist/business guest.
- taken_username 4y agoThere is also an official website: http://www.kitsault.com/index.html http://www.kitsault.com/index.html
- nsxwolf 4y agoThe house has so many design and decor cues from the house/neighborhood I grew up in in Redmond, WA. I wonder if there's a name for that design movement of orange carpet, wood panelling, wallpaper, linoleum, popcorn ceilings...
- bonestamp2 4y agoThat was the late 70s/early 80s in North America, no?
- jabbany 4y agoYeah, this kind of split-level design was super common in the PNW and 1980s isn't even particularly old when it comes to housing (plenty of houses in the Seattle metro area that are from the '20s...). Like here's a random listing from 30 seconds of searching that has light renovations: https://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/10201-23rd-Ct-SW-98146/home/180428 https://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/10201-23rd-Ct-SW-98146/hom... and if you spend enough time looking for "affordable" options in suburbs, it's not hard to find ones that have not been renovated since they were built in the '70s and '80s.
- olyjohn 4y agoThere's a common thing that I've noticed when going to Canada. As soon as you cross the border, you see tons of houses built in the 70s and 80s that are sided with stucco. They look so out of place in BC. In Washington, our climate is pretty much the same, but nobody here has stucco houses. I'm curious why so many up in Canada, but not here. They look like they would fit in nicely in Southern California.
- cperciva 4y agoNot sure if this applies to houses built in the 70s and 80s, but I've heard that Chinese-Canadians have a strong preference for stucco over other forms of siding because it's perceived as being more durable.
- deleted 4y ago
- guerrilla 4y agoWhat a beautiful place... > everyone was ordered to leave town. Hmm well that seems to be the problem. A shame it wasn't allowed to grown on it's own and then maybe something would have come of it... Weird that it's private property, that is a bit creepy.
- jabbany 4y agoAhh yes the rich history of exploitative company towns :)
- adolph 4y agoNeeds to be a Lost se/prequel filmed there
- dredmorbius 4y agoShoot the finale first this time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- quietthrow 4y agoMore info and history etc here : [PDF] http://www.kitsault.com/flip_book/kitsault_book.pdf http://www.kitsault.com/flip_book/kitsault_book.pdf
- djmips 4y agoNearby (13 miles), is another ghost town but much older and destroyed. It's called Anyox and has a beautiful Eastwood buttress arch dam. I toured the area 15 years ago or so and it was fascinating. Beautiful scenery as well.
- JSoet 4y agoyeah, I recently watched a youtube video about that town, looks pretty interesting. And the guy seems to have a few more videos from other abandoned towns in BC too... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7PVZq-lqCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7PVZq-lqCs
- sammy2244 4y ago
- Melatonic 4y agoSo......can I buy real estate here for my future relatives in about 150 years once it is nice and toasty?
- lostlogin 4y agoThese is something perversely funny about setting up for a future that’s worse, rather than trying to fix the situation. Obviously it’s easy to control what a few people do over what a few billion people do.
- brent_noorda 4y agoA turnkey Alzheimer’s town. The next Hogeweyk. Sign me up (I’m just about ready).
- nyx_land 4y agoIt's neat to see one of my personal holy grails of urban exploring being posted here and then see people talking about gentrifying an entire preserved town from the 80s to build some kind of weird techbro commune. Never change HN.
- notatoad 4y agoI get the disdain for gentrification when it displaces existing communities. I have a harder time seeing the harm in finding a productive use for a city that currently doesn’t have a productive use. It’s cool that this place exists, and is a bit of a time capsule. But it’s not that noteworthy or valuable beyond being a mild curiosity, and certainly not worth preserving if it can be used for actual benefit instead. I always thought part of the appeal of urban exploration and abandoned sites was the knowledge that abandoned places get redeveloped, and the fun is in exploring it before it gets turned into something new and shiny. Artificially preserving a place that could have another use takes it from “urban exploration” to visiting a museum, which is much less cool
- prawn 4y agoAlso, little surprise that people would outline that tack in a community about finding ideas and solutions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BogdanPetre 4y agoI wonder if anybody was born there in the 80s…
- RichardHeart 4y agoSeems ideal for a cult of some sort.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoIf anybody else is wondering how the molybdenum market is doing these days, here's a chart: https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/molybdenum.jpg https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/molybdenum... The price halving that killed the mine/town in the mid-1980s is barely visible at the very beginning. There was a massive price spike to above $10/lb around 2005, but it fell back to around $2 and has been pretty flat ever since. Production is reasonably evenly split between China, the US and Chile, so geopolitical risk is not huge.
- Vilkku 4y agoLooks like that chart doesn't contain information from the 80's. I found this chart where the 1980 price level and crash seems to be pretty significant: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-rhenium-metal-power-price-from-1952-2012-year-2012-Metal-Pages-2012-years_fig15_280079972 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-rhenium-metal...
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThat's rhenium, not molybdenum?
- xmcqdpt2 4y agoAFAIK all metals collapsed in 1980 due to Silver Thursday https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday Different metals are correlated too. There are charts at the end of https://www.hwwi.org/fileadmin/hwwi/Publikationen/Research/Paper/HWWI_Research_Paper_155_2015.pdf https://www.hwwi.org/fileadmin/hwwi/Publikationen/Research/P...
- michaelcampbell 4y ago> The price halving that killed the mine/town in the mid-1980s is barely visible at the very beginning where? It starts at 1996.
- nivertech 4y agoThis could be the excellent site for a re-education camp for the unvaccinated ;)
- mejthemage 4y agoLet's not even joke about that.
- kensai 4y agoHas anyone noticed there is a customer waiting to be served at the Royal Bank?! ><
- michaelcampbell 4y agoA totally tangentially interesting thing about that blog is that ... OMG, someone is still using "pingback"s.