ANCHORAGE -- This city often walks with a swagger as the metropolis of America's far north, the high-rises of its oil-based economy glittering against a backdrop of mountain peaks and the ocean inlet named for Capt. James Cook, the English explorer. While Anchorage still occasionally glances south for approval, or for signs of a slight, it has recently carved a place of its own, residents say, with exciting art, dining and theater scenes, and job opportunities that go beyond energy.
The great question now is whether maturity and diversity will provide shelter from the economic storm barreling fast in the city's way.
Six months of falling oil prices have come with some bitter and frightening memories of Anchorage in the mid-1980s, when the wild economic party ushered in by the Trans Alaska Pipeline shut down. The 800-mile pipe, from the northern oil wells of Prudhoe Bay to the shipping port of Valdez, had been completed in 1977 and was in its first gusher phase then until a price collapse not unlike the current one brought it all to a whooshing end.
The scars lasted years, in vacant homes and shops, in closed banks, and in the demographic crater left by the many departing Alaskans - dreamers and seekers, drawn north like the Klondike gold miners of the 1890s - who felt that the Last Frontier had failed them.
Now, even some people too young or too recently arrived to remember those dark days say they are worried. About 41 percent of Alaska's population of 735,000 lives in the Anchorage area.
"Gas prices going down are, to me, a red flag," said Erica Wynn, who works for the city's Office of Equal Opportunity and was sipping coffee in a downtown cafe on a recent morning, as the temperature hovered just below zero. Wynn, 24, said that watching the sinking numbers on the gas pump has been fun, but it also fills her with deep unease.
"It seems like a good thing, but I don't think it is," she said.
The similarities between the mid-1980s and the present start and end with oil prices and taxes. More than half of state tax revenues for this year have disappeared from the state budget in recent months, as they are linked to taxes on oil companies, which are now earning less. This has led Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, to propose cuts of 5 to 8 percent across most state agencies, and the elimination of more than 300 state jobs, with a worst-case possibility of 25 percent reductions in some agencies over the next three to five years.
The University of Alaska, a major economic force in Anchorage with about 20,000 students, faced budget cuts last year from the state even before the oil price crash, and it is braced for more. The big oil companies, while avoiding sizable layoffs so far, are squeezing suppliers. A project to repair and renovate the Port of Anchorage and a second one to construct a bridge connecting downtown to a suburb across the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet, which are both ardently hoped-for stabilizers to the economy, are now on hold since most state capital spending projects are frozen in place.
But optimists have fuel too.
Economic sectors that benefit from low energy prices, especially tourism and commercial fishing, are far bigger now than they were in the 1980s. The city also has a heft and reach it didn't have then: It is connected to the economies of the world in ways it never was before, with one of the nation's busiest air-freight hubs linking exporters and importers for balletic trades on the northern fly route between Asia and the markets of North America. And the state government has savings, built up in the last few years, that could help avoid the drastic cuts that badly hurt the economy last time.
"It's too early to panic," said Bill Popp, the president and chief executive of the Anchorage Economic Development Corp. But, he added, "It's also a time to be choosing our steps very carefully."
Popp said he believes a more mature Anchorage - a city founded only 100 years ago - will take some hits, but avoid catastrophe. Yet he noted that decisions made in a climate of fear, such as reduced spending by households or businesses, could hurt the city and become self-fulfilling.
Some small businesses have been paring back expenses and payroll, but not by choice. Beacon Occupational Health and Safety Service, for example, a business in Anchorage started by Mark and Holly Hylen in 1999 that has grown to about 300 employees, contracts with several oil companies that are spending less and pushing that down the chain, said Hylen, the firm's vice president. Beacon had to cut 24 employees' pay last year in a contract change for oil field safety services, and about 12 of those people quit.
"Everybody is looking at ways to be more efficient," said Hylan. "The pressure intensifies."
The recent decision by the Obama administration to seek federal wilderness protection for millions of acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the state's northeast corner, which would take those lands off the table for oil or gas drilling, also sends a bad signal in a scary time, oil industry officials said. In the expensive projects in the state's far north, political fears might provide excuses to pull back, said Kara Moriarty, the president and chief executive of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.
"In this price environment, those projects are on the margin to begin with," she said, referring to drilling sites above the Arctic Circle. "Now to put further restrictions, it sends a signal that Alaska is not open for business."
Part of the economic calculus is that Anchorage is also the state's marketplace for goods bought by other Alaskans, who by and large pass through on their way to smaller cities or rural villages. And the rest of the state lacks the diversified economy of Anchorage, making those places more vulnerable to the impact of cuts in state spending or revenue sharing.
"What's good for rural Alaska is good for Anchorage," said Anchorage's mayor, Dan Sullivan. "It's a symbiotic relationship."