Cruise Town

No discussion of cruise ships would be complete without talking about maritime disasters.

Yes, it’s morbid, but it’s hard not to think about what could go wrong when 5,000 people are trapped on a boat at sea — everything from ship-wide intestinal distress to people falling overboard. There was even a murder on a cruise ship in 2017 in the waters near Juneau.

The good news is, there are tons of safety measures in place.

In this episode, we talk to the people who have thought about how to prepare for the worst things that could happen — like if international superstar musician Yanni was stranded on a sinking ship, for example. (Yeah, that happened.)

The place we know as Juneau has been the home of the Aak’w Kwáan since time immemorial.

Tourists who are curious about this place — and the people who were here well before Cruise Town — often head to the visitor center at the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

When the visitor center opened about four years ago, they were getting so many tourists walking in off the street, that they decided to hire cultural interpreters to help out. And these interpreters are so much more than tour guides. Their task is to explain their history, their culture, their art — their existence — to someone who just got off a cruise ship.

And that’s what this episode of Cruise Town is about.

The first thing cruise ship passengers see when they disembark in Juneau is a row of little covered booths. They’re made of wood and trimmed with corrugated metal and inside you’ll often find an attractive young person enticing you to book a tour.

Their official title is “dock sales representatives,” but we call them “hawkers” because they frequently yell out as they fight for attention and business from tourists as they get off their ships and plan their day of sightseeing in Juneau.

Sam is here from Utah for the season. It’s her second summer in Juneau. She’s selling glacier tours, whale watching trips, float plane rides and scenic helicopter tours.

In the off season, she works in tourism in Baja California, Mexico. She basically follows the whales.

“I see the exact same ones down there as up here,” she says. “We leave at the same time.”

Sam is one of the thousands of seasonal workers who come to Juneau to work in tourism. A lot of them are college students or college-aged, at least. They can make Juneau feel a lot like a summer camp.

The booth next door is occupied by Natalie from Dallas. She says there’s plenty of competition between sales reps in the booths, but they hang out after hours.

“We all go for drinks together very often,” she says. “We get to go on all the tours. We can go whale watching like, everyday if we wanted to.”

Juneauites are a lot like whales. Some are year-round residents — enduring or even thriving during the cold and wet offseason. But some migrate in for the summer — making a splash when they arrive and then leaving again, chasing prey or love or something else equally magnetic.

On this episode of Cruise Town, we meet some of the people who live here.

Tahku is a life-size statue of a humpback whale breaching from a reflecting pool, complete with water works. It’s a fairly new addition to Juneau’s waterfront, but it’s already iconic.

The statue is about a mile walk from the closest cruise ship dock — which is about a mile too far for some people. Because Tahku is basically a giant whale-shaped embodiment of Juneau’s relationship to the cruise industry.

The whale statue itself was privately funded, but the park where it lives and the restrooms, the cute cafe style tables and chairs and even the colored lights and the pump that runs the fountain were almost entirely funded by a controversial tax.

Juneau was one of the first places in the world to charge a per-person tax on cruise ship passengers. Then, the cruise industry actually sued the city over it, pointing its finger right at Tahku, singling it out as a prime example of the city’s irresponsible use of the cruise ship passenger tax.

So, in Juneau now, a whale statue is not just a whale statue: it’s a very large symbol for how Cruise Town benefits from hosting cruise ship tourists.

Juneau is dwarfed by the cruise industry. In 2019, cruise ship passengers outnumbered locals 35 to 1.

The cruise ship docks and the few blocks of downtown right next to them come to life during the summer — we call it “the season” meaning the cruise season. But it’s more predictable than summer around here. And a lot longer — from late April until early October.

Most of this part of downtown looks like a tourist town with T-shirt shops, jewelry stores, a fudge shop and an old-timey bar called the Red Dog Saloon with squeaky swinging doors.

A lot of people call it the Disney part of town. Because it feels, frankly, fake.

But right in the middle of all of the gold rush facade is something that looks out of place: a concrete parking structure several stories tall.

And that’s where our story begins. Because it’s where a legal battle took place over old and new ideas about what the city should look like — for cruise ship passengers and the people who live in Juneau.

In the 1980s, a woman who dressed up like a turn-of-the-century dance hall girl sued the City and Borough of Juneau to prevent this parking garage from being built. She was fighting for authenticity and fairness at a time when the definitions of those terms seemed totally up for grabs.

On this episode of Cruise Town, we go back — not to the 1880s when Juneau was founded and steamships started coming north, but to the 1980s — when Juneau made a conscious decision to change its destiny.

KTOO reporter Elizabeth Jenkins will be our guide as we meet two people who were there when an old mining town embraced its history and transformed itself into Cruise Town.

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For the people who live in Juneau, there’s a lot to love. It’s a small cosmopolitan capital city with a backdrop of almost-cliche scenery. We see whales and orca from our front porches and mountain goats and glaciers out the back. There are salmon swimming through town — bringing the bears with them.

But sometime in the 1980s, Juneau decided to become a Cruise Town — a destination that would open its port and its heart to what was then a hundred thousand people a year and is now… well over a million.

This year, cruise ship passengers outnumbered local residents 35 to 1.

Juneau was the first place in the world to let cruise ships turn off their diesel engines in port and plug into our municipal power supply — and use renewable hydropower. It was also one of the first places in the world to charge a per person tax on cruise ship visitors.

Juneau’s trying to get out ahead of this wave of tourists, but the fact of the matter is the community is dwarfed by the cruise industry. We can have up to six giant ships a day — each with thousands of passengers and crew. They’re taller than almost every single building in town and bring crowds of people that almost double the city’s population for the day.

The KTOO news team is excited to bring you Cruise Town, a podcast about how Juneau became a Cruise Town, what it’s like to live here and what the city’s future holds in light of the industry’s explosive growth.