There’s a curious landmark pushing skyward from a muddy lot on Fireweed Lane near Gold Cache Bingo and the Grab-A-Dab.
It’s a whitish, pointy, corrugated metal structure that started slowing traffic last year. At the light near A Street, idling drivers gawked as a towering steel cone morphed into what now looks like a stack of giant hatboxes piled 10 stories high.
The mysterious building isn’t yet finished, but describing it has become a neighborhood pastime. It’s a teepee. An upside-down ice cream cone. A pagoda, done in Danish Modern. It’s even piqued the imagination of the construction workers.
“Does this look like a giant wedding cake to you?” one asked on a recent, icy morning.
The building is, in fact, a church for La Luz del Mundo, an evangelical nondenomination Christian group based in Mexico. It’s built in a shape meant to funnel God’s light — in the form of rainbow-colored electric beams — upon the faithful.
When it’s completed, the spire will preside over the dusty mishmash of Midtown, an architectural standout among the bland angles of ’70s strip malls and office buildings, gas pumps and garages. The twisted icon on the roof is already visible from the parking lot of Wal-mart to streets of downtown, beckoning all to a Hispanic spiritual oasis in Anchorage’s Little Korea.
One sentence shows why I love my country: “The twisted icon on the roof is already visible from the parking lot of Wal-mart to streets of downtown, beckoning all to a Hispanic spiritual oasis in Anchorage’s Little Korea.”
That’s simply wonderful.