A Found Green Postcard

Green square patched next to green square, the image on this postcard captures a verdant aerial view of downtown Anchorage in 1960. The regular lines carved in the landscape evidence emerging urbanity creeping across Dena’ina Ełnena, the Dena’ina peoples’ homeland.

The postcard is from the Anchorage Museum’s collection, and little background information on the item exists. However, clues on the item itself help tell a partial story. Mac’s Foto, noted as the source of the image on the postcard’s back, was owned by Stephen McCutdheon, born in Cordova, Alaska in 1911. McCutcheon was a self-taught photographer who held a variety of elected positions in Alaska. Indeed, he was one of the 55 elected delegates of the Alaska Constitutional Convention. Obtaining a private pilot’s license enabled his hobbyist photography to take on new expanses, and by 1949, he had opened Mac’s Foto Service in Anchorage, a commercial photography and cinematography business. McCutcheon persistently documented Alaska’s industry, landscape, flora, and fauna, generating an extensive photographic library. Nearly 200,000 of his negatives, slides, and prints are now in the Anchorage Museum archives.

When I look at this found postcard from the past, I wonder about the pervasive green color (which is not a fluke of the highly color-accurate Kodachrome photographic process used to create the image). Without visible people, this image is populated with plant life. Who are those plants? Are we looking at “settler species” from outside of Alaska spurred by urbanization to green downtown? Which of these plants have roots and histories older than the buildings that tower above them? Since this image was taken, Anchorage’s human population has grown nearly five times. How does plant population growth compare? Who are our green plant neighbors today? And, if a plant could write a postcard, what would it say, “Wish you were here?”