Northward Building

Fairbanks’ first steel girder “skyscraper” was built from 1950 to 1952 as part of a two-year building program to alleviate the housing shortage in Fairbanks. It is still one of the tall­est buildings in town. The eight-story struc­ture was Fairbanks’s first apartment building and the setting for Edna Ferber’s novel Ice Pal­ace, about Alaskans striving for statehood in the 1950s. A movie based on the novel was in part filmed in Fairbanks, including exterior shots of the Northward Building.