Agency quizzes Alaska town on color for historic building

KETCHIKAN, Alaska (AP) — It’s easy for tourists to find the city’s historic Federal Building — it’s the only big, pink building in the middle of town.
Now the 1938 landmark needs a paint job, and the federal government has a question for Ketchikan residents: keep it pink, or go with cream?
Paint selection isn’t normally brought to the attention of the public, but officials thought it was important in the case of the five-story Federal Building, one of 2,300 federally owned structures on the National Register of Historic Places.
National Register guidelines call for a historically appropriate color, in this case cream, but there is leeway if the community prefers pink, said Rebecca Nielsen of the General Services Administration.
The preference at a sparsely attended public meeting Tuesday was pink.
Amanda Welsh said painting the building a color that matched Ketchikan’s gray weather would be ”dismally boring.
”I’m here to support the pink,“ she said.
The L-shaped concrete building is significant for its modern European-influenced architecture. It was painted pink — or salmon, as some prefer to call the shade — in the early 1990s. A local committee chose the color.