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SPEAKER_07: There are all sorts of reasons for our inertia. We don't know how to fix it. It's not ours to fix. We could get in trouble.
SPEAKER_08: That's producer David Weinberg.
SPEAKER_07: You might notice these little design flaws for years silently fuming until one day.
SPEAKER_04: He called me and said, you know, okay, we're doing it.
SPEAKER_07: It was early Sunday morning, August 5th, 2001 in Los Angeles, California. Richard Ankrum and a group of friends were on the 4th street bridge over the 110 freeway. They were about to commit a crime. It's going to be a high profile dangerous situation.
SPEAKER_05: Not only could I get arrested, I could kill somebody. Really, I was terrified of that.
SPEAKER_07: But let's back up. About 20 years prior, Richard Ankrum, an artist living in Orange County, was driving north on the 110 freeway. As he passed through downtown Los Angeles, he was going to merge onto another freeway, the I-5 North. But he missed the exit and got lost. And for some reason, it just stuck with him.
SPEAKER_08: Years later, when Richard moved to downtown Los Angeles, he was driving on the same stretch of freeway where he'd gotten lost a decade before, when he looked up at the big green rectangular sign suspended above.
SPEAKER_05: I realized why I missed the exit is because it wasn't adequately signed.
SPEAKER_08: Bad wayfinding.
SPEAKER_07: The exit for the I-5 wasn't indicated on the green overhead sign. There was even a big open space where there should have been a blue and red interstate shield. And above that, it should have said north. It was clear to Richard that Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, had made a mistake.
SPEAKER_08: So Richard, an artist and sign painter, decided to make the Interstate 5 North shield himself and install it in the place he thought it should have been all along, high above the 110 freeway. He would call it an act of guerrilla public service. The whole idea was to be sort of a public servant or actually to show what you can do
SPEAKER_05: with artwork. You can put it in plain sight and have a functioning, working thing for everyone to use.
SPEAKER_07: Richard started by studying LA freeway signs, holding up Pantone swatches to perfectly match the paint color. He dangled over bridges to measure the exact dimensions of other signs. And most importantly, he downloaded the Necronomicon of California road signage, the Mutt Kid.
SPEAKER_08: The M-U-T-C-D, the manual on uniform traffic control devices, quote, to provide for uniform standards and specifications for all official traffic control devices in California. It's not a beach read.
SPEAKER_08: I have it. It's more of a lazy Sunday afternoon read.
SPEAKER_05: All the specs are online so people can bid on projects.
SPEAKER_07: Richard wanted his sign to be built to the exact specifications of Caltrans, which were designed to be read by motorists traveling at high speeds. The shield with a five on it is three feet, roughly high and wide.
SPEAKER_05: It's less than an eighth of an inch, barely an eighth of an inch thick aluminum. It's still pretty strong. And above that, I put the word north. And that was about 14 inches by five feet. And again, I used the same typeface that was there and the same signs. I tried to match everything as close as I could so it wouldn't be obvious Caltrans didn't do it.
SPEAKER_07: Richard's brand new additions had to blend in perfectly with the existing signage, which had been collecting dirt and smog for decades. I sprayed the whole thing with a really thin glaze of gray.
SPEAKER_05: It knocked down the shine.
SPEAKER_07: After he finished it, Richard signed his name on the back of it with a black marker, like a painter signing a canvas. Then came the next phase of the project, the installation, which he planned with the precision of a bank heist.
SPEAKER_08: He bought a disguise, a white hard hat and an orange vest, so he'd look like a Caltrans worker.
SPEAKER_05: Basically looked the part as best I could. And he made a decal for his pickup truck, meant to look vaguely official, that said
SPEAKER_08: aesthetic deconstruction.
SPEAKER_07: The night before the installation, Richard drove out to the site and hid some of his supplies so they'd be easy to get to the next morning. When I interviewed him, he took me to the spot and showed me where he'd stashed his stuff.
SPEAKER_06: Okay, we're basically here. Right now the ivy isn't that thick, but it was a lot thicker and I had, basically behind that tree, it stashed the ladder and the signs and stuff.
SPEAKER_07: After he hid his things, he climbed a tree and just sat there, going through everything in his head.
SPEAKER_05: I just sort of calmed myself down by being there and hanging around with it the night before.
SPEAKER_07: Richard was worried that he might drop the sign, or one of his tools, onto the road below. Drivers going 60 plus miles an hour would have no time to react if something landed on the road in front of them, or worse, onto their car.
SPEAKER_05: That was the scariest thing of the whole project, is if somebody got hurt, you know, I'd have to live with that, and then the project I'd have to sh** scan it, because it would have defeated the whole idea of it.
SPEAKER_07: But despite some reservations, Richard was pretty confident he could pull the whole thing off, and he'd gone too far to turn back.
SPEAKER_08: And that brings us back to the morning of August 5th, 2001. Richard did not act alone. He asked several friends to film the installation from different vantage points. Amy Inoa was one of the friends he enlisted to film.
SPEAKER_04: We did it at 6am or 7am on a Sunday morning. It was tense because we all thought we were going to get into trouble.
SPEAKER_08: Richard had chosen a Sunday morning to put up the sign, knowing that there would be little traffic and the morning light rising above the skyscrapers would be just right for filming. What he hadn't anticipated was that Caltrans had also picked that morning to do work on the same stretch of highway.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, they happened to be doing some other work on the freeway just south of that sign.
SPEAKER_07: When they saw the Caltrans workers, they thought about turning back.
SPEAKER_05: But I had surmised, after all this is a pretty large city, there'd be more than one sign crew. My assumption was they'd think the other guy was doing it.
SPEAKER_07: Richard parked his truck, and when everyone was in position with their cameras, he went to work.
SPEAKER_05: The hardest part really was getting over the razor wire with the ladder.
SPEAKER_07: Once he was up on the catwalk, nearly 30 feet above the highway, he started screwing in the new sign, careful not to drop any screws on the cars below.
SPEAKER_04: Halfway into it, we just felt like, okay, he's going to get away with it.
SPEAKER_08: Look at that. Is that amazing or what? Oh look, he's folding up his stuff. He's got it up.
SPEAKER_07: The whole thing took less than 30 minutes. As soon as it was up, Richard packed up his ladder, rushed back to his truck, and blended back into the city.
SPEAKER_06: Oh my God.
SPEAKER_04: Awesome. I think we all went out to breakfast together afterwards, and we were super relieved and really happy.
SPEAKER_08: Only a small group of people knew that the Interstate 5 Shield, with the word North hanging above the 110 freeway, was a forgery.
SPEAKER_04: He didn't say to us, don't tell anyone. So our friends all knew about it, and we would drive by it, and we would just all feel really happy about it. But it never managed to leak out past that small group.
SPEAKER_07: For a while.
SPEAKER_04: For a while.
SPEAKER_07: For nine months, the secret stayed within a small community. And then Richard's friend Gary leaked the story.
SPEAKER_08: What the hell, Gary? Why can't you be cool? Just be cool, Gary.
SPEAKER_07: Richard's secret was out to Caltrans and to the press.
SPEAKER_00: From the fake magnetic sign on his beat up blue truck to a work order proclaiming rush. What he did is against the law. But Caltrans says it has no plans at all to file charges against him.
SPEAKER_05: After they found out what had happened, apparently they sent a crew out there to inspect it.
SPEAKER_08: Richard was hoping to get his sign back from Caltrans after they took it down. He was thinking he would hang it in an art gallery. But Caltrans didn't take the sign down.
SPEAKER_05: It passed the Caltrans inspection, because that's really the final test of how good the artwork is. It stayed up for eight years, nine months and 14 days, I believe. It's not exactly accurate, but it's pretty close to that.
SPEAKER_07: In interviews about the incident with other news organizations, Caltrans didn't exactly condone Richard's handiwork. But they were pretty kind about it.
SPEAKER_08: Here's the Caltrans spokesperson at the time.
SPEAKER_00: He did a good job, but we don't want him to do it again. And in fact, he did such a good job that I'd like to offer him a job application.
SPEAKER_08: More than eight years after Richard's sign went up, he got a call from a friend who noticed some workers taking it down. Richard contacted Caltrans to ask if he could have his sign back.
SPEAKER_05: By the time I tracked him down, it had already been crushed into a bale going for China. Who knows what it turned into. It could be a waffle iron by now.
SPEAKER_07: After Caltrans took down Richard's sign, they replaced it with a brand new one. But this time, they incorporated his ideas into the new design. They added the 5 North and the Shield not only to that sign, but to two additional ones up the road.
SPEAKER_08: A little epilogue. Richard's highway sign is a happily ever after story. The sign worked. People appreciated it. No one got hurt, thankfully. Even Caltrans was really pretty nice about the whole thing. There's another gorilla sign story out of New York City, a group that calls itself the Efficient Passenger Project has been hanging signs in New York subway stations to tell people where they can board the train to make the most efficient transfers.
SPEAKER_07: The project is not at all affiliated with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, but the signs look just like MTA signs, black with white Helvetica lettering. They say things like, board here for best transfer to the 4, 5, and 6 trains, or board here for best transfer to F and M trains.
SPEAKER_08: It's the kind of knowledge that you build up over time as a regular subway rider, and this gorilla sign maker is offering it to everyone.
SPEAKER_07: And though some have applauded the signs, not all New Yorkers are pleased.
SPEAKER_08: These are secrets, some say, that people should have to earn. They will unbalance the cars, they say, leave signage to the experts.
SPEAKER_07: The MTA, for their part, is taking down the signs as fast as they go up. MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz told us in an email that, quote, posting of the signs is considered an act of vandalism.
SPEAKER_08: Point being, if you decide to undertake an act of gorilla public service, just know it may not be received as such. There have been a bunch of fascinating extra legal public service interventions since we aired this story a few years ago. A roundup of those after this.
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SPEAKER_08: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around. I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. The Efficient Passenger Project isn't the only group that's gotten ambitious with modifying New York City subway signage. 99 P.I.'s Kirk Colstad is here to talk about a similar intervention and some other creative works of guerrilla urbanism.
SPEAKER_03: That group actually led me to the story of a Rhode Island School of Design student named Ryan Murphy, who also took up the challenge of subway signage. And his project was pretty simple, but also pretty clever. He installed a bunch of signs about exits at eye level, about five feet up, on stair risers. The idea was that train passengers looking at the staircase from below could then figure out if those steps would take them where they wanted to go.
SPEAKER_08: Stair risers are basically the flat front of a stair that you see from the front.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So if you were walking up the staircase, it would be right in front of you and you just sort of look at it and be like, oh, yeah, that's the exit I want. And you'd be able to, you know, more easily find your way through the system.
SPEAKER_08: And it's a lot of real estate that signs haven't occupied all that much, actually. Yeah. That's interesting.
SPEAKER_03: And of course, like the other sign project, though, these got taken back down and clearly the MTA is not particularly open to guerrilla innovations. No, they're not.
SPEAKER_08: And you've covered a bunch of these on the website over the years. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I'm super intrigued by these kinds of guerrilla public service projects and those unpaid activists who do them. I mean, they're creative people who see everyday problems as civic design opportunities. And mostly, of course, their work gets removed. But in some cases, these projects actually lead to something more permanent.
SPEAKER_08: Kind of like the highway sign that David talked about in our piece.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. And up here in Northern California, there's another group called the San Francisco Transformation Agency, which is, of course, a spoof on the city's transportation agency. And their crew has illegally built a number of guerrilla bike lanes around the city. And often, they just kind of mark these out with ordinary orange traffic cones, which the city could just pick up and haul off.
SPEAKER_08: Since they get taken away, what they mainly do is highlight design problems with the current roads, right?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. In a lot of cases, yes. But in late 2016, they decided to create a protected bike lane on a stretch of road along Golden Gate Park. And they used what are called soft hit or safe hit posts, which are a few feet high and they have these little reflective stripes. You've seen them before on the side of a road. And these provide a visible and physical presence, but they're also easy to knock over, so they don't really pose a danger to cars. But instead of just taking the post down, the city did something pretty remarkable. They agreed to run with the idea and install a protected lane on that same spot for legal reasons they couldn't just leave up the post that had been put there in the first place. But same idea. I mean, that seems like a pretty big win for a really small group of people that are activists
SPEAKER_08: for bike safety. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: It was totally a three-point shot for these guys at the transformation agency. It met their three goals of one, drawing attention to unsafe conditions, two, increasing safety for cyclists and pedestrians, and three, getting the city on board with more rapid and effective safety improvements.
SPEAKER_08: And so this is, I mean, we've talked about ones that happened in California. You know, we're a particularly rowdy bunch of leftists and such. I mean, does it happen in other places?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it does. It's not totally unique to California. And crews in New York have been known to install gorilla bike lanes. And in Seattle, there's this group called the Reasonably Polite Seattleites that actually made a lane that got taken down initially. And the DOT was really nice about it. They politely offered to return the posts to the installers. And then finally, they actually agreed to just put that gorilla lane back up.
SPEAKER_08: So there's activity in LA. There's activity in San Francisco, activity in Seattle. Is this a West Coast liberal thing?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it kind of seems like it. And there's a lot of them in our own backyard. There's one in particular, too, that I talked to earlier this year called the San Francisco Public Bench Project. And their thing isn't so much about road safety as it is about just making the city a nicer place to live by installing free benches. So I contacted their founder for a 99PI feature. And he said, basically, like he's been on boards and committees. He's worked on promoting public space. But he really finds just building benches to be more rewarding. And over the past 40 years, he's actually installed over 70 benches around the city. And he keeps improving his design as he goes, too.
SPEAKER_08: So how does that work? Does he just never gets permission to do them or just does them rogue no matter what?
SPEAKER_03: Well, sometimes he gets permits or he gets sort of bulk permits which make them cheaper. But other times, he just works with these loopholes in the city codes which allow for sidewalk furniture if you kind of meet the right criteria and you don't obstruct sidewalks. So he sort of found the gaps to put them in. And in most cases, somebody requests a bench for a specific spot. And then they agree to keep an eye on it. And then if the community feedback is positive, the bench becomes this permanent fixture of the neighborhood. Right. And he also offers templates and instructions to anybody who wants to kind of DIY this and kind of take up the mantle, too.
SPEAKER_08: So it's easier to beg for forgiveness and to ask for permission. I think that's the basic idea.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: So we got interventions and built spaces like roads and sidewalks. But there's also a class of grill activity related to green spaces, too.
SPEAKER_03: Indeed there is. The phrase gorilla gardening covers a lot of ground. But essentially it refers to any act of planting where people aren't supposed to plant. So a community garden without a permit would be a sort of simple example. And these can be about beautification, activism, food production, or a combination of goals. So it's literally grassroots reaction to top-down urban planning.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: In a lot of cases, it can be pretty small scale and incremental, like filling in vacant lots with nicer greenery. You can find actually recipes and design instructions online describing how to build what are called seed bombs. And these are sort of typically balls of clay, compost, and maybe a combination of local or regional wildflower seeds. And people can toss these bombs over fences and into medians, places that are hard to access and you wouldn't really be able to get to to dig a hole and plant something.
SPEAKER_08: And not all the interventions are just about beauty, really. They're trying to create something functional in the environment. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's this group in San Francisco of gorilla grafters. And their idea is, I mean, San Francisco is a pretty green city. We have a lot of greenery, but it's mostly sterile by design because they don't want fruit creating messes and attracting animals. And these guys are grafting fruit-bearing branches onto trees in the city to try to provide local food sources, which is pretty neat.
SPEAKER_08: Wow. And they don't care about the food messes and stuff?
SPEAKER_03: Well, I think their idea is that the good outweighs the bad.
SPEAKER_08: Right. Yeah. And some of these signs have been about creating a better urban environment for the public good, but not every single one of these sign changers are doing it solely for other people's benefit.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah. No, no. There's definitely examples on the other end of this spectrum. And there's a guy in particular who just hit the news from China who got caught painting an arrow in the middle of the street. And it was in broad daylight. I mean, there's cars around. He's captured on video. And there's a turn arrow there already. But he pointed this forward arrow because he wanted to make his commute faster, basically. And he had some argument that, oh, we could use more forward arrows at this intersection. But it was a pretty clearly selfish act.
SPEAKER_08: So he took a turning lane and turned it into an optional go-forward and turning lane. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: And then he got fined for it. 99% Invisible was produced this week by David Weinberg. Today's show, Below the Ten, is an ongoing series from KCRW that tells intimate stories about the people who live in neighborhoods south of the Ten Freeway in Los Angeles. Check it out. 99% Invisible is Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sree Fuso, Delaney Hall, Taran Mazza, composer Sean Rial, senior producer Katie Mingle, digital director Kurt Kohlstedt, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by The Knight Foundation and sticker-loving listeners just like you. You can find this show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit too. But the real 99piHQ is at 99pi.org.
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