SPEAKER_02: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and T-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This is part two, the 2018-2019 mini stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little design stories and stories about the built world that don't quite fill out an entire episode for whatever reason. But they are quintessential 99 P I stories nonetheless. We have stolen artifacts, mythical alleys, detached U.S. territories, machines that bring joy to people's lives, and a 50 foot screaming monster that we will burn to the ground. If you are ever in need of a conversation starter, the mini stories are our gift to you. Stay with us. Up first, producer Joe Rosenberg. Okay, so Roman, imagine you're watching a TV show set in New York and let's say it's one of those buddy cop comedies where they pair the rookie with the grizzled veteran and it opens on a foot chase.
SPEAKER_07: They're closing in on their suspect, streets of Manhattan are whizzing by. Let me ask you, like nine times out of ten, if the suspect ducks around a corner to get away from them, he usually ducks into a what? An alley? Is that what you're looking for? Yes, okay, yeah, I'm kind of leading you on. You are correct. Okay, now imagine another episode, same television show, the rookie cop is woken in the middle of the night because there's a fresh body. There's been a murder, they need him at the crime scene. Now picture the crime scene, the police tape, the shock outline. Where is this crime scene?
SPEAKER_02: That is definitely in an alley. Correct. Yes, again, and now imagine Humor View for what, just to complete the rule of three. In another episode, the grizzled cop breaks up a drug deal, it's going to be in an alley.
SPEAKER_07: Right, and that's just for like a television crime procedural. I mean, imagine like say all the roles an alley might play in a movie set in a New York restaurant.
SPEAKER_02: Sure, like if you're a restaurant worker or a dishwasher, you're taking out the trash in the back alley, you're like having a secret rendezvous in the back alley, totally. An alley is where things happen. Right, exactly. It's all alley everything. But the point is that regardless of what's happening in the film or the television show, all of these alley scenes help sell audiences on the same idea of New York. That New York is a city of 10,000 alleys, each with its own secret history.
SPEAKER_07: There's just one tiny problem with this, which is that there are no alleys in New York. That can't be true. It's hard to wrap your mind around because we've all been raised on this myth that New York has alleys. And there are some in the outer boroughs, but like if you've spent time in Manhattan, and you really search your memory, you will not remember passing by an alley. At least not like a classic alley that like leads between two streets as the fire escape. Like usually maybe at best like if there's like a glorified like loading dock.
SPEAKER_02: Right, right. I can't specifically remember one, you're right. But it seems amazing to me.
SPEAKER_07: Right, but like proper alleys, they're just not there.
SPEAKER_02: So why do I think there is and then why aren't there? Which is the right question. Right, right. So first, why aren't there? And this is because like when the city planners laid out the grid for Manhattan north of Houston Street in 1811, something called the Commissioner's plan, they purposefully did not include alleys.
SPEAKER_07: They figured that they didn't need alleys because they thought the high frequency of the east west streets, which are much closer together to each other than the north south streets, kind of obviated the need for shortcuts, or anything else that might break up their wonderfully perfect grid. But also, and this was probably the real motivation, it was a way to maximize real estate. Because this way without any alleys cutting through the blocks, the landowners could squeeze in more housing, and the land was worth more. And after that, almost no alleys were built. Because, of course, why own an alley when you can own a larger building? And so the result is that today Manhattan has at best a dozen things you might call alleys, but they're all south of Canal Street, in the oldest part of the city that was built before the grid. Wow, that's amazing. I mean, now that you mention it, the thing I noticed the most when I'm walking down the streets of New York is the piles and piles of trash, which when I lived in Chicago, that's put in the alley, that is not on the street.
SPEAKER_02: Chicago is like the antithesis. Chicago is something like 2000 miles of alleys.
SPEAKER_07: Totally. And it's just, it's so key to the idea of that city, but in that case, it's actually true. But, you know, it's weird, a lot of people don't put this two and two together, including New Yorkers. The myth of the New York alley is so pervasive that even a lot of native New Yorkers have fallen prey to it.
SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite things to do is just like, I always ask people, fellow New Yorkers, I just say, like, when was the last time you remember saying, I really got to get somewhere? And the quickest way to get there would be to take the alley shortcut. Because it's not a thing. It's only when you point it out to them that they kind of step back and go, yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_07: So this is Nick Carr, and he's a film location scout who worked in New York for many years on films like War of the Worlds, War of Wall Street, more recently, the new Ghostbusters, the Smurfs movie. Didn't know that had a Manhattan section. Oh, you got to know this. Of course the Smurfs go to New York. I mean, what else would that happen when your television shows turned into a movie? It makes sense. Or at least in the sequel, right? And he says, but anyways, Nick says that this belief that New York has alleys is like the bane of his existence. Because he'll tell a director, you know, New York, New York is not a city of alleys, New York does not have alleys.
SPEAKER_01: But if you were to tell a director that there are no alleys in New York, they'll look at you like you have two heads and think that you don't know how to do your job.
SPEAKER_07: So invariably, he reluctantly winds up showing them the dozen or so alleys south of Canal Street. And I would think of the filmable alleys in New York that look like how you want them to look, I'd say it's like five or six.
SPEAKER_01: And of those five or six, most of them are either privately owned, and so they're very expensive to shoot in, or they have other permanent issues, logistical constraints, parking constraints, leaving only this one alley just south of Canal Street and east of Broadway in which almost everyone films.
SPEAKER_07: And that is Cortland Alley, which is just it is the alley.
SPEAKER_01: And Cortland, you have to understand this. It's the alley you've been seeing your entire life.
SPEAKER_07: You just don't realize it. So like, let me show you some photos.
SPEAKER_02: It's got the fire escapes. It's got loading docks. It's got, you know, bricks and graffiti. And it's an alley. It really is. It is like it's the perfect alley. It's very archetypal. This is the photo. This is the one where I looked at it. I was like, I have totally seen that.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've seen 300 Law & Order episodes without alley. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, it's so archetypal to such a degree that if you walked by it, you wouldn't actually notice it because it would feel so intensely normal.
SPEAKER_07: It's almost like you've been there, you know, like even if you'd never set foot in it, you take it for granted because you have already been there. So I'm pretty sure that whenever the first time I sat, I walked down that alley, it might as well have been like the hundredth time I walked down that alley.
SPEAKER_07: But here's where things get especially weird, because the reason Cortland looks like the platonic ideal of a New York alley is precisely because it's been used in so many movies. And so there's this chicken and egg thing that happens where once a filmmaker who wants to film a quote unquote classic New York alley scene sees Cortland, they're like, this is perfect.
SPEAKER_01: And it lures them into contributing to this fantasy of New York.
SPEAKER_07: Because when a director has a location in mind, he has created the perfect location in his head and no location you ever find will ever match up to what it is. Right. But Cortland is what you picture.
SPEAKER_01: The director pictures it in his head and it's not 80% of the way there's not 90. It's 100% of what he had in mind. And that's because the people directors see a version of New York and other movies and TV shows and then go and want to recreate it when they do their own film in town. So the sad truth is that it's sort of a stereotype that gets perpetuated from movie to movie.
SPEAKER_07: And so now Cortland is forever caught in this loop to the point where it can seem like it's all it's used for is filming by basically everyone all the time. When I used to drive by, I mean, I swear to God, it was on a weekly basis.
SPEAKER_01: The Law and Order series would, you know, put a body in the alley every other week. But the thing is, they all did it. They all do it and still do it. Every, every major crime show, cop show, superhero show, anything that is filmed in New York has filmed in Cortland. Like, I would say that with 100% confidence. So like even the one alley in Manhattan doesn't really function as an alley. It's basically a film set.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly. And just to give you an idea of Hollywood's, like to the degree to which it's like treated as a film set and Hollywood's zeal in pursuit of the platonic New York alley.
SPEAKER_07: Like a story often calls for an alley to be like filled with trash. That's a part of the classic concept since that's part of the archetype. But of course, real trash and grime would be hazardous to the cast and crew. So the first thing they do is actually clean the alley with like pressure hoses to the point where it's, you know, pristine.
SPEAKER_13:
SPEAKER_01: And then you buy movie trash. And movie trash is large plastic bags like trash bags that are filled with approved logo sort of trash. So it's like generic milk bottles and cereal boxes. But I believe each bag of movie trash is about 40 to $60 a bag. So there's an industry just in making alleys look like look like alleys. But what especially kind of interests me about all this is that I think with some cities, we don't really know much about them. So they get to be their own thing.
SPEAKER_07: There might be like cliches about San Francisco or Chicago, but no one outside of San Francisco like truly thinks they know the city. But New York, perhaps more than any other city, in some sense, it belongs to everyone. Everyone feels that they know it.
SPEAKER_02: Right. Because they've seen it in a million movies. It is like America's city to so many people. And it is the city to so many people in and of itself. Right. And there's like a level of granularity when you talk about uptown, downtown, Soho, Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn. Like there are more like household names in terms of like the geography.
SPEAKER_07: Totally. No, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_13: It's also kind of like, you know, people think they know it, but they don't. And the result is that at some point, the idea of New York has overtaken the reality of New York.
SPEAKER_07: New York kind of takes cultural precedent. Right. Even in the minds of a lot of New Yorkers who never realized New York has no allies. And it's just sad because it's almost like an actor that's typecast. Right. Like it's like an actor that's being asked to play the same old role because, hey, you did that one role really, really well back in 1977.
SPEAKER_01: So keep doing it for another 50 years. And I just think movies are just so much more interesting when you portray the locations featured for what they are and let them be a real character instead of just a backdrop.
SPEAKER_02: So at any point in its film history, was it ever named or presented as Courland Alley?
SPEAKER_07: Almost never. But Nick says Men in Black 3 has a scene where Will Smith is tracking down an alien and they actually do at least attempt to ID the alley properly. You know you're not supposed to be north of Canal Street.
SPEAKER_01: So he gets it wrong in that they're south of Canal Street. But so close, so close.
SPEAKER_13: Well, they tried. They did their best. They did their best.
SPEAKER_02: I think that's the most you can ask of Men in Black 3. Well, thanks so much, Jo. Thank you, Roman. This is so cool.
SPEAKER_07: This has been a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_13:
SPEAKER_02: Okay, Sean, composer, Sean Rial, what's the story you have today?
SPEAKER_12: Well, first I want to ask you a question, Roman. So you've never done karaoke? I've never done karaoke. How is that possible?
SPEAKER_02: I've played the singing parts of Guitar Hero. That's almost karaoke. Almost. But not as performative in a bar with strangers. I've never done that. Yeah, it doesn't count. That's fair.
SPEAKER_12: So I want to tell you about the person who invented the karaoke machine. His name is Daisuke Inoue. And as you can imagine, he loves music. Of course. I read this interview with him and I found out that he started working as a drummer when he was still a teenager in high school. And after he graduated, he was perpetually in a traveling band that did cabaret music for nine years. And I think that's a really big achievement. But in his interview, he likes to kind of talk smack on himself. And so he says, one night I realized that no matter how much I practice, I could never be as good as someone with God-given talent. And that was enough to change my life as a band man. And after nine years on the road, many tales and no regrets, I went home. I don't know. It seemed like it was more than just his musicianship that took him out of road life. It seems like he wasn't really compensated fairly all the time. And people he was working with, they partied a lot and they were drinking all their money away. So he was 28 and living with his parents in Kobe, Japan after all that. And so 1968, karaoke is kind of already like a social activity, but it's done with live instruments. So there are bars where you have a musician playing a single guitar or a keyboard or something and people singing along to the hits. And this was one of Daisuke's regular gigs when he was living there with his parents. And he says... Playing the drums? Oh, no, he learned how to play keyboard. Oh, okay. Yeah, he says that he taught himself 300 songs, which once again is just like a humble brag. Because then he goes on to say that he was like, but every time I tried to learn more than 300 songs, I just would forget them or I would start mixing them up. Wow. So yeah, Daisuke is pretty down on himself.
SPEAKER_13:
SPEAKER_02: Poor guy. Okay, I find it really charming.
SPEAKER_12: So he's working at these karaoke bars, and he's got like a bunch of regular karaoke singers. And there was this one businessman who would always sing with him, who kind of changed everything. This businessman was about to travel for work and he wanted to be able to sing for his colleagues on the trip. And Daisuke recalls the businessman saying to him, Your keyboard playing is the only music I can sing to. You know how my voice is and you know what it needs to sound good. And Daisuke couldn't take time off work, so he taped himself playing some of this guy's favorite songs. And it worked. The guy was happy. Daisuke got paid. And I'm sure you can see where this is going. Yeah, totally. After his success with this businessman, Daisuke in 1971 commissioned a friend to build a machine out of three existing machines. An amplifier, a coin box, and an eight-track car stereo. And he called it the Juke 8. So 100 yen, you put in 100 yen and the machine would turn on for five minutes. So you could put on a tape of instrumental music and sing through a microphone. And Roman, I want you to see one of these machines. They're really beautiful if you just go into Slack. Oh, wow. It really is beautiful.
SPEAKER_13:
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. It's a cabinet. It's red and white. It has great little analog knobs and a place for the eight-track cassette, what I would call a cart machine in the radio business that you press in there. And then a little red cabinet on the right that stores a little library of eight-track tapes. It's lovely. Is that him smiling right next to him? Mm-hmm. Yeah. What a delightful looking man. Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: In every picture, he's smiling like that. Oh, I love it. So the music on these first eight-track tapes, were they the ones that, did he compose those?
SPEAKER_02: Or how did he get the music for those? So they were popular songs, and Daisuke recorded them with his band.
SPEAKER_12: Or actually, I guess he recorded his band playing the songs. He says that early on in the process, they fired him from playing. So he just...
SPEAKER_02: Again, poor Daisuke. Poor guy.
SPEAKER_12: So he just focused on recording and mixing the music. Right. Which is a really important part. Oh, totally. Totally. Yeah, if it doesn't get recorded, no karaoke machine.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. Oh, yeah, recording and mixing. Thank you, Sharif. Totally. Thank you, Roman. Sharif does the really best job with it, for sure. Yeah, and it's funny to me, because even though Daisuke was fired from his own band, he was a real hustler. He got bars all over Kobe to lease these machines from him. He got contracts with major record labels to use all these popular songs. Wow. But he didn't patent the machine. Oh, no. He says, when I first made the Juke 8s, a brother-in-law suggested I take out a patent, but at the time, I didn't think anything would come of it. I was just hoping the drinking places in the Kobe area would use my machine. Most people don't believe me when I say this, but I don't think karaoke would have taken off like it did if there had been a patent on the first machine. I think that's actually a pretty fair assessment, honestly.
SPEAKER_02: It's a really nice and joyful thing, even though I've never participated in it. It's a nice and joyful thing. A lot of people think so, yeah. And this machine is really, really lovely, and it's actually nice to think of it as just existing in the world to make the world better and not necessarily to make him money.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, it does make some people money. This other person did take out a patent on a laser disc karaoke machine. Oh, God. But he's not part of this story.
SPEAKER_02: No. God, no. Let's write him out of history.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. And then a disc k goes on. Besides, I didn't build the thing from scratch. The amp, the microphone, the 8-track player, even the 100 yen box machine all had patents on them. Yeah, but that's not how patents work. He could have totally gotten a patent for it.
SPEAKER_12: You think so? Totally. Yeah, I don't know anything about patent law, especially Japanese patent law. Well, I don't know about Japanese patent law, and I actually am no expert of U.S. patent law.
SPEAKER_02: But if you come up with a new use for even a known thing and prescribe that use inside of the patent, it doesn't have to be three machines. It could be one machine to do a certain thing as long as you change a little something and change its purpose. So he totally had the right to a patent for sure.
SPEAKER_12: So this is just more of him talking smack on himself. But, yeah, what I really love about this story on a whole is that he seems pretty okay with how all of this turned out. He talks a lot about just like how glad he is that this brought so much joy into the world. And he says, I may not have the original patent. Some say I would have made $80 million last year, and that was a bad year. But I have good friends and a family I love, and I can't help but smile every day. Do you have a thing to sum up, or is that it?
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, I guess the last thing was I just wanted to say that Daisuke says that to honor karaoke, he and his wife and daughter and three granddaughters get out a song book once a week and see who can sing the most songs before going horse, which sounds crazy. That's so crazy. That's way harder than I want to party.
SPEAKER_12: And, yeah, and there's more to his story, but I think it's better told from him, so we'll put a link to that on our website. Nice. All right. Thanks. And we should totally go karaoking sometime. Totally. I think we could make that happen. Thanks.
SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Roman. About a year ago, our senior editor Delaney Hall moved from beautiful downtown Oakland, California, back to New Mexico, where she grew up. She now works for 99PI remotely, and her mini story is about this phenomenon in the new city where she lives, which is Santa Fe. The phenomenon is called Zozobra.
SPEAKER_06: Zozobra is a big deal here in Santa Fe. Basically, every year, a group of people in the city build this enormous marionette that's named Zozobra. And in Spanish, Zozobra means anxiety. So he's like all of the city's collective sorrows embodied in this huge puppet.
SPEAKER_02: Wow. That's amazing. So what does he look like?
SPEAKER_06: Well, he's 50 feet tall. He is dressed in a long white gown. He has these very dark, angry eyes. They're usually rimmed with green or black. And what happens is that every fall, this group constructs a new Zozobra, and about 50,000 people gather in one of Santa Fe's biggest parks, and they burn him.
SPEAKER_02: Wow. They burn him. A 50-foot puppet. Yeah. It's a very intense kind of pagan feeling event. I mean, basically, the crowd chants, burn him, burn him, burn him, and he's set on fire, and he is slowly engulfed in flames.
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_02: And I assume they burn him so they can burn their collective anxiety that he represents. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So because he represents gloom, it's this way that the city purges its sadness every year.
SPEAKER_06: And people get to participate in these interesting ways. And one of the reasons Zozobra is so flammable is that he is stuffed with bushels of shredded paper. And where that paper comes from is in the weeks leading up to the burning, anyone with an excess of gloom is encouraged to sort of write down their gloomy thoughts on a piece of paper and to leave it in this thing called the gloom box, which at least in the past has been located in the offices of one of the local newspapers. So people contribute police reports and mortgage documents and divorce papers. I mean, just anything they might want to burn.
SPEAKER_02: It reminds me of other sort of bonfire rituals like Burning Man or something, which a lot of people go to around here.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. I mean, Zozobra has been around a lot longer than Burning Man. It's been around since the 1920s. But there are definitely some similarities. Like both were developed by artists. Both events began relatively small, like in someone's backyard or on a beach, and then grew into something much bigger. And both actually draw on other traditions that go back even farther. But one thing that's pretty neat about Zozobra is that because he's a puppet, he's capable of kind of rudimentary movement. So his arms swing around, his jaw is hinged, so his mouth opens and closes. And he also makes sound. So I'm going to play a little bit of sound of the event so you can hear it.
SPEAKER_13:
SPEAKER_02: And I assume he's flailing at the same time. Yeah, he's flailing, his mouth is opening and closing. It's actually a really troubling event to go to as a kid. It's sort of seared into my memory.
SPEAKER_06: But this is actually like the thing I most want to tell you about because I recently learned just in the past year or so that the voice of Zozobra is performed live. And there is one guy who's been doing the voice for about 20 years. And I learned this thanks to this gem of local reporting from KOET Action 7 News. Me, I see him as an old grumpy old man. And that's the character that I get into.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_04: This is the Zozobra you know. They want to get rid of him. They want to destroy him. They want to burn him. And the way I play the character is I'm fighting to stay alive.
SPEAKER_04: On Friday, Michael Ellis will take on the persona of our collective sorrow for the 19th time. And despite the title of Old Man Gloom, Zozobra's voice battles several emotions. There are times when he'll sound like he's crying.
SPEAKER_05: Protesting. Adimate. I'm not going to let you do this to me again.
SPEAKER_04: Ellis says the audience of 50,000 should always know what Zozobra is feeling. Not only do I want the crowd to hear him, I want them to feel him.
SPEAKER_04: And even after 19 years for Ellis, the big night is always exciting. I'll sit down and have a sandwich in the early afternoon.
SPEAKER_05: After that, I've got butterflies and I won't have anything until after it's all over.
SPEAKER_04: On Friday night, those butterflies join all of New Mexico's gloom up in smoke.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I just love this news clip so much. I think it's one of my favorites ever. It's the combination of the reporter's seriousness or maybe mock seriousness and then just the sublime ridiculousness of what you're seeing. Which of course people can't see it, but to describe it, it's Michael Ellis, the voice of Zozobra, performing the sounds of Zozobra, but to this big empty baseball field, which probably later in the night will be filled with 50,000, 60,000 screaming people. But at the moment, it's just entirely empty. Well, that's so good.
SPEAKER_02: So you get a little taste of what Michael Ellis is about, but what is he really like?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so this was the only thing I could find on the internet about him. And from seeing this clip, I definitely wanted to learn more. And so I looked him up and went to talk with him. And what I learned is that he was born and raised in Santa Fe. And so Michael told me that as a kid, Zozobra was like this figure, this monster who almost seemed real, like actually alive. And that sense of realness was this thing that the community continues to really play into and cultivate. Growing up, I remember there would be little stories in the newspaper talking about how Zozobra has been spotted in the Arroyos in the east side of town.
SPEAKER_05: And you would hear stories of sheep being missing from the area, little things like that that would play into trying to make this thing seem real.
SPEAKER_02: And so from there, how did Michael actually become the voice of Zozobra?
SPEAKER_06: So as a high schooler, he started volunteering for the event. He would help with building the puppet, stuff like that. And he just kept being involved a little more each year. And eventually he was asked if he wanted to help with the voice. So it was just sort of a matter of hanging around for long enough, I guess. And so did Michael do it any differently?
SPEAKER_02: Did he add something special to the voice when he took over? Michael didn't have any formal voice acting experience.
SPEAKER_06: He's done various jobs throughout his life, including working at Lowe's Hardware and running a DJ business. But he told me that the main thing he wanted to bring to Zozobra was that sense of realness, that kind of aliveness that I was talking about earlier. And to do that, he said he had to find ways to really empathize with Zozobra, this grumpy old man, and to see the whole event unfolding from his perspective. Knowing that everybody wants his demise, they want to see it happen.
SPEAKER_05: So I do my best to try to fight with just, you know, with my voice. And there are times when it'll almost sound like he's crying. Ooh. When he begins to realize that there isn't anything he's going to be able to do to stop it. Of course, in our conversation, I was like pushing to try to understand, is there some deep, gloomy memory or experience that Michael taps into in order to perform?
SPEAKER_06: I asked him about his personal history. I asked him about some health problems he's had recently. But he said, you know, not really. It just comes when it's needed.
SPEAKER_05: You've just got the readily accessible, grumpy old man right there.
SPEAKER_05: I guess. Maybe there's a little bit of that deep inside.
SPEAKER_06: So that's the voice of Zozobra. And I really like thinking about the fact that when I went to see Zozobra burn back in the 80s, it was Michael performing the voice. And if I take Fiona, my daughter next year, it will probably be Michael again.
SPEAKER_02: Up next is our technical producer, Sharif Yousif. We're rolling.
SPEAKER_13: All right, cool. All right.
SPEAKER_11: So, Roman, if I told you that I had another map story, how excited would you be? Very excited. Okay, cool. I love a good map story. Oh, I know. So maybe if you could just go to Google Maps real quick. The main thing we're going to be looking at today is the border between the U.S. and Canada. And pardon my sibilance, I have some dental work. Okay. Yeah. You're excused. And the thing that you need to pay attention to is the 49th parallel in the Pacific Northwest of America. Okay. So important thing that we're – I'm here. Okay. Yeah. And you can probably, maybe now, can notice a little something that looks off.
SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about Point Roberts that sticks out right here? Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: Point Roberts on that little peninsula. Yeah. The Soson Peninsula. Maybe you can just sort of describe what you're seeing there.
SPEAKER_02: So Point Roberts is off a peninsula, off of the area of Vancouver. It looks like it's completely cut off from the U.S. except by water. You have to – by land, you'd have to get to Canada. It's got a few – it's very, very gridded streets. Yeah, a couple. Just a couple. Yeah, it's kind of like an exclave but not quite. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: It's a semi-exclusive space. But it is difficult to get into, so it's an exclusive-exclusive thing. So yeah, Point Roberts is actually in Washington State, part of Whatcom County. So I first heard about Point Roberts from a podcast called Stop Podcasting Yourself, hosted by Dave Shumka and Graham Clark, two Vancouverites. And they are saying that some Vancouverites go there because it's only 20 miles away or so in order to pick up packages because shipping across the border is actually quite expensive and also to get cheaper gas. It's also rumored to be the site of a federal witness protection program, like where they relocate. Wow. And I just happened to be in Seattle a little bit ago. And I also wanted an excuse to go to Vancouver and have you pay for it. So I decided to go – should I just play some border crossing? Yeah, sure. My first border crossing? All right. This is the Peace Arch border from… Washington State and the Canada. Exactly. Hi. How's it going?
SPEAKER_13: Good. How are you? Good, thanks. So what's the purpose of your trip today?
SPEAKER_11: I'm going to Point Roberts to report a story. It was just like a weird little part of America that you have to go through like two border crossings to get to. Yeah, two border crossings. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm very nervous. Yeah, can you hear my voice crack a little?
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I think there's an instinct that arises in every Arab when they are crossing a border. Also, funny story, the last time I crossed a Canadian border, I was three or four years old going into the American side of Niagara Falls, and the border guard looked in and was like, is everyone in this car American? And my dad's like, I'm Egyptian, she's American, and he's American in the back. And I go, no, I'm French, I'm being kidnapped. Oh, my God. So there's some trauma around the Canadian borders. Oh, my God. Oh, young Sharif.
SPEAKER_13: I was a little… You were a scamp.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Scamp is a much nicer word than I was going to use. Okay. Are you making any stops in between?
SPEAKER_13:
SPEAKER_11: Not in between, but I'm spending the night in Vancouver tonight.
SPEAKER_13: Vancouver?
SPEAKER_11: Have a good time. Thanks, man. Unscathed. Unscathed. Yeah, he was a very nice border crossing guard. He did ask if I had been arrested, which apparently is a thing like if you've been arrested, you can't, you have to get like special permission to get into Canada if you have a criminal record in the States. Oh. So anyway, it's another 20 or 30 minute drive to border number two. Welcome to Little America. I just crossed the border into Point Roberts. Scenic Loop Gateway. That sounds like something I would do. I like scenic loops. And basically immediately to my right after I cross the border, there's a place that receives packages. Open 24-7. Automated retrieval. Vacuum brewed coffee. Parcel services. It seems like there are a lot of places for parcel service. And that was the theme throughout the entire time in Point Roberts. Basically any shop, no matter what it was selling or what it did, they offered to accept packages for you. Yeah. It's good to be back to the familiar land of America.
SPEAKER_11: God. The gas is in gallons. Oh, maybe it's not. Oh, interesting. They measure the gas in liters here, even in America. That's nuts. Wow. Liters. Yeah, liters. Earthshacks. So what else did you find?
SPEAKER_02: These little differences besides the leaders' revelation? Yeah, there wasn't much.
SPEAKER_11: It wasn't the most happening spot. Free wood. It's about like five square miles. A population of 1,314 according to the latest U.S. census in 2010. But in the summertime, it can grow to about three or four times that because a lot of Canadian vacationers come in. I went to the post office. Oh, it's closed. I guess it's Saturday, 1.15. Is there a school system? I saw that there is one primary school. I believe it goes up to grade three or four. And then everyone who is older than that has to go across four international borders every school day to go to school in Blaine, Washington. Oh my God. Yeah, and I grew up in a fairly rural place with long school bus rides, so I very much empathize and feel for you any Point Roberts school kids who are listening. Driving down this main track, the biggest little store in Point Roberts. Hey. Eventually, I ran into their restaurant district. Oh shit, it's called the Reef Tavern? I have to eat there, right?
SPEAKER_02: Reef Tavern is calling to you. That's what we call you. I don't know if people know that. Yeah, it was fate.
SPEAKER_11: And at the Reef Tavern, I had a wonderful server named Tony, and he was just the absolute Swedish person and told me about how people from Canada go to that restaurant to get medium-rare burgers because apparently the health codes in Canada are a little more strict about how to, what's the bad at meat terms. Basically, in Canada, you have to cook it longer. So, the real blood connoisseurs go to Point Roberts. I'm a journalist from Oakland, California. I'm still living in East Bay. Oh yeah?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's living by the Grand Lake Theater, by the Grand Lake Bar.
SPEAKER_02: That's so cool that you ran into the other Oakland guy. Yeah, what are the odds?
SPEAKER_11: And that's not even the weirdest part. Hold on, let me play you a little something. Get ready to have your mind blown, Roman. Prepared. Welcome to Point Roberts, Dennis. Yeah, thank you. Beautiful downtown Point Roberts, right here. Beautiful downtown.
SPEAKER_03: Beautiful downtown Point Roberts.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, you guys have the same catchphrase. Oh my God.
SPEAKER_13: That's amazing. I don't understand how the stars of the universe aligned in such a way.
SPEAKER_11: You're just supposed to go there.
SPEAKER_13: I know. It sounds like a lovely trip. Yeah. Did you ever figure out why the gas was in liters?
SPEAKER_11: I didn't do much sleuthing, but my guess is mainly to market to Canadians. So they know how much gas they're putting in their cars. Yeah, exactly. And actually at the Reef Tavern, I saw two very lovely Canadians named Jason and Lisa. They had come in that very day to pick up a guitar loop pedal from a seller on eBay who didn't want to ship it across the border. Oh, perfect. Yeah. So it's super calm, calm enough that you just run across a person who is doing the type of thing they're expecting.
SPEAKER_02: Totally, totally. Looking into the town, Lisa saw that the average visitor spends less than 20 minutes.
SPEAKER_09: Only 5% of the visitors spend longer than an hour. Stay longer than an hour. Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: Anyway, we've never been here before. It's super weird, but I like it. Cool. Thank you guys so much. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: I'll give you guys my phone number in case you guys are around. Making friends. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Making friends. And coincidentally, I showed them where I was staying in Vancouver, and it was basically right next to them.
SPEAKER_11: And they invited me to drink wine and decorate their Christmas tree. And it was just a really lovely evening. Wow, that's so cool.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Did you ever get confirmation about the witness production thing? Well, I guess I can neither confirm nor deny it.
SPEAKER_11: I actually reached out to Gerald Short, the founder of the Witness Protection Program, and he responded back. And he says, I have no information on Point Roberts, Washington, which I guess you can take to be anything you want.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's awesome. Nice adventure in the name of the show. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: Thanks for the expense. No problem. Thanks, Shrief. Yeah. Thanks.
SPEAKER_02: Special thanks to Nate Berg, Lauren Sporer, and Pete Early for helping Shrief out with that story. We have one more mini story coming up next with the king of Dakota, Kurt Kohlstedt, after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at canva.com, the home for every brand.
SPEAKER_02: 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. So every year at the end of the year, in the beginning of the next year, we do these mini stories. And the funny thing is, is that the mini stories were so popular that we began doing them. Kurt and I am in the studio with Kurt. Kurt and I started doing kind of a mini stories almost every episode, like as Dakota. Because there's always some story that Kurt has that relates to the story we just told. But this one we never found a place for exactly. Yeah, this one just never quite fit yet. And I really wanted to tell him.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, here we go. Then we had the perfect opportunity.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so basically last year, the Ford Motor Company made big news in Detroit when they said they were going to buy and renovate Michigan Central Station.
SPEAKER_10: And this is like a big train station, sort of like Grand Central Terminal type train station.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's huge, old, beautiful. It's like Grand Central, but much, much taller.
SPEAKER_10: And it's in downtown Detroit? Yeah, it's really visible when you're coming in on the highway. It's just like one of the most visible, tallest structures on the side of the city. And so Ford, based still in Detroit, bought this, and they're going to renovate it.
SPEAKER_02: And suddenly there is all this news around the fact that they're going to come out and do this big press conference and explain to the city what their plan was for this old building that had been deserted for so long.
SPEAKER_10: And in the lead up to that big press conference, someone anonymously approached the Ford Museum with this surprising artifact. It was this big, round, antique clock that used to hang really prominently on one of the walls of the station.
SPEAKER_00: Let's face it, train passengers needed to know the time, so the clock is huge. It's been gone for a very long time now, and Bill Ford says he couldn't believe it when a secret approach was made to get that clock back. Somebody must have really loved it and loved the train station because they took very good care of it.
SPEAKER_10: So somebody stole this gigantic clock from a train station, and then they returned it when they heard that the train station is going to be renovated.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. And we don't really know much about the person who returned the clock.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, maybe they just took it to try to help preserve it. Maybe they weren't even the original thief. It's possible they bought it or found it on eBay. Yeah, right? Or inherited it. All we really know for sure is that they carefully wrapped it up and then told the folks at the Ford Museum where to find it. What do you mean where to find it? Like they left it somewhere and they like, anonymously?
SPEAKER_02: They left it alongside the side of a building. There are pictures of this. You can see it. He just kind of wrapped it up and kind of strapped it in.
SPEAKER_10: And then hightailed it. And then hightailed it and just texted them. Yeah, that's amazing. Just come and grab the clock, but bring a couple guys and a truck. Wow, it's amazing that he felt so inspired to give it back.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think this is sort of a civic icon. It's this stunning, massive Beaux Arts structure.
SPEAKER_10: And it was designed by the same architects as Grand Central Terminal in New York. And the idea originally was that it would be the Grand Central of the Midwest. It would handle all this passenger and freight traffic and be kind of this landmark in the city. So they put up these, you know, it's filled with all these beautiful details. These marble walls, vaulted ceilings, copper skylights. And it's huge. It's 18 stories tall. So there are restaurants and shops down below and then office spaces above. And so, but obviously it fell on hard times. So what went wrong with the Michigan Central Station?
SPEAKER_02: Well, a lot of things arguably, but the rise of the car definitely helped drive it out of business.
SPEAKER_10: You know, more people were driving out to the suburbs and the city itself and the station fell into disuse. And at first the offices cleared out and then the shops and restaurants started to close down. And then finally in the 80s, the ticket booth shut down and basically the whole place was just locked up. Wow. And they just abandoned it. It was left empty at that point.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And there was talk over the years of, you know, tearing it down, but it had this status as a landmark.
SPEAKER_10: And that helped protect it from demolition. Wow. You know, they came up with plans to try to reuse this, like ideas to turn it into a police station or a convention center or even a casino. And none of those panned out. So the building just kind of kept being sold and changing hands. And the owners before Ford finally did do some work on it. Like they drained the basement and they added some new windows and they put up a security fence. Right. So obviously that must have happened after the clock was stolen.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. They definitely were aware that things were disappearing from the building.
SPEAKER_10: And I think they wanted to put a stop to that. I mean, a lot of people were visiting this building to take pictures or, you know, just explore it. But along the way, hundreds of artifacts were taken too. So the clock is really just one piece of the puzzle. There were lots of little things taken from this building I would imagine over the years.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. A really large piece that took, you know, multiple people to move, but definitely one of many things.
SPEAKER_10: And returning it actually started this kind of bigger movement because once Ford had the clock in hand, they were able to put out a call and say, Hey, look, somebody returned this clock. If anybody else has stuff, maybe you could bring it back too. And you know, you won't get in trouble. No questions asked. Just leave it on the side of a building. Right. Right. And it worked. Dozens of people have now come forward to offer up old station artifacts, including fountains and plaster medallions and light fixtures and all kinds of stuff. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And Ford actually has a wishlist too. They want back things like the ticket window grills, elevator transom panels, other clocks that have disappeared over the years. And basically, you know, anything that is sort of considered critical to the historic character of the building. Right. And what are they, are they planning to restore it as it was? What are they planning to do with all these artifacts?
SPEAKER_02: Well, some things will probably go back into the building and others will end up in local museums.
SPEAKER_10: And one of the sort of side benefits is that some of these things can be used to model copies too, right? So if you have one plaster medallion, you can make a bunch of other ones put in the renovated building. Yeah. Well, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02: So is the idea that this thing is going to be like a passenger train terminal again or is it something different? No, it's going to be something different. Basically, Ford hired Snowheada, this sort of famous international design firm, to help them build out a new campus.
SPEAKER_10: They're calling it the Corktown Campus and it's going to be the center for Ford to develop autonomous vehicles and other urban road-related technologies in a nice central area where they can do actual on-the-road testing. And the station itself is going to be at the heart of this and it's going to be repopulated actually with a lot of the same things they had before, like restaurants and shops. And above, there are going to be offices but also condos now. And the idea is that Ford can move some of its people and its partner organizations up into these spaces.
SPEAKER_02: Have you seen pictures of the artifacts and the renovation at all? Yeah, there's some great images of the clock and it sitting outside wrapped up.
SPEAKER_10: And there are a lot of historic photos that kind of show what was there, what's missing, and Ford's plan for what this building is going to look like when they're all done with this campus. That's awesome. And can you put them on the website for us?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, of course. That sounds good. All right, thank you, Kurt.
SPEAKER_02: And beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are founding member of radio topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our sticker loving coin carrying listeners just like you can find 99 percent invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 PI org run Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit, too. But the real 99 PI HQ is at 99 PI dot org. Radio topia from PRX.
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SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today. Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.