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SPEAKER_02: This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the heart of the Caribbean, there is a tiny little island called Anguilla. And I mean tiny. At its widest point, it's only about 16 miles across. But while it's small, its white sandy beaches and crystal blue waters have made it one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the Caribbean. It's got all-inclusive resorts, and you can swim with dolphins. The island is like the ideal place to film an episode of The Bachelor. In fact, tonight on The Bachelor.
SPEAKER_03: They did.
SPEAKER_02: Season 15, week 7.
SPEAKER_03: Whoo hoo! Anguilla!
SPEAKER_02: But back in the 1960s, Anguilla didn't have any of the beachside villas or luxury spas or golf courses that it has today.
SPEAKER_05: It had dirt roads, no electricity, one stoplight in the middle of town.
SPEAKER_02: That's Emily Obermann. She used to visit the island on family vacations as a kid.
SPEAKER_05: When you wanted to get a message to someone, you pinned it to this very specific mahogany tree in the center of town in the valley.
SPEAKER_02: Emily's parents were successful graphic designers from New York City, and they liked to travel off the beaten path. This was particularly true for her father, Marvin.
SPEAKER_05: My father was incredibly gregarious and charming and smart and quick-witted and a total wise ass and he always was ready to take someone in his arms and dance with them.
SPEAKER_02: You can tell Emily loves her dad a lot. Both her parents, really. She is an extremely successful graphic designer in her own right, but she gives her parents the credit.
SPEAKER_05: I am a graphic designer because of my parents.
SPEAKER_02: After her dad passed away in 2018, it was actually a graphic that he helped design that got Emily thinking about Anguilla again.
SPEAKER_05: My father had recently passed and so I had gone through a bunch of his stuff and came across a small flag.
SPEAKER_02: The flag was all white with a thin strip of brilliant turquoise blue at the bottom and three orange dolphins arranged in a continuous circle in the center. Almost like a recycling sign, but with dolphins. Emily knew that her father had gotten involved with the design on one of their trips to Anguilla and that it had actually flown there for a couple of years. So four decades later, inspired by this keepsake, she decided to take a trip back to Anguilla to honor her father and show her own family this place that had been so important to her childhood.
SPEAKER_05: I hadn't been there in 40 years, so it was going to be an adventure and an experience for me, but I thought probably an emotional one because it had been so meaningful to my family.
SPEAKER_02: In April of 2019, Emily packed up her husband and sons and they slept through the cold to Newark Airport, hopped on a plane to St. Martin, where they boarded a ferry.
SPEAKER_05: And as we were approaching, there was a big sign welcoming you to Anguilla and it was on a white building with orange and turquoise typography. And I looked at it and thought, huh, that's cool. I recognize those colors.
SPEAKER_02: They were the same colors as her father's flag, orange, white and blue. And she noticed them a lot.
SPEAKER_05: I suddenly began to see the color scheme was everywhere. The pylons along the highway had those three colors painted on them. And the color theme was just everywhere. So it was a little bit of a surprise and a delight.
SPEAKER_02: Emily's father was an amateur writer. So when Emily returned home from her trip, she looked through his folder of stories to see if she could find out more about this flag.
SPEAKER_05: We looked through his stories and sure enough, there was the story of the Anguillian flag.
SPEAKER_02: It turns out that her father's dolphin flag was a bigger deal than Emily had realized and that her parents, a couple of graphic designers from New York City, had played a very small but not insignificant role in a key moment in the island's history because this flag that had been collecting dust in the family attic was a symbol of one of history's strangest political revolutions.
SPEAKER_04: When I was born, there were dirt roads, no running water, no telephone. This is Timothy Hodge, former president of the Anguilla Archaeological and Historical
SPEAKER_02: Society. Like Emily Obermann, he was a kid in the 1960s and he remembers the island a lot like she does.
SPEAKER_04: None of the comforts that we have today, very little commerce, very little employment.
SPEAKER_02: Anguilla had been one of Great Britain's many overseas colonies since the 1650s. But unlike many of Britain's other territories, Anguilla was missing a lot of essential services like electricity, paved roads, proper schools, mostly because the British neglected it.
SPEAKER_04: Basically, if you read the historical records, it was not recognized as having any value to the British crown. So nobody paid any attention to it.
SPEAKER_02: Even though the island has a history of slavery, Anguilla's soil wasn't fertile enough for large-scale agriculture. And according to Hodge, if the British couldn't establish widespread slave plantations on Anguilla, then they didn't have much use for it. And so for decades, centuries even, they basically ignored the island, which meant Anguilla got very little funding for development.
SPEAKER_04: It was just the island that was unto itself, existed unto itself. And this is the Anguilla that existed up until from 1650, when it was settled initially, to 1825.
SPEAKER_02: But in 1825, Britain decided just to throw some of the smaller islands together to form a single colony. Anguilla would be treated as one part of a multi-island colony along with St. Kitts, which is also known as St. Christopher, and eventually with Nevis, with St. Kitts in administrative control of the Union. Suddenly Anguilla went from essentially independent self-governance to having to answer to St. Kitts for everything.
SPEAKER_03: Without consulting the people of Anguilla, Britain decided to lump it with St. Kitts and Nevis.
SPEAKER_02: This is Don Wolecek. He studies Caribbean history at the University of Puerto Rico. He says this was a common move for the British in the Caribbean.
SPEAKER_03: Just like it lumped together other countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Karakou and Grenada. So there were other examples of this.
SPEAKER_02: But there was one huge problem with lumping Anguilla with St. Kitts.
SPEAKER_03: The Anguillians didn't like the Katitions.
SPEAKER_04: You know, it's just a match that was never made in heaven.
SPEAKER_02: St. Kitts and Anguilla were two very, very different islands with very different relationships with Great Britain.
SPEAKER_04: One of the gripes that the Anguillian people had was that the aid that came to the colony always ended up in St. Kitts so that St. Kitts had electricity and running water and telephones and the things that we spoke about that Anguilla didn't have.
SPEAKER_03: And at the time, Anguilla's leaders were calling for things like piers and, you know, a better port.
SPEAKER_02: There was a story going around at the time that the leader of St. Kitts had been given money by Britain to build a much needed Anguillian pier. But instead of building it on Anguilla, he actually built the pier in St. Kitts and called it the Anguilla Pier.
SPEAKER_02: Tension between the two islands simmered for over a century, until 1967, when Britain made a decision that would turn their feud into an open conflict. Rather than separating the two islands as Anguillians wanted, the British government decided that St. Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla wouldn't be a single colony anymore, but an official self-governing associated state with St. Kitts in charge. Which, I know, basically sounds like the same thing, but Hodge says this arrangement was much worse.
SPEAKER_04: At least with the colony status, they could complain to somebody, they could complain to Britain, but after that they would have nobody to complain to.
SPEAKER_02: Anguillians were now entirely at the mercy of St. Kitts, and they started protesting immediately. The entire police force on Anguilla was made up of 17 conditions, and they became the symbol of condition authority. So in February of 1967, Anguillian rebels rounded up all 17 officers and booted them off the island.
SPEAKER_04: They took the police, they took their weapons, and they put them onto vessels and shipped them off to say, kids, and said, well, we are forever free of you, and we are separate and independent from you.
SPEAKER_02: This was the first act in the Anguillian revolution, one of many revolutions that were happening throughout the British Empire at the time.
SPEAKER_00: Jamaica becomes the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to gain independence. Long as the 15th, 1947, Independence Day for India. These are among the last pictures to be taken in the capital of the Gold Coast. For when this day is over, a crowd... And now Anguilla too was declaring their independence.
SPEAKER_02: Kind of.
SPEAKER_04: The Anguilla revolution in 1967 caused lots of historians and others to scratch their heads.
SPEAKER_02: Because Anguilla was calling for independence from St. Kitts and dependence on Great Britain, the island wanted to go back to being ruled directly by the British.
SPEAKER_04: Really and truly what the Anguillians had asked for was to be ruled directly from Britain.
SPEAKER_02: They figured it was better to be loosely ruled by a country half a world away than tightly policed by your next door neighbor. As all this was going on, a young Emily Obermann and her family were on one of their trips to Anguilla. Emily's father Marvin learned about the conflict over breakfast when he overheard two men recounting a raid on the police station.
SPEAKER_05: They said that there was an attack on the police station and one of the guys apparently was very proud that he had shot two bullets. But the police station was closed at the time so there was... He was just shooting two bullets at an empty building.
SPEAKER_02: Curious, Marvin Obermann started asking around.
SPEAKER_05: What were these guys talking about? Why would there be a raid on the police station? What's going on?
SPEAKER_02: He was eventually introduced to a man named Jeremiah Gumbs who was able to explain the revolution because he was involved.
SPEAKER_06: I mean Jeremiah Gumbs, I say Jeremiah Gumbs was a colossus.
SPEAKER_02: This is Alan Gumbs, son of Jeremiah Gumbs. He was as strong as any man I've known.
SPEAKER_06: Physically his closest thing in physical stature was the American athlete Jim Brown. But I mean he was like solid steel and he could run and he could do everything in the world.
SPEAKER_02: Jeremiah had moved away to the US in his 20s but had come back to Anguilla with his wife Lydia to open up a hotel. He didn't have any official role in the government but he became deeply involved in the politics of the island. They even gave him the nickname the Roving Ambassador.
SPEAKER_05: He was very involved in where the revolution was going and how it was going to be handled and I think he had a better eye for even publicity.
SPEAKER_02: Jeremiah and Lydia knew that if this revolution was going to capture people's imagination they needed a good flag.
SPEAKER_06: The original idea was for Anguilla to break away and so they had to have a flag.
SPEAKER_02: It isn't entirely clear whether the Gumbs reached out to Marvin or if Marvin reached out to them but one way or another Emily's father helped create a whole new flag for a whole new political future.
SPEAKER_05: The idea behind the flag was that he wanted it to be incredibly simple.
SPEAKER_02: As any good flag should be. Marvin drew inspiration from the colors of the island itself.
SPEAKER_05: Pretty much wherever you are on Anguilla you can see this beautiful turquoise water and the idea of there being a long band across the bottom certainly felt like what a flag should have. Like in the vocabulary of flags there should be a big wide band of something and an iconic image of something else.
SPEAKER_02: Lydia Gumbs and Marvin settled on three colors, white, blue, and orange. White for peace and tranquility. The blue base representing the surrounding sea and also faith and hope. And the three orange dolphins at the center which symbolized endurance, strength, and unity in a perpetual circle. Marvin coordinated with Lydia from his office in New York and mocked up a prototype but since he was technically working for a government in revolt he had some concerns.
SPEAKER_05: My father was so nervous about designing this flag. He was petrified that he was being followed by the FBI because he was working for a foreign government in revolt. So he was sure that MI5 was following him or the FBI and he would keep the shades drawn in his office and it was actually hilariously charming.
SPEAKER_02: It turns out that the FBI had very little interest in Marvin's flag project and he was able to get the prototype printed without issue.
SPEAKER_05: And they made the flag which my father then wrapped in something wrapped in something and brought to Jerry and Lydia gums and that was the first flag.
SPEAKER_04: The flag with the three dolphins, that flag certainly caught on and it has remained loved and beloved by the Anguillian people. The flag was raised over the administrative office along with the Union Jack, a clear
SPEAKER_02: declaration of independence and dependence at the same time.
SPEAKER_05: As a graphic designer my father had been really proud of the work that he had done for the island. But Alan Gumbs remembers it a different way.
SPEAKER_06: My mother was the artist, had the imagination and then she was the one that came up with the three dolphins and there was somebody who helped her draw it and that was it.
SPEAKER_02: Gumbs is positive that his mother Lydia was actually the designer of the famous dolphin flag of Anguilla.
SPEAKER_06: If she was in there then she might have been working with Mr. Obermann, you know, I thought impossible.
SPEAKER_02: Most Anguillians who know the revolutionary history will probably tell you that Lydia designed the flag. While flag nerds who read the September 1991 issue of the flag bulletin will probably tell you that Marvin was the designer. The truth may actually lie somewhere in between but as a successful graphic designer herself Emily has a healthy perspective on the debate.
SPEAKER_05: I have always believed and I usually think about this in terms of my team but I can say this in terms of clients as well. To me a project that is successful is one where everyone who worked on the project thinks that they were 100% responsible for it.
SPEAKER_02: Regardless of who designed it, the Anguillians had a flag and a revolutionary spirit but they were still stuck in this confusing tangle of colonial bureaucracy since they were fighting for independence from St. Kitts but not from Great Britain. Revolutionary leaders tried to negotiate a direct relationship with Britain but Britain refused to deal with Anguilla without going through St. Kitts first. Anguilla did not want to do that and so the tension just continued to escalate. But even with this tension it remained a bloodless conflict.
SPEAKER_03: The man who eventually became known as the father of the nation in Anguilla, Ronald Webster, said the revolution was really a war of words.
SPEAKER_02: Here's Don Wolechak again.
SPEAKER_03: He meant that he won a lot of battles with words, with threats, with conversations with reporters.
SPEAKER_02: The media was captivated by the story of this tiny island in a territorial dispute with one of the most powerful nations in the world.
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_02: This is the voice of revolutionary leader Ronald Webster who, along with Jeremiah Gumbs, petitioned the United Nations to back the Anguillian cause. They failed to convince the UN but their story was in papers all over the world.
SPEAKER_06: The press were now following my father because Anguilla had become the mouse that roared and they were in the New York Times every day for months.
SPEAKER_02: The Mouse That Roared was a satirical novel by Leonard Wibberley about a tiny nation that declares war on the US. The reporters couldn't help but see an ironic similarity between the two situations. Anguilla was this surprisingly ferocious island that refused to back down.
SPEAKER_03: Anguilla was this small place lurking in the corner that no one thought could produce such a giant powerful political movement and it surprised everybody. The movement was heard all over the world.
SPEAKER_02: More than anything, the revolution marked a huge shift in what it really meant to be an Anguillian and it united Anguillians behind a single purpose under a single flag. But despite this new unity, Saint Kitts still had the power and they were withholding everything from postcards to pensions. The leader of Saint Kitts, Robert Bradshaw, even reportedly said, quote, I must get Anguilla back on their knees, end quote. Britain had no intention of separating the two islands and Anguillians were losing their patience.
SPEAKER_03: They realized they were being strung along and they realized that Britain wasn't particularly invested in allowing them to determine their own destiny.
SPEAKER_02: So in February of 1969, two years after Anguilla declared independence from the associated state, it took a more drastic step and declared independence again. But this time it was from the British. As a tiny nation with no diplomatic recognition, this was an incredibly risky move. But Anguillians voted 1,739 to four to end all ties with Great Britain. The Union Jack that had flowed alongside the Dolphin Flax since the start of the revolution was taken down because they decided they would rather try to make it entirely on their own than to have any connection with Saint Kitts.
SPEAKER_03: They would never negotiate that. They said they will never be part of the associated state in the discussion.
SPEAKER_02: But Britain wasn't ready to let go and they attempted a last ditch effort to save the associated state. They sent a British representative to Anguilla named William Whitlock to try to negotiate with the Anguillians. You have to understand you're dealing with the dead and dying vestiges of the British
SPEAKER_06: Empire. They didn't necessarily send their brightest people out to the Caribbean.
SPEAKER_02: The accounts of what happened next tend to vary depending on whether you're asking an Anguillian or a British person. But according to Wolachek, the Anguillians welcomed Whitlock at the airport with a stirring rendition of God Save the Queen. And as a sign of respect to Whitlock, Ronald Webster, the Anguillian leader, came dressed to the nines.
SPEAKER_03: He was actually wearing, what do you call it, a dinner coat? A very formal sort of, I'm not British, right? This thing that British people know what it is, right? He's dressed in this, like it had a tail.
SPEAKER_02: But the courtesy wasn't returned. Apparently Whitlock blew off an invitation to have lunch with Webster and instead ate with another British official stationed on the island. Feeling disrespected, the Anguillians asked Whitlock to leave the island.
SPEAKER_04: And he says, well, you know, you can't throw, I represent the crown, so you can't throw me, you can't tell me to leave. But the Anguillians were having none of it.
SPEAKER_03: I believe they fired some guns into the air to signal that they were serious.
SPEAKER_02: Whitlock jumped on a plane with his tail between his legs and headed straight back to Britain.
SPEAKER_03: Whitlock was humiliated. He shared his humiliation with his peers and his superiors. It's not really clear if he exaggerated what happened, but he really portrayed the islanders as villains who were extremely violent and about to kill him.
SPEAKER_02: Britain decided the only way to respond was by mounting a full-scale invasion to restore order. So the British invasion, such as you want to call it, actually occurred.
SPEAKER_06: They sent a frigate down there.
SPEAKER_03: Two Royal Navy frigates arrived and 330 paratroopers. People talk about seeing, you know, jeeps coming out of the sky.
SPEAKER_02: British forces parachuted onto the island and stormed the beaches, probably expecting armed resistance. But all they found were reporters snapping photos and some very confused Anguillians. Because the Declaration of Independence from Britain had been so recent, a lot of islanders thought that maybe the British were there to make Anguilla a direct colony again, like they had originally wanted.
SPEAKER_03: There were also locals who thought that the troops were actually there to help them. They thought to themselves, oh, they finally came to settle all this ridiculous controversy. We finally have direct colonial relations. There are stories that some women were taking food out, right, to the soldiers, like a sign of solidarity. And then they realized it was an aggressive invasion.
SPEAKER_02: The Anguillians didn't put up any resistance. There was very little violence and certainly no casualties. Once word got out about the so-called invasion of Anguilla, the British became a punchline.
SPEAKER_04: The foreign press, the press, international press, all over the world were basically making fun of the British invasion.
SPEAKER_02: The official name of the invasion was Operation Sheepskin, but it later became known by a different name.
SPEAKER_04: They called it the Bay of Piglets.
SPEAKER_02: The Anguillians allowed British troops to search their homes for weapons and watched as they replaced the dolphin flag that flew over the administrative office with the Union Jack. Anguilla had been taken without a fight. But in a way, Anguilla won the war.
SPEAKER_04: The Anguilla won the war because it had essentially achieved what it wanted to achieve in the first instance.
SPEAKER_02: It came at the hands of an unnecessary and aggressive invasion, but Anguilla was technically under colonial rule again. And more importantly, they were no longer under the thumb of St. Kitts, which was exactly what they had been originally fighting for. And because the British had gotten themselves into a PR nightmare, they had a lot of damage control to take care of. They started development programs to pave roads all over the island and a new runway for the airport. They also trained a new police force made up of locals. They didn't just have to make up for a disastrous military move, but for centuries of colonial neglect.
SPEAKER_03: Anguilla received more support than it ever received in all of the hundreds of years of British colonization. Britain established Anguilla as a colony in 1650. This is 1750, 1850, 1950, 300 years, more than 300 years. So in a matter of a couple of years, it began to have infrastructure, schools, there was a mobile library built, health professionals were stationed there.
SPEAKER_02: Anguilla was given the support that it needed to develop its economy and create a thriving tourism industry. It took over a decade to negotiate the terms, but by 1980, Anguilla had achieved full separation from St. Kitts and was officially a direct territory of Great Britain. It isn't technically correct to say that Anguillians achieved independence, but today the country has its own constitution and government.
SPEAKER_03: It's described by Anguilla today as independent. And when I first started going there, I kind of thought it was an independent nation. And then finally I started checking things out and then I would go to my Anguillian friends and I would be like, you know, Anguilla's not technically independent. And they would sort of flare up on me. They're like, we had a revolution, we were invaded, we had two declarations of independence. There's this parallel, very powerful and convincing narrative. And maybe, you know, a small place with such a different history, maybe they should be allowed to have sort of their own understanding of what independence is.
SPEAKER_02: Even though you can still see its presence all over the island today, the dolphin flag of the Republic of Anguilla was only officially flown for about two years. Once Britain invaded, it reverted back to the Union Jack and then got a completely new flag in 1990. The current design is a blue field with a Union Jack in the upper left canton with a clashing orange dolphin coat of arms on the right hand side. Most British overseas territories adhere to this particular style guide and to be honest, it's not so good. Those Union Jacks need to go. It's really only appropriate on the UK flag. But anyway, I digress. The current Anguilla flag is certainly less fun than the dolphin flag created by Marvin Obermann and Lydia Gumbs. But in a way, the design of the current flag is an appropriate, if complicated, symbol of what the country is and what it wanted to be.
SPEAKER_02: Coming up after the break, Kurt Colestad and I are going to talk about the first 99% invisible book. It's called the 99% Invisible City. It comes out October 6th. We're going to talk about it and tell you how you can get a copy or 10. You can get 10 copies. We will not stop you after this. When you're working on the go, how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter using Nanoluver technology. 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet. The perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens are wherever we go. Try the new 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears in your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3MScreens.com slash brighter to get your new 3M Bright Screen Privacy Filter today and work like no one is watching. 3MScreens.com slash brighter. 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. 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. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses, or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter? Or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website, or share your new blogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to squarespace.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. So we have a huge announcement. The first 99% invisible book is coming out October 6, 2020. It's called the 99% invisible city, a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design. It is written by Kurt Kohlstedt, our digital director and me. It's available for pre-order right now. So if you go to 99pi.org slash book, you can find all the places you can pre-order and pre-ordering is extremely important to new books, especially by new authors. We will talk a little bit more about that later, but first I want to tell you about the book itself. It is both a culmination of the 10 years of stories and the unique worldview of the podcast. And it's this huge leap forward with brand new stories and insights, literally everything we cover was researched and written from the ground up. So even if you know the show backwards and forwards, you've listened to every single episode, you might recognize a reference to Busta Rhymes Island, for example, but there are whole parts of that section about the process of naming things that were not in the episode. And then there's all the stuff that we've never covered on the show and we're just extremely proud of it. It's designed to be a reading book, like read it cover to cover, but also it has the look and feel of a field guide where you can flip through, find entries for the city artifact that's maybe sitting right in front of you and read a cool story about why that thing is the way it is. It's beautifully illustrated by Patrick Vale and designed by Raphael Geroni. So it's both this functional object I want you to use and read and carry around with you, but also a precious object that you will like to hold in your hands and look at. So to give you a sense of the stories that we tell in the book, the co-author Kurt Kohlstedt is here and I wanted us to cover one of the stories that I actually used to pitch the book to publishers in New York when I was out there. And as I was describing it, I said, well, it'll be like this travel guide, but it'll be to all the mundane, boring things that are in every city, not any one city in particular, but every city. And it'll have these entries like a field guide, but in the entry for like a traffic light, for example, it won't necessarily be the origin story of the traffic light. Well, cause the origin isn't always the most interesting story about a traffic light
SPEAKER_01: or anything else in your city. Right? Exactly. So we want to focus on the ones that are like, not just the best example of, but the coolest story about.
SPEAKER_02: The most interesting traffic light in the world, as far as I'm concerned, happens to be in Syracuse, New York. So what is so strange about the traffic light in the corner of Tompkins street and Milton Avenue in Syracuse, New York?
SPEAKER_01: Well, really simply it's upside down. So the order of lights is reversed. Right. So the green is above the red, which is unusual.
SPEAKER_01: You always see traffic lights the same way. I mean, sometimes they're sideways, right? But it's always green goes up to yellow goes up to red. Like that's the stack is just how we do things. But if you think about it, that had to start sometime. Right? So when the traffic lights started being deployed around the country, it wasn't like this is the way things have always been because there was no precedent. Yeah, it was brand new. So they landed in this one neighborhood in Syracuse, New York that happened to be very Irish and Irish Americans there saw this as an affront to their culture. You know, they never, this was a new phenomenon. Traffic lights were new to the area and they were like, well, why is the union red on top of the Irish green? Right.
SPEAKER_02: They're like, that's not the order of things. Green is above red. That's how things should be. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01: And so they did what, you know, anybody would do, I guess. And they just smashed it. They broke it. And then, you know, and you'd think, well, that would be the end of the story. They're going to fix this thing and everything will go back to normal. But no, like they keep repairing the light and people keep throwing stones at it and breaking it. And it kind of moves all the way up to the state level. There's all this back and forth. There are these aldermen that come in and say, okay, well, can we negotiate with the city to get this thing to be permanently, you know, upside down? And in the end, kind of remarkably to me, they won. And so to this day, that traffic light is still upside down. But then, you know, it's one of those stories where as you dig into it, you find all these fun details. And I love it. Like if you go there to this spot today, you don't just see the upside down traffic light. There's an entire memorial park on the corner and it's got, you know, an Irish flag. It's got this sort of shamrock embedded fence. It's got these bricks, which you can kind of picture representing like the bricks that maybe were thrown at the light with the members of, you know, community donors who helped make the park. And then there's this statue and it's a statue of family. And the father is pointing at the light.
SPEAKER_01: And the son, if you look closely, in his back pocket, there's a slingshot. And you know, so it's kind of this memorial to this very strange, seemingly low stakes little battle, but that ended up bringing this community together and got everybody really enthusiastic about a traffic light of all things. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So that is indicative of the type of story that we're telling in the book in addition to stories about, you know, mantle covers and towers and the grid system and cities and a bunch of things that you may know a little bit about as a regular listener to the show, but a bunch of stuff that I guarantee you do not because when we did the research is a bunch of stuff that was new to me and it's all put together in the new way.
SPEAKER_01: One of the things I love about the sort of challenge of the book and opportunity of the book was to say, well, we have all these stories, but we want to tell a larger story. You know, we want to make this into chapters. We want to tell this overarching story of the city. So the existing episodes that we wanted to include became the kind of framework around which we infilled all these other stories to tell larger stories. So we have, you know, a section, for example, on heritage, and it contains certain things that are topics we've covered in episodes, but we do it in a kind of order and we bring you through it so that it tells this larger story about how we think of heritage and old buildings in our built environments. Right.
SPEAKER_02: Like what is all the thinking behind preserving things and keeping things the way they are, restoring them to a certain state and not others or tearing them down even and how that relates to preservation and heritage. And then the whole book is organized around bigger concepts on the design of cities, but it also functions as a field guide that you can just kind of flip through. If you see something, you can open up the entry on, I don't know, utility graffiti, the spray paint markings on the street, and we'll tell you like what the different colors mean and what that means for what tubes and cables and piping is underneath the street in front of you. But we'll also tell you the big story of the explosion in Culver City, which codified all of these markings to make sure that the streets were safe when workers were digging underneath the ground. So the book really has like all these little ways that you can use it and enjoy it.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I mean, I think that's the beauty of it is that we made it so that each story really is independent. Each entry can be read by itself. But if you are interested in that kind of thing, you might go to the next entry and the next and the next, because in a lot of cases, you'll find that the story keeps going beyond the sort of thing that you're looking at at the moment while you're looking at that entry.
SPEAKER_02: Totally. And it's a field guide to the city. So it's a field guide to all cities in this way because it has stories from all over the world. But there's probably some analog in the city that you're in to the thing that we're talking about. But we do travel the globe with the book. And one of the things that's kind of interesting about releasing it in this time period where travel is limited is that if you're looking to be engaged in the world and you can't travel, this is actually a beautiful travel guide to the place where you are. You can go outside and find the depth and the history of a thing that is on your corner that maybe you've just ignored before. You've never thought about before. But there's this rich history there. And this book will be your guide to your own city. When you can't travel right now, you can find all this joy and pleasure and curiosity in the city that you're in. I think it's sort of a beautiful moment to have this book.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I completely agree. And I've been telling people that for a while now, too. It's just like, you can use this book both to think back to places you've been, but even just within a few blocks of your home, you'll find things that we talk about in this book. I mean, that's the kind of crazy thing, right? It's like you think this is sort of specific to a place. And our stories are anchored in places. But at the same time, they're kind of placeless. Yeah, they're real stories that take place in a place.
SPEAKER_02: So like, we take you to Syracuse, New York, we take you to Old Town, Warsaw, we take you to Barcelona, like there's all these stories in there. But most of these stories lead to big lessons about why the grid is the way it is in your city, even if you are, you know, 10,000 miles away from the one that we're talking about. And that's the nature of the show. It's very much the nature of the book. And I just am just really proud of how it all came together. And I think it's this—and it's also just like lovely. You know, like— It is really beautiful. And we're very lucky to be paired with a really talented designer and a really talented
SPEAKER_01: and just very hardworking illustrator who went above and beyond in a lot of cases to just bring stories to life. And that's something kind of unique and amazing about the book, too, is, you know, normally we can't show you these things. We have to walk you through what they look like or you know—and sometimes that's an advantage to storytelling. But sometimes it's really helpful if you could just immediately see on the page, okay, this is what we're talking about. We don't really have to describe it any further. We can just jump right into what it means. Right.
SPEAKER_02: So, needless to say, we want you to buy the book. And right now you can pre-order it. You can go to 99pi.org slash book to find all the relevant links. We also have a link in the show notes. I've learned so much about the book publishing industry as we've been going through this process and one of the keys to our success is a large number of pre-orders. So all the pre-orders of the book and the first week sales are all collapsed into one number and that determines if the book premieres on the New York Times bestseller list, for example. And that, of course, is a big deal. But also the pre-orders determine if big stores will stock the book and how many copies booksellers will order for their shelves. So you pre-ordering now greatly increases the chances that a person who has never heard of the show will see a copy randomly and flip through it and fall in love with it and buy one. So you, the current 99pi fan who orders right now, are the fuel for that whole engine. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And once you buy one, I mean, you might as well buy two. And if you're buying two, you could just buy three. I mean, you have family and friends and other nerds.
SPEAKER_02: It comes out October 6th. You could buy 10 and your shopping could be done for Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever you celebrate or like birthdays. It is a very good gift for all kinds of people who are just curious about the world and especially curious about the world that they live in every day. And so we think this is a lovely evolution of the show. And if the book does well, we might get the opportunity to do more. So 99pi.org slash book is the place to go to get your copy the day it comes out on October 6th. Do not wait. Get it today.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Kurt.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Roman. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivien Leigh. Mix and tech production by Kevin Ramsey and Sharif Yousif. Music by Sean Rial. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Katie Mingle, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Michael Beirut and Nisha Dupuy. Our technical producer, Sharif Yousif is leaving us this week to go on new adventures. We want to thank him for all of his hard work on the show, making things sound so beautiful for us and so beautiful for you, the listener. He's a true artist and will be missed. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is now distributed in multiple locations around North America. But in our hearts will always be in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist owned podcast in the world. You can donate to the collective at Radio-Topia.fm just like these fine people did. David Otoguro, Usam Hage, Brian Chesney, Eugene Gilbert-Park and Mike Garrett. Thank you so much. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram and Reddit too. We have links to the 99 Pi book and pictures of the 99 Pi book and how to pre-order the 99 Pi book at 99pi.org slash book. Radio Topia from PRX.
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