99% Invisible

Episode 79- Symphony of Sirens, Revisited

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:19:00 -0700

Sirens, for the ancient Greeks, were mythical creatures who sang out to passing sailors from rocks in the sea. Their music was so beautiful, it was said, that the sailors were powerless against it—they would turn their ships towards these sea nymphs and crash in the impassable reefs around them.

(The Siren, Edward Armitage, 1888)

There’s moment in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus and his men are traveling near an area that Sirens are known to inhabit. Odysseus knows that if he hears the siren’s song, his ship is going to sink. But he still wants to hear what they sound like. So he comes up with a plan: Odysseus has his men tie him to the mast of his ship so that he can’t give commands. And then Odysseus has his men fill their own ears with beeswax so they can’t hear anything. They set sail in striking distance of the sirens’ call.

(Ulysses and the Sirens, John William Waterhouse, 1891. Sirens were sometimes depicted as giant birds with heads of women)

The plan works: Odysseus gets to hear the music, his men don’t, and they sail on to safety—with Odysseus pleading with his crew to crash the boat the whole way.

And for the next 2000 or so years, that’s what a siren was: a creature that makes a beautiful sound.

But that all changed in 1819, when a French engineer named Charles Cagniard de la Tourdecided to give that name to call the artificial noisemaker he was working on the “siren.” (It could, after all, emit sound under water.)

(A siren from the 1860s. From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine)

And this new, mechanical siren became one of the signature sounds of the turn of the Century. Sirens announced the beginning and end of the workday at factories. Sirens warned people about immanent bombing raids during World War I. Sirens announced incoming fire engines, and ambulances, and police.

Thanks in part to the siren, the world of the the early 20th Century had become a lot louder than any time in human history. And we can probably assume that the sirens that people heard in cities all over the world sounded nothing like the Siren songs of Greek myth.

At least to most. One man, a composer, named Arseny Avraamov heard music in the cacophony of the modern world.

(Arseeny Avraamov (photographer unknown). Courtesy of Andrey Smirnov.)

In November of 1923, Avraamov stepped onto a Moscow rooftop clutching two oversized flags. The flags were his conductor’s wand—for his plan was to conduct an orchestra comprised of the city itself.

(Avraamov conducting the Symphony of Sirens (photographer unknown). Courtesy of Andrey Smirnov)

Enthralled with the Russian Revolution’s break from the past, Arseny Avraamov envisioned a “music of the future” made from factory sirens, barge foghorns, soldiers’ footsteps, artillery fire, workers songs, steam whistles, and proletarian shouts. Put together, he thought, the clatter of the newly formed Soviet Union could be music.

Avraamov called his composition The Symphony of Sirens.

(Graphical score for Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens. Appeared in Gorn Magazine, 1923.)

(Graphical score for Avraamov’s magistral. Appeared in Gorn Magazine, 1923. Author unknown)

As it happened, the Moscow debut of the Symphony of Sirens coincided with a military parade, a celebration of the Soviet Union’s sixth birthday. Most people didn’t even know that they were witnessing—and creating—a work of music.

Moscow-based producer Charles Maynes investigated the legend of Arseny Avraamov and his forgotten masterpiece. This story was part of the Global Story Project, presented by PRX with support from the Open Society Foundations.

For more on the avant-garde audio experiments of the 1920s Soviet Union, check out Andrey Smirnov’s Generation Z (though a working knowledge of Russian might be helpful). And Sergey Khismatov, composer of Symphony of Industrial Horns (a reconstruction of Avraamov’s work, which appears in Charles’s story), has a website in English.

BONUS! Stay tuned at the end of the episode for one from the archives: #25- Unsung Icons of Soviet Design. After listening, you can go bow down before the glory of Krugozor.

Episode 78- No Armed Bandit

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:39:00 -0700

Americans now spend more money on slot machines than movies, baseball, and theme parks combined.

(Credit: Natasha Dow Schüll)

Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded as vending machines. They gave out chewing gum as prizes, and those prizes could be redeemed for cash.

That’s where the fruit logos come from. In fact, in the UK, slot machines are called “fruit machines.”

Despite outward appearances, slot machines have evolved dramatically since they first appeared in 1895.

(Credit: felinebird)

To play the first slot machines, you slipped in a coin and pulled the lever to set the machine’s wheels in motion. The slot machine’s crank-action operation (and the way it took your money) earned it the nickname of the “one-armed bandit.”

But today, those hand-crank levers are uncommon, and where they do exist they are known as “legacy levers,” because they have zero relation to how the machine actually works. Everything inside a slot machine has been computerized and automated—from how you enter money, to how you bet, to how you play, to how you win and lose, and even to how you feel when leave.

At first, gambling machines existed at the fringes of casino culture—both figuratively and literally. The real money was in tabletop games—or so it was thought—and the slots were set up around the edges of the casino to give gamblers’ wives something to do while they waited.

But then video technology expanded what slots could do. Now a machine could have more rows and columns than the standard three-by-three, and allowed you to place multiple bets on a single spin. A penny slot machine could let you place a hundred different one-cent bets per spin—so even if you win 40 cents on one line, and the machine congratulates you with flashing lights and chimes, you still lose 60 cents.

And that’s how video slots have become the most lucrative—and addictive—game in a casino.

(Credit: Alan S Living with Autism)

At the same time, a shift happened in how some people gamble (or maybe in experts’ understanding of how people had always gambled). People don’t just play to win—people play to win to play. Gamblers don’t just want to win money, but rather to extend play for as long as possible.

And there’s a specific type of uninterrupted play that gamblers want to extend. Slot players call this being in “the zone.”

“The zone” is a sort of trance-state that players experience while they’re playing. One’s sense of time, space, body, and sense of self can disappear.

So there’s an imperative to design against interruption. Which is why machines lost their levers. It’s why some players will create ways to signal to cocktail waitresses that they don’t want to be bothered. It’s why so many people play a game where the odds of winning are completely unknown.

Our guest this week is Natasha Dow Schüll, an MIT-based anthropologist who has been studying Las Vegas and the culture of gambling for more than fifteen years. Schüll is the author of Addiction by Design.

To learn more about Schüll’s work, check out her book Addicted by Design and her above talk at the Gel 2008 conference. Schüll also created the documentary film Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, about the fascinating spectacle that is the Las Vegas buffet.

Episode 77- Game Changer

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:47:41 -0700

Regardless of how you feel about basketball, you’ve got to appreciate the way it can bring groups of strangers together to share moments of pure adulation and collective defeat.

Case in point: the buzzer beater:

You know this moment: time is running out, the team is down by one, a player arcs the ball from downtown just as the buzzer sounds—and sinks it. it’s exhilarating. It’s heart breaking. And most of all, it’s good design. But it’s not the way basketball was originally designed.

The invention of basketball is credited to James Naismith, a phys ed instructor who had the idea to mount peach baskets to a the walls of a Springfield, Massachusetts gymnasium, and have his students attempt to throw a leather ball through them.

After points were earned, the game was put on hold until someone could retrieve the ball with a ladder.

(The first basketball court at what is now Springfield College)

Eventually, the bottomless basket became the standard, and early 20th Century basketball became a speedier game than in the 1890s. But watch any game from as late as the 1950s and it still seems dreadfully slow compared with how the game looks today.

Here’s what’s missing from the basketball of yore: the shot clock.

During pro basketball’s infancy in the 1950s, nothing forced a player to shoot the ball. If a team was winning, and they wanted to keep their lead, the team could literally hold on to the ball for ten minutes and run the clock out.

The game may not have seemed slow to the players, but it wasn’t a particularly compelling spectator sport. Especially when you had games like the November 22, 1950 bout between the Ft. Wayne Pistons and the Minneapolis Lakers, which had a final score of 19-18.

(From Basketball-Reference.com)

Fast forward to 1954. Enter Danny Biasone, owner the Syracuse Nationals. Biasone had crunched some numbers, and he believed that some simple arithmetic could save basketball.

By this point, an exciting game of pro ball would have teams scoring 80 or more points—a score that Biasone figured was high enough to retain the audience’s interest. Biasone started tracking how many shots a team needed to make to score the requisite 80-something points, and he found that each team needed to take an average of 60 shots per game.

So given…

60 shots per game x 2 teams = 120 total shots per game

And…

One game = 48 minutes = 2880 seconds

Thus, divide the number of shots needed by the length of the game…

2880 seconds per game / 120 shots

And you get…

24 seconds per shot

Therefore, Biasone reasoned, an exciting game of basketball needed a team to take shot every 24 seconds. To hold players to that standard, Biasone instituted a 24-second shot clock, and a new rule to go with it—if a team doesn’t take a shot by the time that clock runs out, it’s a violation and they lose possession of the ball. No more running the clock for minutes at a time.

There’s any number of reasons a basketball fan can love the sport—the pace, the intensity, the sheer athleticism of the players—but it just might be that they all take root in that tiny, nearly invisible 24 second shot clock.

(Credit: gorbould)

Danny Biasone was posthumously inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000. Basketball legend Dolph Schayes, who played under Biasone’s leadership on the Syracuse Nationals, offered a tribute at the ceremony.

Reporter Eric Mennel spoke with Dolph Schayes—who played pro basketball both before and after the advent of the shot clock—about how Biasone’s contribution to the game shaped basketball into what it has become today.

A different version of this story aired previously on BackStory with the American History Guys, where Eric is a staff producer.

Episode 76- The Modern Moloch

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:06:44 -0700

On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.”

And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year.

(Credit: New York Times, Nov 23, 1924)

Much of the public viewed the car as a death machine. One newspaper cartoon even compared the car to Moloch, the god to whom the Ammonites supposedly sacrificed their children.

Pedestrian deaths were considered public tragedies. Cities held parades and built monuments in memory of children who had been struck and killed by cars. Mothers of children killed in the streets were given a special white star to honor their loss.

(Courtesy of Peter Norton)

The main cause for these deaths was that the rules of the street were vastly different than how they are today. A street functioned like a city park, or a pedestrian mall, where you could move in any direction without really thinking about it. The only moving hazards were animals and other people.

Turn-of-the-century footage from San Francisco’s Market Street shows just how casually people strode into the street.

If a car hit someone, the car was to blame. From the New York Times, November 23, 1924:

The horrors of peace appear to be appalling than the horrors of war. The automobile looms up as a far more destructive piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death the artilleryman. The man in streets seems less safe than the man in the trench. The greatest single lethal factor is the automobile. It left shambles in its wake as it coursed through 1923.

(From left: poster by Harry de Bauffer, reproduced in “Poster Wins Second Prize,” Milwaukee Journal, September 28, 1920; poster by George Starkey, reproduced in “Winning Safety Poster,” Milwaukee Journal, September 25, 1920.)

Automotive interests banded together under the name Motordom. One of Motordom’s public relations gurus was a man named E. B. Lefferts, who put forth a radical idea: don’t blame cars, blame human recklessness. Lefferts and Motordom sought to exonerate the machine by placing the blame with individuals.

And it wasn’t just drivers who could be reckless—pedestrians could be reckless, too. Children could be reckless.

This subtle shift allowed for streets to be re-imagined as a place where cars belonged, and where people didn’t. Part of this re-imagining had to do with changing the way people thought of their relationship to the street. Motordom didn’t want people just strolling in.

So they coined a new term: “Jay Walking.”

In the early 20th Century, “jay” was a derogatory term for someone from the countryside. Therefore, a “jaywalker” is someone who walks around the city like a jay, gawking at all the big buildings, and who is oblivious to traffic around him. The term was originally used to disparage those who got in the way of other pedestrians, but Motordom rebranded it as a legal term to mean someone who crossed the street at the wrong place or time.

Over time, Americans began to view their relationship to the automobile as a sort of love affair—which means that logic need not always apply. Groucho Marx even said so himself!

(Credit: Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Poster illustrated by Isadore Posoff, 1937)

Our reporter this week is Jesse Dukes, who spoke with historian Peter Norton about the invention of jaywalking.

We just learned today (literally!) that Peter Norton previously appeared on BackStory With the American History Guys in 2008, speaking with host Brian Balogh (who also happens to have been Peter Norton’s dissertation adviser). Check out that interview here.

And here’s Peter Norton over at The Atlantic Cities.

We had help recreating historical (and counterfactual) America with the vocal talent of Snap Judgment’s Pat Mesiti-Miller, Stephanie Foo, Anna Sussman, Will Urbina, and Nick van der Kolk. Their recent episode Making It Work is an instant classic!

Support for this episode comes in part from Tiny Letter—email for people with something to say!

Support also comes from Squarespace, offering listeners a free trial and 10% new orders—head to squarespace.com/99invisible and use the code “invisible4”.

Episode 75- Secret Staircases

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:45:00 -0700

Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of California—if you know where to look—you’ll find public, outdoor staircases.

(Credit: Alana Goldstein)

The large number of often hidden, public staircases is part of what makes California so great. San Francisco’s tourist-crushing Filbert Steps to Coit Tower are not to be handled lightly. The Monument Way staircase just off the corner of 17th and Clayton leads the intrepid walker to what used to be Sutro’s Triumph of Light and Liberty statute. There’s just something about a secret staircase that beckons you to go out of your way to use it.

(Credit: Charles Fleming)

Charles Fleming is one of the world experts of coastal California’s public stairs. Charles has documented and mapped walking routes through nearly every useable public staircase in San Francisco’s East Bay, as well as in Los Angeles (where he lives). He published his findings in two walking guides, appropriately titled Secret Stairs.

Producer Sam Greenspan met with Charles in the Pacific Palisades, where people from all over Los Angeles had gathered to attend one of Charles’ monthly stair walks.

(Charles at right. Credit: Alana Goldstein)

Charles’s fascination with public stairs began with a basic need to walk. “I was trying to walk my way out of a surgery,” he says. “I had had two hip replacements and two spinal surgeries in the space of about 6 years, and I was up for a third spinal surgery. I simply couldn’t face it…so I told the surgeon I’m not coming, because I had found that a little bit of walking relieved the pain I was in.”

Charles started walking flat streets, the moved to hilly streets, and eventually graduated to the stairs. He looked for a city inventory of all the staircases, but couldn’t find one. So he started making his own.

(Walk #41 from Secret Stairs, the route Charles took Sam through. Credit: Charles Fleming.)

(Credit: Alana Goldstein)

The staircases are generally either from the 1920s boom years or from the Works Progress Administration in the 1940s. They were built because developers in hilly areas needed to find a way for prospective home buyers to get down from their houses to a school, church, or streetcar line. But the Depression, and then World War II, halted most staircase construction.

(Credit: Alana Goldstein)

And there’s something about exploring the public stairs that feels like trespassing.

Notes:

Public radio super-listeners may recognize Charles Fleming as the author of My Lobotomy, the book adaptation of an award-winning radio documentary of the same title.
The “favorite place in San Francisco” referenced in this piece is Sutro’s forgotten monument, the subject of Episode #5

Episode 74- Hand Painted Signs

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:02:00 -0800

There was a time when every street sign, every billboard, and every window display was painted by hand. This sounds unremarkable until you actually think about what that actually means.

(Sign painter Chancey Curtis in Mankato, MN, ca. 1930. Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)

Every single sign in existence was made by a sign artist with a paint kit and an arsenal of squirrel- or camel-hair brushes. Some lived an itinerant lifestyle, traveling from town to town, knocking on the doors of local shops, asking if they could paint their signs.

(From Wagner’s Blue Print Text Book of Sign and Show Card Lettering.

Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)

And this was the way things were until as recently as the 1980s, when everything was upended by the vinyl plotter. Now, sign-making was faster, easier, and cheaper than ever before. Moreover, vinyl signs didn’t require any skill to make. But over time, they created an environment of anonymity and impermanence.

(Credit: Gelatobaby)

Hand painted signs began to disappear. But not completely.

(Credit: New Bohemia Signs)

Our contributor Benjamen Walker spoke with Faythe Levine and Sam Macon about their new book and documentary project, Sign Painters, which profiles more than two dozen contemporary sign painters keeping the tradition alive.

(Ken Davis and Caitlyn Galloway of New Bohemia Signs. Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)

(A collection of work from New Bohemia Signs. Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)

Benjamen also spoke with sign painter and cartoonist Justin Green, who draws the comic series Sign Game (among others).

(Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)

Sam Greenspan also visited New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco to get their take on the sign painting scene. Damon Styer, the store’s owner, was working on a “rickshaw obscura” for the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Sign Painters (the film) premiers in Washington, D.C. on March 30.

Episode 73- The Zanzibar and Other Building Poems

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:37:00 -0800

There comes a time in the life of a modern city where it begins to grow up—literally. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has been going through a tremendous growth spurt since its economic boom of the mid 1990s. It happened fast. In just a few years, single family homes all over the city gave way to high rises.

(Credit: Miguel Angel)

A man named Rodrigo Rojas played a small part in Santiago’s “upward mobility.” This wouldn’t be that remarkable if he were an engineer, a real estate developer, or an architect. But Rodrigo Rojas is a poet.

This is how it worked: a developer bought an old house, tore it down, and had an architect draw up plans for a new high rise. And then Rodrigo stepped in to give the building a name.

In a way, these names of buildings became Rodrigo’s first published poems. Sometimes these poems were just about flattering his clients—like when he’d named a building after the developer.

But sometimes these poems—like good poetry in general—could be transformative. In one particularly cold and humid neighborhood, El Llano, Rodrigo gave buildings names that made it seem almost tropical. He imagined that residents could forget the weather. Sitting on their balconies, staring off into the slate gray sky, they could dream of beaches. He called several buildings the Cancúns. Developers were so excited they planted palm trees—which are atypical in Santiago.

(Credit: Grego Lepoolpe)

Rodrigo even fabricated whole stories in the service of building an identity. He came up with one story about a ship called the Zanzibar, a luxury liner built with the Titanic, but slightly smaller. And the Zanzibar never sank.

“When you mix luxury with survival of tragedy, it’s very important for Chile,” says Rodrigo. ”It’s the search of status, and the survival of earthquakes.”

And if a developer rubbed him the wrong way, he’d sneak in a joke. There’s a building in Santiago named Infantes de Carrión. In Spanish, “infantes” are children of kings, which gives it an air of nobility and prestige. Unless, of course, you happen to have read El Mio Cid, one of the most famous epic poems in the Spanish language, and know that the Infantes de Carrion are horrific villains.

But on the whole, Rodrigo was a kind of interpreter of dreams—he tapped into the psyche of what the people of Santiago wanted to become, and tried to give that a name.

(Credit: Carla McKay)

Our reporter this week is Daniel Alarcón, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, a new podcast which has been called “This American Life en Español” (though some stories are in English).

Daniel is also the author of the award-winning novel Lost City Radio. His next book, At Night We Walk in Circles, will be out in the fall.

Episode 72- New Old Town

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:38:00 -0800

Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part: The Old Town.

(Credit: Andy Wright)

Walking through the historic district, it’s just like any other quaint European city. There are tourist shops, horse-drawn carriage rides, church spires. The buildings are beautiful—but they are not original.

During World War II, German forces razed more than 80% of Warsaw. After Soviet troops took over, much of the city was rebuilt in the with communist style: fast, cheap, and big. They built apartment blocks, wide avenues, and heavy grey buildings. It was communist ideology in architectural form.

But when it came to the historic district of Warsaw—the Old Town and a long connecting section called the Royal Route—they decided not just to rebuilt, but to restore. Builders would use the same stones, and use special kilns to make special bricks to preserve its authenticity. After six years of reconstruction, the new Old Town was opened. Poles were ecstatic to have it back. Even in the West, it was seen as a triumph of the human spirit.

But here’s the thing: Warsaw’s historic Old Town is not a replica of the original. It’s a re-imagining. An historic city that never really was.

Look closely.

(From left: Warsaw’s Old Town Square in 1913; in 1945; and in 2009)

Not long after the Old Town was rebuilt, people started to notice that it was a little bit off. People wandered around and feeling this uncanny disjuncture between the city that they remembered and the city in which they now found themselves.

(From left: Nowy Swiat (“New World”) Street, c. 1915-1918; in 2009)

Despite the push for authenticity, it turned out that the major inspiration for the rebuilding of the city were the paintings of an 18th Century Italian artist named Bernardo Bellotto. Bellotto was a “vedutista,” one who specialized in the Venetian style of painting in which cityscapes are depicted realistically, with their details and documented precisely.

(“Dluga Street,” Bernardo Bellotto, 1778.)

But Bellotto had a tendency to make “improvements” on the cities he painted, relying as much on his artistic license as what he actually observed. The paintings from the 18th Century were never meant to match reality—they were supposed to be better than reality.

(From left: John’s House on Castle Square in the 1920s; John’s House as depicted by Bellotto, c. 1768; John’s House After the 1948 reconstruction.)

For the Soviets, this reconfiguration of the Old Town served two purposes. FIrst, they wanted to send the message that the Old Town—and Warsaw as a whole—would be better than it was before the war. Second, they didn’t want Poles to long for this lost part of the city. By recreating Old Town, the past could stop being such a distraction, and they could get to work on a drastic overhaul of the country.

(Credit: Emily Heath)

Today, placards with Bellotto’s paintings stand beside buildings, inviting passers-by to marvel at their likeness.

Our story this week was reported by Amy Drozdowska and Dave McGuire, who spoke with Warsaw-born anthropologist Michał Murawski about Warsaw’s complicated history.

NOTE:

This week’s episode is sponsored in part by Sidewalk Radio with Gene Kansas, which covers the art, architecture, design and urban planning of Atlanta, GA and beyond.

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:53:05 -0800

Last year I appeared on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters and now the episode is on Soundcloud for easy sharing. This is my mom’s favorite interview with me. Design Matters has posted 141 past episodes for your listening pleasure!

Episode 71- In and Out of LOVE

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:57:00 -0800

(Credit: Mike Blabac)

Though its official name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park, after the Robert Indiana sculpture installed there.

Designed by Edmund Bacon and Vincent Kling, the park was fashioned in high modernism: sleek, granite benches; geometric raised planter beds, and long expanses of pavement. Its success as a pedestrian plaza is debatable.

But it turned out to be perfect for skateboarding.

(Credit: Mike Blabac)

You could even make skateboard ramps by pulling up the concrete tiles.

(Credit: Mike Blabac)

Skaters started filming themselves at LOVE Park in the early 1990s. Once their videos found their way to California—the epicenter of the skating world—Philadelphia became a skating destination. As the skateboarding industry grew, so did the popularity of LOVE Park. By the end of the decade, professional skaters moved to Philly just to skate in LOVE everyday.

LOVE Park may have become the Mecca of skateboarding, but skateboarding was never a legal activity there. Police chased (and still chase) away skateboarders, and can issue fines or even confiscate boards. And as the city gentrified, the grip on skating in LOVE Park tightened, and the city announced that the park would undergo a $1 million redesign to make the park unskateable. DC Shoes, a skateboarding footwear company, offered to match the city’s $1 million if they would keep the park as-is and use the money to repair the wear and tear done by the skaters. The city declined, and renovated the park in 2002.

“The major thing they did was they removed all the of the granite benches that were there, these giant slabs of granite that were these great skateable elements,” says Philadelphia architect Tony Bracali. ”And they replaced them with Williams and Sonoma-ish wood benches that look like they belong in an 1890s kind of park.”

(LOVE Park after the renovation. Credit: Tony Bracali)

Though Bracali is not a skateboarder himself, he’s become an advocate for skateboarders’ rights, and argues that skateboarding actually improves the life of public places.

Here’s Bracali giving a tour of LOVE Park after the renovation in a documentary called Freedom of Space (beginning at 36:30)

LOVE Park’s renovation didn’t just upset the skateboarders. Edmund Bacon, one of the park’s designers, was so impressed with the skateboarders’ ability to find a new use for the space he designed, that at age 92, Bacon skated in LOVE Park in protest of the crackdown..

Edmund Bacon Skates Love Park from WHYY on Vimeo.

Other cities deployed anti-skating countermeasures as well. In San Francisco, innocuous-looking marine life sculptures were installed around the Embarcadero to render ledges ungrindable, and “skatestoppers” were put on ledges at another SF skating landmark called Hubba Hideout.

(Credit: Andrew Norton)

But skateboarding culture is a culture of adaptation. DC Shoes, after failing to keep LOVE Park from being renovated, opened their own skate park in Kettering, OH, using similar features found in LOVE Park. Tony Bracali, the architect, is working to create skateable public places. so skating doesn’t have to be confined only to the skate park. And in Tacoma, WA, skateboarders won the right to remove skatestoppers in what is now known as Thea’s Park.

If you don’t skateboard, don’t live in Philly, or don’t want to get chased by the cops, you can skate LOVE Park virtually—and in a few different ways, too. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 was the first to include a LOVE Park level, but some gamers have re-created their own LOVE Park in other games, such as EA Skate 3.

Our reporter this week is Andrew Norton, a Toronto-based skateboard photographer-turned-radio producer. Andrew Norton is a proud graduate of the Transom Story Workshop, led by our friend Rob Rosenthal from HowSound.

Episode 70- The Great Red Car Conspiracy

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:12:15 -0800

When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city—until a car company bought it, dismantled it, and forced a dependency on freeways.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because it was the evil scheme revealed at the end of the Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

But like most legends, the one that Eric heard about the Red Car is not entirely accurate. It’s true that Los Angeles did have an extensive mass transit system called the Red Car, which at one time ran on 1,100 miles of track—about 25 percent more more track mileage than New York City has today, a century later.

But the Red Car wasn’t the victim of a conspiracy. The Red Car was the conspiracy.

Our reporter Eric Molinsky spoke with historian Bill Friedricks, who says that to understand the Red Car, you first need to know about Henry Huntington, one of the major power brokers of Los Angeles. If you’ve ever heard of Huntington Beach, Huntington Park, or the Huntington Library, this is that Huntington.

Henry Huntington was the nephew of railroad magnate Collis Huntington, who mentored Henry and taught him the family business. When Collis Huntington died in 1900, Henry expected that he would inherit his uncle’s company, Southern Pacific. But Southern Pacific’s board didn’t want another Huntington in charge. They forced him out, but gave him a $15 million payout (about $400 million today).

Henry Huntington took his money and headed for Los Angeles. He purchased the biggest transportation system in the city, The Los Angeles Railway (LARy), and then incorporated it into a new company called Pacific Electric. Huntington also started building hundreds of subdivisions on the periphery of Los Angeles, and used Pacific Electric trains—bright red trolleys—to connect the subdivisions to downtown Los Angeles.

Over time, though, Huntington had built so many subdivisions that his Red Car couldn’t do a good enough job connecting the city’s disparate areas. The Red Car was never designed to be a comprehensive system like the New York City Subway; rather, it existed primarily to get people in and out of Huntington’s subdivisions. Angelenos who could afford cars found it was easier to get around by driving. The Red Car fell into disrepair, and was mocked as a “slum on wheels.”

Eventually, Southern Pacific (the company Huntington thought he would inherit from his uncle Hollis) bought Pacific Electric, and in 1926 they offered Los Angles a massive plan to use public dollars to build subways and elevated trains around downtown L.A. But California voters didn’t trust Southern Pacific, which had meddled in California politics for so long that people called it “The Octopus.” The people voted against the plan.

Red Car routes were decommissioned, and bus routes and freeways would eventually replace the Red Car entirely. The last Red Car ran in 1961.

But if you look carefully, you can still spot evidence of the old Pacific Electric Railroad company, especially around Santa Monica.

To find out more about the Red Car, check out Bill Friedrick’s book, Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California (which you can read, in entirety, for free!).

Or, you can just go play L.A. Noire.

No longer an Angeleno, Eric Molinsky is now based in Brooklyn, where he makes radio and draws people on the subway.

Episode 69- The Brief and Tumultuous Life of the New UC Logo

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 14:36:00 -0800

**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**

If you’re not from California, or missed this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo. Or rather had a new logo. To be more precise they had a new “visual identity system,” which is the kind of entirely accurate but completely wonky description that gets met with sarcastic eye rolls from anyone who isn’t a designer, but there it is. But they don’t have a new ~~anything~~ logo anymore. Because of a massive public backlash, the UC system actually suspended the ~~entire new brand identity~~ monogram while we were reporting this story.

In this episode, we talk to the Creative Director of the UC Office of the President, Vanessa Correa, who led the team that created this short-lived brand identity and Christopher Simmons, principal of MINE, who waded into the UC logo fight with a brilliant blog post called “Why the UC Rebrand is Better Than You Think.”

One of the factors that contributed to the negative public reaction was that fact that the UC monogram was often depicted side by side with the classic University seal in media reports.

Christopher Simmons argues that this image, and the general ignorance of the press, implied that the UC monogram was replacing the seal. Actually, the seal was not going anywhere, but this fact was not always clear. And even if the text was accurate regarding the logo’s relationship with the seal, the visual language of the juxtaposition cemented people’s expectations instantly. The blog Brand New depicted a more accurate representation of the visual identity evolution.

Another piece of the marketing that misled the public was the University produced video that graphically illustrated some of the design elements in the monogram being pulled out of the seal, followed by the old seal being brushed aside. As a stand-alone statement, the video reinforced a lot of the fears that people had about the new logo and what it might replace.

Fourth generation UC Berkeley alum, Cyrus Farivar (see episodes #36 and #55, true believers) takes a look at the new UC logo and chronicles its tumultuous life and rapid death. We also use this opportunity to ruminate on the topic of how and when a design should be judged.

Important clarification from Vanessa Correa: “To be entirely accurate, the university didn’t suspend the entire new brand identity, but rather, just the monogram. (I’ve become a stickler for accuracy as of late. It’s a new thing with me.)”**

**We corrected the audio to reflect this clarification. I’m embarrassed by the error.

Ira Glass mentions me and 99% Invisible by name in his...

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:05 -0800

Ira Glass mentions me and 99% Invisible by name in his commencement address at the CUNY Grad School of Journalism. Really! It’s in the first couple minutes. Later on he mentions pig rectum, so stay tuned!

Episode 68- Built for Speed

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:44:22 -0800

**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**

I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major highway. How long are the stripes and the spaces between them?

You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to.

Over the course of many years, a psychology researcher named Dennis Schafer at Ohio State asked students from many different parts of the country this question and the most common response was that the white stripes are two feet long.

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the brilliant book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), reveals the real answer and some of the other perceptual countermeasures that are designed to make you feel comfortable going way faster than your brain can adequately process.

We also talk about how this design language of exaggerated scale and wide vistas is great for limited access highways, but it’s problematic when these features are grafted onto suburban landscapes where they don’t belong.

All the music in this episode is courtesy of my favorite new label, the Utah based, Hel Audio. Specifically, we played the bands OK Ikumi and Mooninite. Hel Audio focuses on physical releases of electronic and experimental music. I just bought myself the full Hel Audio catalog on four glorious cassette tapes, along with less glorious but more versatile (and free with purchase) digital downloads of the same songs. The tape deck in my twelve-year-old Golf has never been happier.

I, and every other creative audio lover, owe a huge debt to The Third Coast International Audio Festival, and every year I send them a small donation to make sure they keep going, or I buy a t-shirt. They have hands-down my favorite t-shirt design in the whole world— across the front is the word “listen” written in Braille. I have something like six of them in every color. A must have for any radio lover. You can find out more at thirdcoastfestival.org.

Episode 67- Broken Window

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:44:00 -0800

**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**

When Melissa Lee was growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town in upstate New York, there were only so many fun things to do. One was buying geodes and smashing them apart with a hammer. (You know geodes, right? Those dull-looking brown rocks that you break open to reveal crystalline structures inside?)

One day, when Melissa was thirteen, she and her friend Liz bought some geodes, They didn’t want to wait to get home to crack them open, so they decided to throw them against the wall of an apartment building.

Liz’s aim went wild on one of the geodes, and it went through a window.

Melissa and Liz tried to find person whose window they had broken, but they couldn’t figure out which door in the apartment building lead to the unit with the window in question. Eventually they gave up.

Melissa would have probably forgotten about the incident had it not been for one inexplicable thing: the window didn’t get fixed. Ever.

It was clear that someone lived there. Melissa would walk by the window and see the apartment lit up by a TV. Someone was opening the window in the summer, and closing it in the winter. But the hole remained.

Melissa finished middle school, then high school, then went away to college. And when she came home and saw the window still broken, it had this effect of making her feel like the nervous, insecure thirteen year old she was when she broke the window.

This became a pattern for Melissa: she’d leave home, do some growing up, come home, see the window, and feel like a teenager.

Melissa traveled the world. She went to graduate school, She moved to Washington, DC, She got married. And every time she’d come home, she’d see the window. “As much as I was changing, this part of my past was completely frozen,” Melissa says. “As soon as I saw the window I was brought right back to those middle school days when we had broken it.”

So in 2011, 22 years after the incident, Melissa went to go find the person who left the window broken for so long. She brought along a tape recorder.

Images this week are by Emile Holmewood, a New Zealand-based graphic designer & illustrator. Find more of his amazing work at The Caravan.

Episode 66- Kowloon Walled City

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:13:00 -0800

**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**

Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever.

(“Walled City Night Views (from SW Corner), 1987.” Greg Girard.)

By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000). That’s a population density of at least 3.2 million per square mile. For New York City to get that dense, every man, woman, and child living in Texas would have to move to Manhattan.

To put it another way, think about living in a 1,200 square foot home. Then imagine yourself living with 9 other people. Then imagine that your building is only one unit of a twelve-story building, and every other unit is as full as yours. Then imagine hundreds those buildings crammed together in a space the size of four football fields.

We can’t really imagine it, either.

(Credit: Ian Lambot)

Kowloon Walled City began as a military fort in Kowloon, a region in mainland China. In 1898, China signed a land lease with Great Britain, giving the British control of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and other nearby territories. But the lease stipulated that the fort in Kowloon would remain under Chinese jurisdiction.

Over time, the fort became abandoned, leaving the area subject to neither Chinese nor British authority. This legal gray zone was attractive to displaced and marginalized people. Thousands of people moved there after the war with Japan broke out in 1937. Even more people moved there after the Communist Revolution. It attracted gangsters, drug addicts, sex workers, and refugees. And it also drew a lot of normal people from all over China who saw opportunity there.

They built the city building by building, first blanketing the area of the fort, then building vertically.

(Left: “West Side Street (Overhead Pipes), 1990.” Right: “Water Standpipe (Man Washing), 1989.” Greg Girard.)

Buildings were packed together so tightly in the Walled City that the alleys were nearly pitch-black in the day time. Electricity and water were brought in by illegal or informal means.

There was no garbage collection, so people pitched their trash out of their windows.

(Left: “Dislodging Refuse from Overhead Pipes, 1987.” Left: “Grill Above Temple Roof, 1989.” Greg Girard.)

This sewer grate pictured above was installed to keep garbage from falling onto the roof of a temple, seen below.

(“Grill Below Temple Roof, 1989.” Greg Girard.)

The Walled City gained a reputation as a sort of den of iniquity—there were high levels of prostitution, gambling, mafia activity, and rampant unlicensed dentistry.

(“Walled City Dentist Window, 1989.” Greg Girard.)

But an order did emerge. There was an informal kindergarten. A resident’s organization settled disputes. And there was lots of industry.

(Left: “Workers in a Fishball Factory, 1987.” Right: “Worker in Metalwork Shop, 1988.” Greg Girard.)

You could even receive mail in the Walled City.

(“Walled City Mail Delivery, 1987.” Greg Girard.)

Kowloon Walled City was torn down in 1993. Today, it’s Kowloon Walled City Park. Most traces of the city are gone, though there is a model of the city cast in bronze.

Credit: trevor.patt

But the memory of the city lives on. It was featured in the non-verbal film Baraka, and plays a cameo role in Bloodsport.

It’s also served as the setting in a number of video games, including most recently Call of Duty: Black Ops

If you still can’t get enough of Kowloon Walled City, here’s an hour-long documentary (in German, with English subtitles)

This week’s episode was produced by Nick van der Kolk (whom you may remember from Episode #21). He spoke with photographer Greg Girard and architect Aaron Tan, who both spent time in the Walled City. Nick also talked to as Brian Douglas, who helped design Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Nick is the director of the award-winning podcast, Love + Radio. You can also hear him over at Snap Judgment. Alexander Jerri contributed to this story.

Episode 65- Razzle Dazzle

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:37:00 -0800

This is probably not what you think of when you think of camouflage.

(Erik Gould, courtesy of the Fleet Library at RISD, Providence, RI..)

(Erik Gould, courtesy of the Fleet Library at RISD, Providence, RI.)

Becoming invisible with your surroundings is only one type of camouflage. Camofleurs call this high similarity or blending camouflage. But camouflage can also take the opposite approach.

(Erik Gould, courtesy of the Fleet Library at RISD, Providence, RI.)

Think about zebras: it’s hypothesized that their stripes make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one from another when the zebras are in a large herd. The stripes also might make zebras less attractive to blood sucking horseflies. This is called disruptive camouflage.

When it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage was called Dazzle.

(Anon, photograph of the USS West Mahomet in dazzle camouflage, 1918. Courtesy US Naval Historical and Heritage Command, NH 1733.)

Dazzle painting emerged in the 1910s as design solution to a very dire problem: American and British ships were being sunk left and right by German U-Boats. England needed to import supplies to fight the Central Powers, and these ships were sitting ducks in the Atlantic Ocean. They needed a way to fend of the torpedoes.

Conventional high-similarity camouflage just doesn’t work in the open sea. Conditions like the color of the sky, cloud cover, and wave height change all the time, not to mention the fact that there’s no way to hid all the smoke left by the ships’ smoke stacks.

The strategy of this high-difference, dazzle camouflage was not about invisibility. It was about disruption. Confusion.

Torpedoes in the Great War could only be fired line-of-sight, so instead of firing at where they saw the ship was at that moment, torpedo gunners would have to chart out where the ship would be by the time the torpedo got there. They had to determine the target ship’s speed and direction with just a brief look through the periscope.

The torpedo gunner’s margin of error for hitting a ship was quite low. Dazzle painting could throw off an experienced submariner by as much as 55 degrees.

(Burnell Poole, Painting of the USS Leviathan escorted by the USS Allen, 1918. Courtesy US Naval Historical and Heritage Command, NH 42691.

A journalist at the time referred to these dazzling ships as “a flock of sea-going Easter eggs.”

(John Everett, Painting of the SS Lepanto (c1918). Postcard. Collection of Roy R. Behrens.)

An American “Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps” did some of the painting.

(Anon, government news photograph of members of the US Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps camouflaging the USSRecruit in Union Square, NYC, 1917.)

Dazzle was occasionally ridiculed…

(Life magazine, 1918.)

…but Dazzle also became an influence for fashion.

(Anon, newspaper photograph of dazzle-inspired bathing suits at Margate UK, from the New York Tribune, 1919.)

Our expert this week is Roy Behrens, a professor graphic design at the University of Northern Iowa. He’s published several books about camouflage, and also runs the Camoupedia blog.

The theater of war has changed so camouflage has changed with it, but there is still dazzle to be found…

(Credit: Ewan Roberts)

…but sadly, there are no longer flocks of sea-going Easter eggs.

Episode 64- Derelict Dome

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:14:00 -0700

In the Cape Cod town of Woods Hole, buildings do not usually look like this:

(Credit: Will Coley)

Producer Katie Klocksin was pretty surprised when she came across it. She found a way inside.

(Credit: JP Davidson)

Katie started asking around about the Dome. She found it was built by the late Buckminster Fuller, who called himself a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” out to solve the problems confronting “Spaceship Earth” by changing the way we make buildings.

(Courtesy of the Fuller Institute)

“Bucky” Fuller invented and patented the geodesic dome, a spherical structure made from small triangles. The design is based on a lot of complicated math, but the idea is that by relying on the strength of of the triangle, these buildings could be made from cheaper materials, like plastic and aluminum instead of steel and concrete.

In 1953, Fuller was commissioned to build a dome in Woods Hole by architect (and aspiring restauranteur) Gunnar Peterson. The dome would become the posh Dome Restaurant. Diners could gaze through the building’s triangular windows out on onto the sea. A zither player named Ruth Welcome entertained guests.

(Courtesy of Woods Hole Historical Museum)

Despite its Utopian aspirations, the building had some structural problems. The glass windows heated the restaurant up like a greenhouse, so the owner installed fiberglass over most of the dome, blocking the ocean views. It leaked constantly, and was difficult to maintain. The dome was also hit pretty hard by 1970’s interior decorating.

(Courtesy of Woods Hole Historical Museum)

Even though the Woods Hole dome did not radically change the world, Bucky Fuller would go on to become one of the most influential thinkers in design and architecture of the 20th Century. A painting of Fuller by Boris Atzybasheff appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1964, and then again as a US Postage stamp in 2004.

Today, the Dome Restaurant lies vacant.

(Credit: JP Davidson)

A new development project could lead to the dome’s restoration, but for now, it remains a decaying curiosity, inviting exploration from microphone-wielding out-of-towners.

(Credit: Will Coley)

Katie Klocksin is an independent radio producer based in Chicago. She made a different version of this piece at the Transom Story Workshop, which ran on the PRX podcast HowSound. Thanks to Rob Rosenthal (who runs both the Transom Story Workshop and HowSound) for pointing us to Katie’s story.

For more on Bucky and his domes, find out if The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller is playing anywhere near you. It’s a live documentary (my new favorite media format) from Sam Green, whom listeners may remember from Episode #16 about Esperanto.

Episode 63- The Political Stage

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:58:00 -0700

On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into the most miniscule details of a political campaign. Andrea was the star of episode #48 of 99% Invisible, The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room.

Andrea reveals seven (and a half) secrets about the staging of events along the campaign trail. Like how every campaign has an “Advance Team” that flies in ahead of a candidate and makes everything from a campaign rally to a 20-minute media appearance run smoothly.

Andrea spoke with Advance guys Jon Seaton and Donnie Fowler, who have been directing this very American brand of political theatre for years.

And like any theatre, one simple misdirection can go really, really badly. Like when Romney gave his economics talk in 2011 to an empty stadium in Detroit…

…or when Sarah Palin held a press conference in front of a turkey slaughter (viewer discretion advised!).

Stories about the real-life impact of American politics is what DecodeDC is all about. Andrea Seabrook created the show after spending more than a decade covering politics for NPR. You can find out more about why she went rogue here, here, and here.

Andrea is raising seed money for DecodeDC with a Kickstarter campaign, ongoing through October 18.

OK Ikumi

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:22:49 -0700

Kris, a longtime listener (way back from the Invisible Ink days), tipped me off to his brother’s band OK Ikumi and the songs are just spectacular. I used a couple tracks already in the Q2 episode (check the timed comments to find the start times). The man behind OK Ikumi, Karl, has his own Utah based record label Hel Audio. He is offering the whole album called Alpine Sequences on bandcamp for $5 and for an additional $2.50 he’ll send you a cassette! If you drive a 12 year old car like me, a cassette is the perfect medium.

Seriously, go buy it.