Nov 2, 2010
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
SXIP SHIREY: Hey, man. How are you?
AARON SCOTT: Doing very well, yourself?
SXIP SHIREY: Good.
JAD ABUMRAD: So Aaron, set this up. Who are we about to meet?
AARON: So this is Sxip Shirey. He lives in Brooklyn.
JAD: And that is, we should say, Aaron Scott. He's a reporter who turned us onto Sxip. And Aaron met up with Sxip because he had this experience.
AARON: That's common to a lot of people who move to New York City.
AARON: Just tell us where you grew up.
SXIP SHIREY: I grew up in the country outside of Athens, Ohio, on 54 acres of wooded land. And I would work all day as a kid in heat.
AARON: Hoeing and picking strawberries.
SXIP SHIREY: Hauling water.
AARON: Planting trees. He'd play in the woods.
SXIP SHIREY: I love the woods.
AARON: But as he got older, he knew he couldn't stay in Athens.
JAD: Why not?
AARON: Well, he's a musician. He wanted to make a living at it, so he bounced around for a bit.
SXIP SHIREY: So I finally ...
AARON: And then finally, at age 30 ...
SXIP SHIREY: There was no place to go except for New York.
AARON: Wait, so it wasn't a matter that you wanted to live in New York
SXIP SHIREY: No, I didn't want to live in New York.
AARON: It was more so New York was your last option?
SXIP SHIREY: It was my last option.
AARON: And he hated it.
SXIP SHIREY: Because it was ugly to me. You know, like too many humans, too many—too much concrete.
AARON: Yeah.
SXIP SHIREY: You know, one theory about autism is that the things that come into an autistic kid's brain all have equal value. They don't know how to sort through it. And when I first came to New York, it was really—it was pretty overwhelming. I had decided to leave, for sure.
AARON: But then ...
AARON: Take us to the roof.
SXIP SHIREY: I was lucky when I first moved here.
AARON: So he's staying with a friend who lives in this big building in Brooklyn Heights.
SXIP SHIREY: Right across from the Twin Towers, and it's 36 stories high.
AARON: And he decides one lonely night to go up onto the roof.
SXIP SHIREY: And there's this intense fog. And the Twin Towers, the bottom of them was covered in the fog, but not the top, so it was like they were floating. And there's a little cuticle, sliver of moon in the sky, and the foghorns are going and the boats are slowly moving. And there's this breeze. And I had this brass penny whistle that my father had given me, and I was standing there and I was playing it and I was really—suddenly something clicked. I was like, "Oh, that must—those are all the bridges. That's the Williamsburg Bridge, that's the Manhattan Bridge, there's the Brooklyn Bridge. That's New York. It's small now."
SXIP SHIREY: And I'm looking at the Statue of Liberty, and my grandmother Anastasia Panny came from Albania and they went to Ellis Island. I could see my history there, too. And it suddenly hit me, like, "Oh my goodness. This is like a coral reef. You can't see the people, but look at this beautiful structure they have created."
SXIP SHIREY: That fog and that air, it was just the whole city was breathing. The whole—nature was breathing. Everything was breathing. And I felt connected on a spiritual level to the city for the first time.
JAD: And so Skip decided to stay.
SXIP SHIREY: For a while.
JAD: For a while.
ROBERT KRULWICH: All over the world people are now moving, of course we know this, from the country to the city. At this point ...
GEOFF WEST: The world, two years ago crossed this extraordinary benchmark ...
JAD: That's physicist Geoff West.
GEOFF WEST: ... where more than half the planet is now urbanized.
ROBERT: 51 percent.
JAD: And that made us wonder, like, how do cities work?
ROBERT: Is there some deep, organic logic that holds all these people together?
JAD: Or as writer Jonah Lehrer puts it ...
JONAH LEHRER: Are cities just these tumors of people on the landscape?
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab, and our topic today ...
ROBERT: Cities.
JAD: Cities.
ROBERT: I love them but I don't know why.
JAD: All right. So in talking about cities, it was kind of hard to know where to start, because every city has its own ...
ROBERT: DNA, kind of.
JAD: Yeah, its own unique feel.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Like, for instance, let me just give you my own stupid example here. So every time I go to St. Louis to visit my mom?
ROBERT: Yeah?
JAD: I'm on the plane, I'm in my own kind of groove. And I step off the plane into the airport and it's just like, with the first step, just hit this wall of—something is different. Like, you feel the difference in your bones.
ROBERT: Because?
JAD: Well, that's the question.
JAD: Is he there?
BOB LEVINE: I'm here.
JAD: What gives a city its feel?
JAD: Oh, is this Mr. Bob Levine?
BOB LEVINE: This is Mr. Bob Levine.
JAD: Mr. Bob Levine is a professor of psychology.
BOB LEVINE: California State University.
JAD: And he thinks the answer to that question is time.
BOB LEVINE: Time.
JAD: That each city warps time in its own unique way.
BOB LEVINE: My cities are my subjects.
JAD: And he's studied this idea for the past 30 years in all kinds of different ways.
BOB LEVINE: We looked at things like percentage of people wearing watches.
JAD: How long does it take bank tellers in each city to change a $20 bill.
ROBERT: Really?
BOB LEVINE: Yeah, and then we looked at talking speed.
JAD: Really?
ROBERT: Talking speed.
BOB LEVINE: Yeah, we'd get on the phone and call post offices, since that seemed like something that would be available every place. And make a standard request.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bob Levine: Would you tell me the difference between regular mail, certified mail, and insured mail?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Okay, certified is when you just need someone to sign for it.]
JAD: Then he says they'd calculate ...
BOB LEVINE: The number of syllables per second.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Regular mail just goes air mail. The office out of Utah.]
JAD: Salt Lake City, Utah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 2.73 syllables per second.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Then if you want the return receipt card to come back to your house ...]
JAD: Springfield, Mass.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: You pay an extra 70 cents. You understand?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bob Levine: Yes.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 3.45 syllables per second.]
JAD: And this one?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Certified is when you want ...]
JAD: Not really sure where it's from because the tape lost the ID, but it could be Nashville.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: ... proof of mailing, and then you want to know who—you want a return receipt.]
JAD: And if it is Nashville ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 2.65 syllables per second.]
ROBERT: Slow.
JAD: Well Springfield is like—feoom!
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: But the whole talking thing was just really a prelude for Bob. It got him into what I think he's most known for.
ROBERT: And what we find most fascinating.
BOB LEVINE: We actually looked at walking speed.
JAD: Walking!
ROBERT: Walking. Yeah.
BOB LEVINE: Well, what I would do is I would get into a new city.
[LISTENER: And I'm in Mumbai, India.]
[LISTENER: Jerusalem.]
[LISTENER: Buenos Aires City.]
[LISTENER: Chiang Mai, Thailand.]
JAD: We actually put out a call to Radiolab listeners everywhere ...
[LISTENER: We're in Buchanan in Liberia.]
JAD: ... to help us repeat the study.
[LISTENER: Okay, good morning, Radiolab. I'm recording from Dublin, in Ireland.
[LISTENER: Downtown Oslo.]
[LISTENER: Copenhagen.]
BOB LEVINE: I would get into a new city and ...
JAD: Step one.
BOB LEVINE: ... I would scope out main business and shopping areas.
JAD: Step two, get out some string.
BOB LEVINE: A roll of string.
[LISTENER: My red string.]
BOB LEVINE: 60 feet long.
[LISTENER: 20 meters we use over here, we wouldn't say 'feet,' really.]
JAD: Step three, use that string to measure out the distance.
[LISTENER: Now I just have to roll out the string.
ROBERT: Now do you tape the one end to the sidewalk?
BOB LEVINE: I would just make more.
JAD: Step four, go undercover.
BOB LEVINE: Get in a corridor and, you know ...
JAD: Be cool. Act like you're reading a paper.
BOB LEVINE: Or waiting for somebody.
[LISTENER: All right. Found myself a discrete place.]
[LISTENER: I think I found a pretty nice spot here.]
ROBERT: Do you use a stopwatch?
BOB LEVINE: I would use a stopwatch.
[LISTENER: The stopwatch, with its trusty beep. Watch is working.]
JAD: Ready?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Are you ready, boots?]
[LISTENER: Okay, I'm ready now.]
[LISTENER: Go!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Start walking.]
[LISTENER: And it all goes quiet the minute I want to start. Brilliant. Thanks, Dublin.]
JAD: This experiment was actually harder than you would think.
ROBERT: [laughs] Much harder.
[LISTENER: Radiolab people, this is not very easy to do. [laughs]]
JAD: Timing was an issue. People trying to sell you stuff.
[LISTENER: No, no, no. I don't need a shoe shine.]
[SHOE SHINER: Very good shine. Look at my color.]
[LISTENER: No.]
[LISTENER: Pigeons don't count? No, pigeons don't count.]
JAD: Okay.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Are you ready, boots?]
ROBERT: All together now.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Start walking.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.]
JAD: Actually, it didn't sound like that at all. They weren't in sync, as you can imagine. Every city had its own beat.
[LISTENER: Start. Step, step, step, step, step, step, step.]
JAD: Which on some level we knew, but still the range was pretty amazing.
[LISTENER: Stop. 12.2.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Oslo.]
[LISTENER: 14.4 seconds.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Mumbai.]
[LISTENER: 27 seconds.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Buchanan, Liberia.]
[LISTENER: Wow. [laughs]
[LISTENER: 13.8.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Buenos Aires.]
[LISTENER: 12.13.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Mexico City.]
[LISTENER: 10.1 seconds.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Copenhagen.]
[LISTENER: 21.5 seconds.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Chiang Mai.]
[LISTENER: 11.57.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Portland.]
[LISTENER: 15 and a half seconds.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Jerusalem.]
JAD: Just to break it down. On the high end, you've got ...
[LISTENER: Step. Steps. You're on it. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.]
JAD: ... the Dubliners.
[LISTENER: Okay, she was 9.5. And that's 10.4.]
JAD: Who take, on average, 10.76 seconds to cover 60 feet.
ROBERT: Compare that to Buchanan, Liberia.
[LISTENER: Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Looking around, something actually on the head. She got a tiny pink blouse.]
ROBERT: Whose walkers covered the same distance in about ...
[LISTENER: 21 seconds.]
JAD: 21 seconds. So if you want to think about it in football terms, by the time the Dubliner has scored a touchdown ...
ROBERT: The guy from Buchanan, Liberia is somewhere I guess around midfield. Oh my God.
JAD: And the spooky thing, according to Bob Levine, if you do these under the same conditions, same place, you will get the same time. These times don't change. Dublin is always about this.
[LISTENER: Step. Step. You're on it. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.]
ROBERT: And Buchanan, Liberia is always around this.
[LISTENER: Step. Step. Step. Step.]
JAD: Manhattan, as we found, is right about here, usually.
JAD: Step. Step. Step. With thunder. Step. Step. Step in pink.
JAD: No Dublin, but not bad.
ROBERT: But why the consistency?
BOB LEVINE: What is it that makes that walking speed?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Where does it come from?
BOB LEVINE: You know? I mean, is anybody beating the drum? How well can you change the walking speed? Say a bunch of us got together and decided we were just gonna up it my five percent on a given day. Would we get everybody to do it, and will they even notice the difference?
JAD: Do we make the city? Or does the city make us?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Thank you to our walkers.]
[LISTENER: Milena in Buenos Aires.]
[LISTENER: Mustafa. Liberia.]
[LISTENER: Yona. Jerusalem.]
[LISTENER: Mira Killam. I'm in Copenhagen.]
[LISTENER: Marta. Oslo.]
[AARON: Portland, Oregon.]
[LISTENER: Kerry Santanatcho, Thailand.]
[LISTENER: Grant Fuller, Mexico City.]
[LISTENER: In Mumbai.]
[LISTENER: Markham Nolan. I'm Dublin, in Ireland.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Props also to Daniel Estring and Anna Sussman.]
ROBERT: Why?
JAD: I don't know, because they didn't say their name so we put them in there. Okay, so getting back to that question I asked a second ago.
ROBERT: Why is it that cities develop particular beats?
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: I mean, is it because the city does it to the people?
JAD: Or the people do it to the city?
ROBERT: Yeah. And we ran into a couple of guys who may at least have the start of an answer.
GEOFF WEST: Yes.
ROBERT: A couple of physicists, oddly enough, named Geoffrey West and Luis Betencourt.
GEOFF WEST: This is Geoffrey, and there's Luis on the other side of the table.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: I'm here as well. [laughs]
JAD: Cool.
ROBERT: They're at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
GEOFF WEST: Lots of mesas and so on.
ROBERT: Nothing like the cities we just visited.
GEOFF WEST: It's almost biblical in its expanse.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Yeah, the blue skies just kind of make you brave and contemplative and all those good things.
ROBERT: Brave enough, in fact, to claim from their high desert perch that these beats, the meter of every city that we've just been to actually has underneath it a kind of logic.
GEOFF WEST: If you tell me the average speed of walking in some city X.
ROBERT: Take Rochester, New York where people walk at about this beat.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 60 feet in 12.67 seconds.]
ROBERT: If you don't tell him Rochester, you just tell him the number of beats, he will tell you ...
GEOFF WEST: The population is maybe one and a quarter million people.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Actual population, 1.03 million people.]
GEOFF WEST: And the average wage, about $16,000 a year.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Actual average wage, $15,588.
JAD: Wow!
ROBERT: Let me ask you a precise question. Are you 100 percent correct? Are you 80 percent correct?
GEOFF WEST: No, of course some things you will score close to 100 percent, other things 80 percent.
ROBERT: But if you start with just the number of footfalls per unit of time, they can tell you all kinds of other things about the same place.
GEOFF WEST: I can tell you how much crime there is in the city.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Income, wages, GDP.
GEOFF WEST: Number of colleges.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Restaurants.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Fancy restaurants.]
GEOFF WEST: Number of theaters for lease.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: The number of patents being produced there.
GEOFF WEST: Cultural events per capita. Number of theaters, libraries. The number of AIDS cases it's gonna have this year.]
JAD: Really?
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Really.]
GEOFF WEST: All of these things are correlated in a quantitative—and I use the word predictive—fashion.
JAD: Wait, are you saying that just from the number of footsteps per given time that you can tell—can you tell me how many libraries there are?
GEOFF WEST: Yeah.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Yes, we can tell you how many you should expect.
JAD: Wow!
ROBERT: How many things can you count when you're ...
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Oh, presumably an infinite number, but it's limited by the things for which there are data.
JONAH LEHRER: They've got data from the US Census.
ROBERT: That's Jonah Lehrer. He's written about Luis and Geoff, and he's the one who kind of got us thinking about all this.
JONAH LEHRER: Japan.
GEOFF WEST: In China.
JONAH LEHRER: Data from ...
LUIS BETTENCOURT: From sociological surveys. Some data on cell phones.
ROBERT: And when they put all these numbers together, they discovered a deep pattern.
JAD: It all comes from the footsteps.
ROBERT: No, not the footsteps.
JAD: What do you mean?
ROBERT: Even the footsteps are a reflection of this deep and fundamental pattern that governs everything. Just one fact.
JAD: What is it?
ROBERT: You really want to know?
JAD: Yeah, what is it?
ROBERT: Size.
GEOFF WEST: The size.
ROBERT: How many people live there.
GEOFF WEST: Size matters. Size is the largest determinant of all characteristics of the city.
JONAH LEHRER: They would say, "Tell me the size of the city and I can explain the vast majority of all these different variables that we can measure."
GEOFF WEST: Right.
ROBERT: As a city scales up, they say ...
GEOFF WEST: From 100,000 to 200,000, one million to two million, from five million to ten million ...
ROBERT: Everything about it, all those things that they've been measuring, they scale up too but they scale up ...
GEOFF WEST: According to a very simple mathematical formula. It does not matter that New York has big skyscrapers and is on the ocean and that Boise is in the Rocky Mountains, that San Francisco is on San Francisco Bay.
JAD: Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait. That can't be. That can't be. No, I was with you right up to that last point. I mean, you go to the Midwest and it's landlocked, and then you go to a port city and it's on a port. I mean, that's gotta matter.
GEOFF WEST: It matters, but these actually are superficial effects, and account for only 10, 20 percent of their variation.
JONAH LEHRER: What they're saying is that those specificities, the local history is in large part insignificant, and it is completely overwhelmed by these generic laws of urban scaling. That to me is a very interesting and surprising idea, simply because we don't think of cities like that at all.
JAD: No, we certainly do not.
ROBERT: That's because you're not a physicist, so you don't think abstractly in that regard.
JAD: Well, why should I?
ROBERT: Because sometimes it can be very useful. Remember, what these guys have done is they've just created an average profile for every size city. If you're one million or seven million or twelve million, here's how many things you should have.
GEOFF WEST: Now you can ask, "Okay, let's look specifically at that city and ask, is it over-performing or under-performing?"
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Right.
JAD: So what are some cities that are over-performing for their size?
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Of the large cities, San Francisco is quite an innovative city. New York's about average.
JAD: About average?
LUIS BETTENCOURT: In terms of patents.
ROBERT: New York's below average? Did you just say that?
GEOFF WEST: New York produces, roughly speaking, the number of patents it should for a size ...
LUIS BETTENCOURT: You produce, for example, twice as many patents as Boston.
ROBERT: We do?
JAD: Hey, that's something! That's something.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: You should've produced many more given the size difference between about ...
ROBERT: We're just average because they're counting patents. We don't have ...
JONAH LEHRER: This is one of the problems with their larger theory, which is that ...
ROBERT: Pay no attention to that.
JONAH LEHRER: ... they're relying on data that the US Census collected, so that's a real blind spot.
ROBERT: If you're counting fabulous, if we ever can figure out a way to count fabulous.
JAD: Yeah, because he has a point. You're not taking into account the experience of living in a place.
GEOFF WEST: Well, what a theory cannot do is tell you about the essence of New York, the New Yorkness of New York. So to speak, the soul of the city.
JAD: And where does that come from?
JONAH LEHRER: Who knows? I mean, I think that's such a broad question.
JAD: Obviously it has something to do with lots of people being jammed into a tight space, bumping into each other.
JONAH LEHRER: The kind of people who move there.
JAD: What the physicists would call human friction. And that's a story you can't really tell in math, but you can hear it. Take Sxip. He gave producer Aaron Scott a tour of his block in Brooklyn. Listen to who he bumps into everyday.
AARON: He took us on this tour. First place we went was this Jamaican body shop.
JAD: Body shop, as in cars?
AARON: Yeah.
SXIP SHIREY: Collision specialists.
AARON: I mean, it's basically these, you know, West Indies, Jamaican guys listening to reggaeton and hip hop, reggae.
WORKER: No, I like our kind of music. It's like ...
JAD: All right, that's one place.
AARON: And across the street from this is Kinderspiel.
SXIP SHIREY: A hidden Orthodox Jewish cookie bakery. Around the corner from that ...
AARON: It's a butcher that sells live goats and chickens.
SXIP SHIREY: And here are the goats.
AARON: On the corner is the Hispanic Pentecostal Church.
SXIP SHIREY: And every Sunday, they give it up to God with this exceedingly enthusiastic band. I huddle at the window and I think, "This is the best music in the world." I feel that deeply.
AARON: And then across the street from that one is a mosque.
SXIP SHIREY: And it's beautiful on the inside. Across the street ...
AARON: There's this big building.
SXIP SHIREY: And the proprietor of this space is a gay foot fetish film producer. "Show me your feet! Show me your feet!" [laughs]
JAD: So wait a second, you've got Jamaicans, Orthodox Jews with the cookies, Hispanics, Jesus, Allah, goats and gay porn?
SXIP SHIREY: Show me your feet!
JAD: All on the same block?
AARON: Absolutely.
SXIP SHIREY: For me, that's the hammer and the nails. That's the raw ingredients. Now I'm gonna take that home and I'm gonna assemble it into a song.
JAD: And when you heard his music, could you hear all that stuff?
AARON: Some of it is clearer than others. The sounds of the neighborhood, like the reggaeton music of the West Indies auto body shops, he kind of takes them and then filters it through some device that makes it sound like bells.
JAD: Oddly enough, the day that Aaron spoke with Sxip was the day Sxip decided ...
AARON: He's leaving New York City and he put in his notice.
JAD: Which I guess makes his latest album, Sonic New York, kind of a Dear John letter to the city. You can hear it on our website, Radiolab.org.
ROBERT: And Robert Levine's book, the one about walking and time stuff, is called A Geography of Time.
JAD: More information about that too on our website, Radiolab.org. Also, you can subscribe to our podcast there.
[BOB LEVINE: This is Robert Levine. I've been told that ...]
[AARON: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
BOB LEVINE: And ...]
[AARON: Produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Adumbrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab.
ROBERT: And our subject right now is ...
JAD: Cities.
ROBERT: So far, we've tried to pin down the character of a place with math or with a story or with some music. But it's like trying to take a snapshot of something that's growing and ...
JAD: Changing.
ROBERT: All the time.
JAD: And that feeling that Sxip had up on the rooftop, like the city was breathing? Well, maybe the city really is.
ROBERT: Like a living thing.
GEOFF WEST: Well, yes. In some ways, that's exactly right. They evolve, they grow.
ROBERT: Think about it, says Geoff West, everyday, every minute becomes energy and ...
JAD: Food.
ROBERT: Trucks.
JAD: Water.
ROBERT: People. Out goes ...
JAD: Garbage.
ROBERT: Ideas, songs.
JAD: Stories, people.
ROBERT: Energy in, energy out. Energy in, energy out.
JAD: That's just what a city needs to do, says Geoff.
GEOFF WEST: Metabolize food, so to speak. Because without that, organisms and cities and so on will simply decay.
ROBERT: So how does a city stay alive? What does it really take for a city to grow?
JAD: Well, that question got me thinking about New York, and led me to a place I'd been wanting to go for awhile.
JAD: I'm starting to hear the reverb a little bit.
ROBERT: Where are you?
JAD: Underground. A hundred feet underground. So this is the sound of one of New York City's water tunnels. I'm standing in it. It's exactly what you would imagine: a big tube that's about nine feet wide, nine feet up, perfectly polished cement. And it seems to just go forever.
JAD: So this is basically, you might call it a smaller artery inside the city's circulatory system. When this is online in a couple of months, it will pump up to 290 million gallons a day. Something like that, which is an awesome thought in the literal sense of the word.
CATHERINE MALLEN: When you walk through the streets of Manhattan ...
JAD: This is Catherine Mallen from the Department of Environmental Protection.
CATHERINE MALLEN: These water tunnels are anywhere from 200 to 800 feet below your feet. They're silently there. And when you turn on your tap ...
JAD: And when you take a drink, you are basking in a daily convenience that is born from blood, sweat, and death. To explain, you really have to go back to a time when there were no tunnels.
DIANE GALUSHA: This would be 1790, 1800 or so.
JAD: Around that time, says historian Diane Galusha, New York's population ...
DIANE GALUSHA: Was booming. It tripled in 20 years.
JAD: And you suddenly had 100,000 people all getting their water from the same spot.
DIANE GALUSHA: A large freshwater pond called The Collect. And they had pigs running around by the hundreds, and the chamber pots on the streets. And there were livestock in Lower Manhattan at the time. People had cows for milk, and so when they died, they had to do something with them, so ...
JAD: Often, she says, they'd throw their dead cows and everything else ...
DIANE GALUSHA: In the pond.
JAD: The same pond that they were drinking from?
DIANE GALUSHA: Right.
JAD: No way!
DIANE GALUSHA: [laughs]
JAD: Not surprisingly ...
DIANE GALUSHA: As the city grew ...
JAD: ... people got sick.
DIANE GALUSHA: In 1798, there was a yellow fever epidemic. Killed a couple of thousand people. And cholera and typhoid.
JAD: City officials were like, "This has to change."
DIANE GALUSHA: And as if to accentuate the point, in 1835, there was this huge fire.
JAD: The fire department rushes out to put out the fire, but they can't.
DIANE GALUSHA: It was in December, and the rivers froze and they couldn't get water to the fires.
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: If you don't have water to fight the fire, the city burns down.
JAD: It's pretty simple.
DIANE GALUSHA: Yeah, 700 buildings.
JAD: That's our starting point. A New York City that could not grow. And by the way, the guy we just heard?
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: John "Chick" Donohue.
JAD: He's a sandhog. Part of the long line of guys who blasted New York out of its poopy pond phase and into its future.
JAD: Can I ask you a question? Why are you guys called sandhogs? Why wouldn't you be called tunnel blasters or earth movers or something that's more—do you have any idea where that name comes from?
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Yeah, it comes from the dictionary. Really. And I love the look on people's faces when they ask me that and that's the answer. It's described in Webster's Dictionary as ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: A laborer who digs or works in sand.]
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: The original sandhogs were the soft ground guys. Compressed air. That's where you ...
JAD: To back up for a second, when the city decided to scrap the pond in favor of clean water from upstate, it faced a couple of challenges. And this was also true when they decided to build the ...
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Subway system.
JAD: Namely, nature. Like, how do you, for example, build a tunnel under a river?
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Well, there were sandhogs. You send them down, they dug. Literally dug with what we call mucksticks, shovels, under the river. 60, 50, 100 feet under the bottom of the river.
NIK SOKOL: Men with shovels, excavating ground.
JAD: That's Nik Sokol.
NIK SOKOL: I'm a tunneling engineer. Generally, it's a dark, dank place.
JAD: Now the obvious engineering problem is that the river bottom, which is now above their heads, is soft.
NIK SOKOL: Sands and silts and gravels.
JAD: How do you keep that from not falling on your head?
NIK SOKOL: That's when compressed air started being used.
JAD: The basic idea, says Nik, is that these huge pumps would basically pump air into the tunnels at such pressure that it would basically push the ceiling up.
NIK SOKOL: Exactly. So the mud doesn't cave in on you.
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: The compressed air holds that thing from collapsing in on you.
JAD: Usually. The engineers on the shore had to get the pressure just right, says Chick, because if they didn't, you'd get this absolutely terrifying situation that is maybe the best cocktail party story ever.
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: We used to give an award. We haven't given it in many years. We call it the Marshall Maybe award. They were doing one of those tunnels to Brooklyn. The men were up in the face of the tunnel, they're digging away.
NIK SOKOL: And then very suddenly ...
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: There's a blow out.
JAD: In the face of the wall, a puncture hole develops. Tiny at first but it quickly becomes ...
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: Bigger and bigger.
JAD: Until it's the size of ...
NIK SOKOL: Sort of like an eye.
JAD: Then a whole head. And all the compressed air rushes into that hole.
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: It would be like if you shot a hole through an airplane. All the air would—pshooo!
JAD: Hats are flying into this hole. Lanterns, shovels. Then a guy goes into the hole.
ROBERT: A guy?
JAD: Yeah, a human being into the hole! And another guy, then a third.
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: The third guy must have been the luckiest sandhog in the world.
NIK SOKOL: This is an article from the New York Times. "As I struck the mud, it felt as if something was squeezing me tighter than I'd ever been squeezed before."
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: He blew through all that 60 feet of muck, then through the river, up to the surface. The pressure blew him right up into the air.
NIK SOKOL: "They tell me I was thrown about 25 feet above the water when I came out, but I don't remember that." That's remarkable. [laughs]
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: And he came back down and landed right alongside a police boat.
JAD: In the water?
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: In the water. So they took him, they cleaned him up. He went home, he came to work the next day.
JAD: What?
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: That's why they gave him the award. That's why the award is ...
JAD: You're kidding me!
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: No, I'm not kidding you.
JAD: In the early days, no one kept track of how many people died building New York's tunnels. The number is probably in the thousands.
JAD: So wait, this right here, this plaque that we're looking at ...
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: This plaque was donated.
JAD: This is Ritchie Fitzsimmons. He's the current head of the Sandhogs Union, and we're standing in front of a big stone plaque with two dozen names on it.
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: It's in memory of all the people that we lost in tunnels in New York City since 1970, you know, since we started keeping records. Some more of the photos, come on.
JAD: Later, he showed me a picture which really underlined the point. It's a picture of him on his first compressed air job.
JAD: Oh wow, look at that!
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: This is myself.
JAD: He's 19. He's huddled with five other guys, and they're in this crowded tunnel and they're all black with soot. And he points to each guy in turn.
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: Dead, dead, dead, dead, had cancer, is still alive, still alive.
JAD: If you ask any of the sandhogs why they do this, mostly they'll tell you, "Well, we've got to. The city can't grow without its tunnels." But you also get answers like this from Chick.
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: [coughs]
JAD: He says when you're down there, and it's pitch black and you're just walking along ...
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: You're 600 foot under Manhattan, you're at approximately 30th Street or something. You're in the middle of the greatest city in the world, nobody even knows you exist. Nobody has a clue. It's just beautiful. It's a weird place. It's like being on a planet somewhere.
JAD: He says when he's literally in this rock that is half a billion years old, he sometimes feels very humbled.
JOHN "CHICK" DONOHUE: You're in the middle of the Earth. You want to see nature? Here it is.
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: That's a romantic way of saying it. The human reality of it is ...
JAD: Here's Ritchie's take.
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: Remember when you were a kid, and they used to give you the ant farms and the ant farms were big? We are ants. The ants, there's so fricking many of them that if you gotta squish a few, if they've gotta use each other to step over each other to keep that whole thing, that's it.
JAD: That doesn't sound very grand the way you're putting it.
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: That's reality.
JAD: Our job is conquer nature, he says, plain and simple.
RITCHIE FITZSIMMONS: We're builders. Human beings are builders. And collectively, there's nothing that we can't do. Nothing.
JAD: October 14, 1842.
DIANE GALUSHA: Oh, it was a huge celebration.
JAD: Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lined Broadway.
DIANE GALUSHA: There was firing of cannons and the ringing of church bells. Fireworks even.
JAD: And at the end of it all, says Diane, everybody gathered in City Hall Park.
DIANE GALUSHA: And they turned a big fountain on and ...
JAD: Water shot 50 feet into the air. New York City would never be the same. It could finally be a city. But here's where you start to wonder a little bit about the real legacy of cities. What you see almost immediately after this moment, according to Diane, is that water usage ...
DIANE GALUSHA: Skyrocketed.
JAD: Suddenly, you had indoor plumbing.
DIANE GALUSHA: All the new buildings were being outfitted with water closets and ...
JAD: Kids were playing in the hydrants all day long. And to make a long story short, just 10 years later, the city is out of water again. So they gotta build more tunnels and then more, and if you follow the water in those tunnels back upstate, you see that the city is gobbling up reservoirs.
DIANE GALUSHA: One after another.
JAD: Dozens. Which meant it had to kick people off that land.
DIANE GALUSHA: A thing called imminent domain.
JAD: Their villages would have to be ...
DIANE GALUSHA: Bulldozed and burned.
JAD: Cemeteries.
DIANE GALUSHA: Uprooted.
JAD: Do you see what's happening? I mean, you could see this city that we live in as a kind of monster. It's just always hungry. Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat!
ROBERT: Well, wait a second! Because, like, there is another logic available here. If you took all the people in New York City, all those New Yorkers ...
JONAH LEHRER: You know, if you have every inhabitant of New York City suddenly left New York City and moved to small towns all across America, you would need a ton of resources to make that possible.
JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer again, by the way.
JONAH LEHRER: So in a sense, New York City saves lots of forests.
ROBERT: Saves lots of water. And the reason why? Well, that takes us back to Geoff and Luis's ideas about cities.
GEOFF WEST: Well, I suppose ...
ROBERT: Because it all started years ago. Geoff at the time was studying, this time it was living things.
GEOFF WEST: Let's go back to biology for a moment.
ROBERT: He looked at a huge variety of creatures, and for each one, he collected data.
GEOFF WEST: Everything from its metabolic rate to length of its aorta. How quickly it breathes.
ROBERT: And he discovered something kind of fascinating about creatures as they grow bigger and bigger.
GEOFF WEST: If you double the size of an organism, you double the number of cells that need to be sustained. You would therefore expect that the energy you need to supply would double. You'd double the number of customers, so to speak.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Yeah.
GEOFF WEST: No.
JAD: No?
GEOFF WEST: That is not the case. Instead of doubling, it needs less energy per unit cell to sustain the whole organism. So there is a kind of ...
ROBERT: So wait a second. That means that the cell is somehow doing more with less?
GEOFF WEST: Right.
JAD: Does that also mean, though, that an elephant cell somehow is more efficient than a mouse cell?
GEOFF WEST: That's correct.
JAD: Huh!
ROBERT: And Geoff says the way they do that is pretty simple. They just move slower.
GEOFF WEST: They process energy at a slower rate.
ROBERT: So if you take a mouse cell, a cell that lives in a mouse and does its work, brings in resources, spits out the waste, brings in more resources, spits out the waste, it does this to a particular beat. But now, says Geoff, if you listen to an elephant's cell, bringing in stuff and then pumping out the waste, it's moving obviously slower. So it's using less energy in a given moment which makes it more efficient.
JAD: And what does that have to do with cities?
ROBERT: Turns out, cities work kind of the same way.
JONAH LEHRER: In cities, you see the same kind of efficiency when it comes to infrastructure.
GEOFF WEST: Electricity.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Length of roads.
GEOFF WEST: Water.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Length of pipes. Length of electrical cables.
GEOFF WEST: Gasoline.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: How much gas is consumed.
GEOFF WEST: Here's the point. The bigger the city, the less roads you need per capita.
JAD: What does per capita mean anyways?
ROBERT: Per person.
JAD: Per person.
GEOFF WEST: The less electrical cable lines you need per capita, the less gasoline stations you need per capita, et cetera, et cetera.
JONAH LEHRER: So every unit of pipe carries more water or more sewage. Every line of electrical wire carries more ...
JAD: All right, all right. Geoff, does that mean then that if I move to a bigger and bigger city, do I, in a sense, become greener the bigger the city I live in?
GEOFF WEST: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a very interesting ...
LUIS BETTENCOURT: Yeah, it's a very good question.
JAD: And this is where Luis and Geoff ...
LUIS BETTENCOURT: I think the case is still a little bit out.
JAD: And even Jonah.
JONAH LEHRER: It gets complicated when you ask, "Are people more or less efficient?"
JAD: This is when everybody starts to throw in all these caveats and qualifications.
GEOFF WEST: All these other variables.
JAD: And quivocations and ambivalations and prognostications and dipilations. Let me just tell you what I think.
ROBERT: I think you'd better.
JAD: All right, we all love to talk about how green we are when we live in cities. This is something everybody in the city talks about, right?
ROBERT: Because we are. Because we take the subway and the bus. We don't drive and driving is the most energy-consuming thing.
JAD: Right, but listen to me. The analogy that you just gave me?
ROBERT: Mm-hmm?
JAD: It does not work. Okay, you said that cells, as they go from small bodies to big bodies slow down.
ROBERT: Yep.
JAD: Well ...
JONAH LEHRER: Cities, the opposite happens of course. As cities get bigger, each individual unit in that city moves faster.
JAD: Thank you, Jonah. We speed up.
ROBERT: That's true.
JAD: We learned this earlier—and this is not trivial, okay? Because as we speed up, we bump into more people, we have more ideas, we invent new things, we want more things. We want more.
GEOFF WEST: More of everything.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: New tastes, new ideas.
JONAH LEHRER: More interactions, more human friction.
JAD: More!
ROBERT: More choices.
JAD: Yeah, a better life. That's what a city's all about.
ROBERT: Is there anything wrong with that?
JAD: No, not at all, but all I'm saying is there's a cost to it that we don't acknowledge.
JONAH LEHRER: West and Bettencourt did this back of the envelope calculation, where it's long been known that a body at perfect rest, if you lie in your bed all day in a coma, you will consume about 91 watts of electricity.
GEOFF WEST: That's called your basal metabolic rate.
JONAH LEHRER: If you're a hunter-gatherer living in some tribe in New Zealand, you will consume about 240 watts of electricity every day.
GEOFF WEST: The energy just simply to stay alive, plus the energy you need to hunt and gather.
JONAH LEHRER: However, if you are living in America, the wattage required to drive your car, run your computer, make your clothes ...
GEOFF WEST: Heat, air conditioning, being able to go to movies.
JONAH LEHRER: On and on and on.
GEOFF WEST: All of the various things that constitute our life. If you add all those up ...
JONAH LEHRER: Your lifestyle requires about 11,000 watts of electricity every day.
ROBERT: Whoa!
JONAH LEHRER: That's more energy than a blue whale requires.
ROBERT: Now some of you listening, particularly if you're an engineer, you may think, "Wait a second, why are you calling these watts when it's power through a system? Power through a human? Call them joules. That's the technically correct word." And then you'd be right, wouldn't you? But the numbers are the same, so we'll just call them watts.
JONAH LEHRER: So one way to look at what cities have enabled us to do is basically live like 300 million blue whales in America.
ROBERT: Are you sure that cities are causing this development? That it begins and ends with cities?
JAD: Yeah, I can't assign it all to cities, but that psychology of wanting more, that's a city psychology. That's why people come to cities. And then the lifestyle that grows up around that gets broadcast out on TV and radios and movies—which are city industries—out to the country. And if you just take a historical look at this, like, the last 300 years have seen more and more consumption, right? And that trend, says Jonah ...
JONAH LEHRER: It's grown in neat parallel with the growth of cities. Cities have enabled that kind of growth.
ROBERT: Even if you guys are right, and we know that half the planet already is living in cities ...
JAD: Eighty percent of America.
ROBERT: So yes, there are more people. I'll agree with that.
JAD: More choices.
ROBERT: Asking for ...
JAD: More consumption, more energy, more, more, more, more, more.
ROBERT: [laughs] Even if that's so, cities, because they also are ingenious and they come up with all these new ideas, maybe cities will solve the problem. Right now, Jad, someone somewhere in Calcutta is about to invent the super light bulb elevator telephone pipe that will make it possible for another 200 catrillion people to live together in peace, harmony and beauty—until the next round.
JAD: All right, you go ahead and cling to that optimism.
ROBERT: And you, of course, can go hang yourself in the corner. So we'll be right back. I'm Robert Krulwich, that's Jad. This is Radiolab.
[LISTENER: Hey, this is John calling from the city of brotherly love. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab.
ROBERT: And our subject today is cities.
JAD: Cities.
ROBERT: And if cities are like organisms, and one thing we should say about every organism that's ever been ...
JAD: They die.
ROBERT: Yeah, they die.
JAD: So you would think cities would die.
ROBERT: You would.
JAD: But Jonah says no.
JONAH LEHRER: Cities die very, very rarely. And they almost never die if there hasn't been a total, total catastrophe, physical catastrophe.
JAD: Which is weird if you think about it, says Jonah, because take a company.
JONAH LEHRER: Sometimes they can get very big, so that they included hundreds of thousands of employees.
ROBERT: And yet they die all the time.
JONAH LEHRER: Of the 30 companies in the original Dow Jones, only three are still on the Dow Jones index. If you took 30 cities from the 1920s, I can guarantee you all 30 of those randomly selected cities would still exist on the map. And the question is why. Why don't they die like every other social organization?
ROBERT: What is it about cities that gives them this crazy persistence?
JAD: That question led us to a place that by all measures should've died long ago. A place called Centralia.
JAD: Okay, so we begin on the side of—where are we?
PAT WALTERS: We're on Route 61 in eastern Pennsylvania.
JAD: Right.
JAD: This is Pat, by the way. He's a producer at Radiolab.
PAT: Hello, hello, hello.
ROBERT: I know who Pat is, thank you very much.
JAD: Anyhow ...
PAT: We're waiting for this guy named Tom to meet up with us.
JAD: Hey, are you Tom?
TOM HYNOSKI: Yep.
PAT: Tom Hynoski.
JAD: How you doing? I'm Jad.
TOM HYNOSKI: When did you get here? Just now?
JAD: Just now.
PAT: And we had asked Tom to show us around his town.
TOM HYNOSKI: Probably the best place to go is up on the hill up there, and you can look over everything.
JAD: Okay, sure.
JAD: So we go up on the hill with Tom.
PAT: We actually meet up with another Tom.
TOM DEMPSEY: Tom Dempsey. I was the former postmaster here.
JAD: So we now have two Toms.
JAD: Tom, Tom.
PAT: Very confusing.
JAD: Anyhow, the four of us stare down into a valley that used to have a town in it.
TOM DEMPSEY: There was all streets with homes on them all over here.
JAD: Now Centralia is just trees.
TOM DEMPSEY: Well, right down here was the ...
JAD: Tom Two points to some trees.
TOM DEMPSEY: Our high school. Over here ...
JAD: More trees.
TOM DEMPSEY: Saint Ignatius Church.
TOM HYNOSKI: There used to be a playground right at the bottom of this little hill right here. You can still see the bars.
JAD: This is where things get a little strange. I mean, right next to the swing set where kids used to laugh their little heads off, there's a hole in the ground.
PAT: Right there, I can see some steam coming out of the ground.
JAD: Spewing steam. And Pat and I would later discover when we got close to it that that steam was really hot.
PAT: It's hot and wet.
JAD: Oh my God. Hah! [bleep] Where exactly is the fire?
TOM DEMPSEY: Underneath us.
JAD: Like how far?
TOM DEMPSEY: Here? 50 feet maybe.
JAD: So 50 feet down.
TOM DEMPSEY: If it is.
JAD: Can I ask you, the smell doesn't bother you guys?
TOM DEMPSEY: What smell?
JAD: You can smell it. It smells like burning tires here.
TOM DEMPSEY: I don't smell it.
TOM HYNOSKI: That must be something from New York that's stuck in your nose or something.
JAD: [laughs] Come on!
JAD: It really did smell.
PAT: But the thing no one can deny is that underneath our feet, there's a web of coal mines that stretches for miles.
TOM DEMPSEY: 40 miles in each direction, 30 miles.
JAD: And somewhere in those mines is a fire that's been burning for 40 years, and has either destroyed this town ...
PAT: Or not.
JAD: Depending on who you ask.
JAD: This is Pat right here.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: My name is Mary Lou Gaughin. I'm 82 years old, and I lived in Centralia most of my adult life.
JAD: What year were you born in, if you mind me asking?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: What year was I born?
JAD: Yeah.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: 1927.
JAD: Mary Lou Gone grew up in a town not too far from Centralia.
PAT: Tiny little farm town called Burnsville.
JAD: And when she got to Centralia, she said ...
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It was like moving to the city. It had a Legion, had a drugstore, it had ...
JAD: Couple thousand people.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Lots of bars in Centralia. Somebody told me one time there were 22 barrooms in Centralia. I don't know if that was true because I didn't frequent bar rooms at that age.
JAD: And all these places that she just mentioned were right on top of each other.
PAT: So when you were walking around, you'd see people all the time.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Just take, for instance, you'd go to the post office after work.
TOM DEMPSEY: I'll show you where the post office was.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Tommy would be there sometimes.
TOM DEMPSEY: I was postmaster here for a number of years.
PAT: You're pointing at a forest.
TOM DEMPSEY: It's hard to imagine this stuff.
PAT: It is hard to imagine.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah, I walked in the post office because your mail wasn't delivered. So I'd go up to the post office, I'd get my mail. And you'd meet people in the post office, you'd meet people coming out of the post office.
TOM DEMPSEY: This was a good football field here. Now it's all growing in, nobody's cutting the grass. There's bushes growing up in it now.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Tommy Dempsey would have a story. I would be an hour until I got home. A whole hour! This is how Centralia was.
PAT: Okay, fast forward. It's Memorial Day, 1962.
TOM DEMPSEY: This is where the bar used to dump all their garbage. Now the fire started, I'd say just about right here where I'm standing right now.
JAD: Tommy points to a little patch of nondescript yellow grass.
TOM DEMPSEY: Right here.
JAD: How did it start? Do we have any idea?
TOM DEMPSEY: Well, it started ...
JAD: The most likely scenario, he says—we also heard this from a writer named Joan Quigley.
JOAN QUIGLEY: I'm the writer of The Day The Earth Caved In.
JAD: Is that people used to heat their homes with coal, and maybe somebody threw their ashes into the garbage which then ended up onto the dump.
PAT: It caught the whole thing on fire.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Furniture, rugs, kerosene cans.
PAT: Which, Joan says, wasn't that unusual.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Some of the former firefighters said the dumps caught on fire all the time.
JAD: And usually the fires just fizzled out on their own. But this one, for whatever reason, before it did, wandered a little bit.
PAT: And it found its way over to an old exposed ...
TOM DEMPSEY: Exposed coal vein there.
JAD: Basically an old strip mine that should've been covered but wasn't.
JOAN QUIGLEY: So there was just a big, open cavity.
JAD: And when the fire got in there and ...
TOM DEMPSEY: Hit that coal vein.
JAD: Poof!
TOM DEMPSEY: Fire trucks came up here and they hosed down the fire until they thought it was out and they left. Following day, somebody says, "Oh, we see smoke and steam coming out of the ground up there." So they came back the next day and they tried to get the fire out and they couldn't very well do it. They weren't getting it.
JAD: Because at that point, it was too late.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I wouldn't know where to start with this mine fire. I wouldn't know where to start.
JAD: The first place that fire camped out was right underneath Mary Lou's house.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I have some ...
PAT: And from that point on, it kind of took over her life.
JAD: My goodness, are these your scrapbooks?
JAD: When we were there, she pulled out these two ...
JAD: Gigantic scrapbooks. This is gonna take four men to lift this book.
JAD: Each book is literally three feet tall, and they document in painful detail how that fire split the town in two.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This is how intense I was with this mine fire.
PAT: She heaved open the book, and she showed us this picture of three people crouched on the street in front of a hole.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This is my husband, my son, and me.
JAD: Husband holding a thermometer.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: We dropped this down on a fishing pole, down on a ...
PAT: Oh, like you're ice fishing.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah.
JAD: This was their way of measuring the temperature of the fire below.
JAD: And what did it read?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It was pretty high.
JAD: 100 degrees high?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: 850, something like that.
JAD: What? Under your house?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: No, this was on the street.
PAT: But the street right in front of her house.
JAD: Oh, wow!
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: The garage was right—as you can see, the garage here, it was right there.
JAD: She showed us another picture of her standing in her garage in front of a trench that they'd dug. And inside that trench ...
PAT: You see flames.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Oh, we used to go out at night and watch the glowing and the embers.
PAT: Fire up there got so bad that some of Mary Lou's neighbors actually got government money to leave their houses.
JOAN QUIGLEY: And they were the first people bought out.
PAT: Never once, like, at the beginning did you think, "Oh, maybe we should just get out of here?"
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: No.
PAT: There's a fire under here. Never?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: No. I never wanted to, no.
JAD: Instead, she did exactly the opposite.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This was my husband. and this was a big official and this was ...
PAT: She dug in her heels and started writing letters.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Congressmen Mulligan, Musto. We wrote letters to him. We talked on the phone with him. I couldn't tell you all the congressmen we talked to. Four governors, all the Harrisburg officials. And they were promising everything but the sun, but it never happened.
JOAN QUIGLEY: But other than the people who lived on that street, many, many people in town didn't have to worry or even think about the mine fire.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Nobody ever believed that the fire was even serious in Centralia. My husband, myself, and Helen Wilmer.
PAT: Oh, so everyone else was kind of "Oh, whatever."
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It's uptown. The fire's uptown.
JAD: All that changed on Valentine's Day, 1981.
TODD DEMBOSKI: We're up a little bit higher.
PAT: Because of this guy.
JAD: A fella named Todd Demboski, who at the time was just a boy.
TODD DEMBOSKI: I was 12.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Twelve-year-old boy.
JAD: He's playing outside.
JOAN QUIGLEY: In his grandmother's backyard.
TODD DEMBOSKI: And I noticed some small wisps of smoke coming out of the ground.
JOAN QUIGLEY: So he went over to take a look.
TODD DEMBOSKI: As I bent down to investigate, I noticed that my feet were starting to sink in. It was really soft.
JOAN QUIGLEY: It was like quicksand.
TODD DEMBOSKI: The more I tried to struggle, the more I was just opening the hole larger.
JOAN QUIGLEY: And he wound up sliding.
TODD DEMBOSKI: To my thighs, to my waist.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Until he was ...
TODD DEMBOSKI: I was under.
JOAN QUIGLEY: All the way underground, surrounded by hot steam.
TODD DEMBOSKI: The smoke was so intense.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Smells like rotten eggs.
JAD: Whoa!
TODD DEMBOSKI: I was screaming for my cousin.
JOAN QUIGLEY: And his cousin heard him and came running over.
TODD DEMBOSKI: Plucked me out like a flower.
JOAN QUIGLEY: What happened to him changed everything.
JAD: Because suddenly, reporters were everywhere
TODD DEMBOSKI: Reporters from the Evening Herald.
[NEWS CLIP: Nightline.]
JOAN QUIGLEY: National news media.
JAD: Everybody pointing their cameras at Todd.
[NEWS CLIP: I seen smoke, so I went over to see if it was the mine fire. And when I did, I just fell right through.]
JAD: And doing stories about this town that was on fire.
[NEWS CLIP: Beneath Centralia, the underground coal fires still burn hot.]
[NEWS CLIP: Centralia is an inferno. Literally.]
JOAN QUIGLEY: That attention ...
[NEWS CLIP: Parts of Centralia look like the outskirts of hell.]
JOAN QUIGLEY: ... would focus ...
[NEWS CLIP: Toxic fumes.]
JOAN QUIGLEY: ... on what had to happen for the town.
PAT: It wasn't long, says Joan, before some of the younger residents ...
JOAN QUIGLEY: Very small, informal group of young parents.
PAT: ... organized a march.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Down Locust Avenue, down the main street in town.
JAD: How many people are we talking about here?
JOAN QUIGLEY: Couple dozen, with red ribbons around their arms and their wrists. And they walked two by two down the main street of Centralia like striking miners.
JAD: Mary Lou glared at them as they passed.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I was bitter. I was bitter. They claimed they were for helping the town to be saved, but they weren't.
JAD: What they were really for, she figured, was getting out.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: They were looking for funds to get relocated.
JAD: She even hated their name.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Concerned Citizens Against the Centralia Mine Fire.
JAD: She thought, how are they the concerned citizens? She's the concerned citizen. She had been fighting the fire for years.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah.
JOAN QUIGLEY: The media was there taking video.
JAD: Cameras filmed the marchers looping red ribbon over everything. And Mary Lou's neighbor Helen ...
JOAN QUIGLEY: Cut the red ribbons down.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Because we fought so hard to try to save Centralia. Why did they want to do this?
JOAN QUIGLEY: People like Mary Lou and Helen Wilmer.
PAT: They started telling people ...
JOAN QUIGLEY: "No, no, no. Here's why it's safe. Here's why you should stay."
PAT: And while parents from the other group were on TV complaining about gasses ...
[NEWS CLIP: It's in the home, and it could be a death house.]
JAD: Mary Lou, Helen and a few others started up their own committee.
[NEWS CLIP: The United Centralia Area Mine Task Force.]
JAD: They got on TV themselves, and in the community, they started printing out fliers.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Fact sheets.
JAD: And handing them out.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Yep, door-to-door.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Lam: Okay, I call this meeting to order.]
JAD: At town meetings, the dueling committees would get up there and make their case.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: But this is a ...]
JAD: Get yelled down.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... will not protect us!]
PAT: Would it get ...?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It'd get rowdy.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Absolutely ridiculous!]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Lam: Families fighting against families, neighbors against neighbors.]
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: There's Lammy.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Lam: They split the town apart.]
PAT: Who's that?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: David Lam.
PAT: This guy David Lam ran a motorcycle shop in town, and he was also a member of this concerned citizens' organization. And one morning, about 4:00 am ...
JOAN QUIGLEY: He was sleeping in an apartment, and someone threw a Molotov cocktail through his plate glass window.
JAD: Mary Lou showed us an article from her scrapbook.
JAD: It was related to Lam's activities as an officer of Concerned Citizens. Wow! This is no joke. This is like the Sopranos, but worse.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: This was really—it was really bad.
PAT: And in the midst of all this chaos, Congress started considering a bill that would basically let them buy out the town.
[NEWS CLIP: Some observers believe that for about $50 million, Centralia could be totally bought out.]
PAT: And so the mayor decided let's hold a referendum.
JOAN QUIGLEY: And the issue was stay or go.
JAD: In the weeks leading up to the referendum, Mary Lou and Helen again went door to door talking to people they'd known their whole lives. And pretty much everyone they talked to said ...
JOAN QUIGLEY: I really want to stay. My mother wants to stay.
PAT: August 11, 1983.
[NEWS CLIP: Shortly before 10:00 this evening, Centralia's mayor announced the results.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: There's 545 votes cast. 200 voted to stay, 345 voted to relocate.]
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I was crying, yes. In my heart, I never thought that would happen ever.
PAT: You thought that everybody would stay.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: We would stay. Maybe 40 people might decide or maybe 30, but that was devastating to know that so many people wanted to move. It was.
JAD: And when you look at her scrapbooks, everything stops after that day.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah, this is just thrown in papers.
PAT: Wow, it just stops so abruptly.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yep. I was mad and disgusted. I didn't want to do no more about it. That was the end.
PAT: Almost immediately after that vote, Congress bought out the town, people started packing up and leaving.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Now let me see where it is. I have some that has the big numbers on it.
PAT: Mary Lou told us that when you decided to leave, a demolition crew would actually come to your house and paint ...
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Big red letters like this.
PAT: ... a big number one in front of your house.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: It looked like blood was dripping off.
JAD: Oh, it's like you were marked.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Yeah.
JAD: And what would happen, she says, when your house was marked is that your neighbors would see it, they'd get nervous, and then suddenly their houses would be marked. And then suddenly the whole block would be marked.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: And I knew everyone quite well, and I think I stopped talking to some of them.
JAD: She'd see them on the street, she says, and look the other way.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I didn't like any of them.
PAT: Really?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Mm-hmm.
PAT: And one day in the fall of 1987, these divisions caused something to happen that is just kind of mythically bad.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Yeah.
JAD: It involved a married couple who'd been in the town—well, she'd been there her whole life.
JOAN QUIGLEY: And as a couple, they were divided. One wanted to stay, one wanted to go. I think it was the wife who didn't want to leave.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: And the husband, well he was a shovel runner, and he wanted to take the money you get from relocation and get out.
JOAN QUIGLEY: Their neighbors were moving, had moved. The houses around them were being torn down, and they had to make a decision.
PAT: And all we really know is that at some point, they started to argue.
JOAN QUIGLEY: And ...
PAT: And it escalated.
JOAN QUIGLEY: And he stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife, and then drove up to an old stripping pit and set himself and his car on fire.
JAD: Wow! This is gonna sound like a strange question, but is there anything about that that makes sense to you? Like, why couldn't people let go of this place?
JOAN QUIGLEY: It is very primal.
JAD: Beyond that, she really couldn't say why. And we asked Mary Lou, who hung on long after the murder, after that referendum, after the town was basically empty.
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: I have no idea what kept me there. I have no idea.
JAD: You have no idea?
MARY LOU GAUGHIN: Uh-uh. No idea. I just didn't want to move.
PAT: Today, 11 people live in town.
TOM HYNOSKI: His brother and his wife and ...
TOM DEMPSEY: My mom and them live down in the intersection.
JAD: Tom and Tom pointed them all out from the hill. We knocked on every door, figured we'd ask them what it is that keeps them living literally on top of a fire.
JAD: Hi, good evening.
[door slams]
JAD: Wow. That was the shortest ...
PAT: But none of them wanted to talk to us.
JAD: Not even the dogs.
JAD: Hey!
[dog barks]
JAD: Whoa! Okay, dog. All right.
JAD: But then Tom Two took us to one last spot.
JAD: Where are we right now?
TOM DEMPSEY: We're in Saint Ignatius Roman Catholic Cemetery.
JAD: This cemetery is just a few feet away from the hill where we started. And it's a really strange contrast. You go from this steamy hell and then suddenly you're, like, in woodsy Vermont.
TOM DEMPSEY: There's a lot of people.
JAD: It's beautiful.
TOM DEMPSEY: This is my grandfather and my grandmother.
JAD: Tom has four generations buried here.
PAT: Do you know how many people are here, Tom?
TOM DEMPSEY: There's over 3,000 burials in this cemetery alone.
PAT: 3,000?
TOM DEMPSEY: Yes. Plus.
JAD: And the thing is, says Tom, even the people that left, fled that fire, continue to come back and be buried in this cemetery. Which means this place, this cemetery, is the only thing in Centralia that's still growing. And suddenly, how Joan put it earlier ...
JOAN QUIGLEY: It is very primal.
JAD: ... made sense.
JOAN QUIGLEY: You can experience your life on a multigenerational plane.
TOM DEMPSEY: This is where my great grandparents are buried.
JAD: Which means, in a sense, this town will never die as long as the cemetery's still here.
TOM DEMPSEY: I can't even read their name on here.
PAT: This year?
TOM DEMPSEY: I'll dig it out.
PAT: Oh, it's under the dirt.
TOM DEMPSEY: D-E. Get this up out of here somehow. It's sinking down into the ground.
PAT: It's in the dirt now.
TOM DEMPSEY: Yeah, see it?
JAD: Here we go. I can see it. DEMP-
TOM DEMPSEY: S-E-Y.
JAD: S-E-Y.
JAD: Thanks to Pat Walters for reporting that with me. And also to Chris Perkel and Georgie Roland who directed a great documentary about Centralia called The Town That Was. You can find out more information about that on our website, Radiolab.org.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: Bye.
[JOAN QUIGLEY: Hello, this is Joan Quigley. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Brenna Farrell. Our staff includes ...]
[TOM DEMPSEY: Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters.]
[JOAN QUIGLEY: Tim Howard and Lynn Levy. With help from Nicole Corrie and Sam Rowdman. That's all, folks!]
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