Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the space of a week, back before the
Speaker 1: world came to a halt, I took two trips. One
Speaker 1: was to downtown Manhattan to the Nine to eleven Memorial.
Speaker 1: I'm ashamed to say I'd never visited before, even though
Speaker 1: I live in Manhattan, one Express subway stop away. I'd
Speaker 1: seen pictures, I'd walked right by it, but for some reason,
Speaker 1: I'd never gone right up to it. So I did.
Speaker 1: Finally saw the two big holes in the ground marking
Speaker 1: the spot where the Twin Towers once stood, saw the waterfalls,
Speaker 1: the black stone, the somber lines of trees surrounding the memorial.
Speaker 1: It was pouring rain. There was no one else there.
Speaker 1: My second trip was to Jacksonville, Florida, two unseasonably cold
Speaker 1: winter days. I wanted to see a chart. I know
Speaker 1: that might seem odd. Who goes to Florida to see
Speaker 1: a chart? But there I sat in the conference room
Speaker 1: of what looked like an old bank right by the freeway,
Speaker 1: and someone hooked a laptop up to a big screen
Speaker 1: and showed me a scattered plot X axis, Y axis,
Speaker 1: a bunch of dots, each in the shape of a
Speaker 1: human figure. At the time, I didn't think of my
Speaker 1: visit to Florida and my visit to the nine eleven
Speaker 1: Memorial as connected. They were just two random quests that
Speaker 1: seemed like they might lead somewhere. That's what I do
Speaker 1: at the beginning of every year when I start the
Speaker 1: research for a new season of the show. I spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time pursuing random ideas. But then March
Speaker 1: came and the world turned very strange and very dark,
Speaker 1: and I sat in my room and realized that those
Speaker 1: two trips were about the same thing. My name is
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about
Speaker 1: things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the final episode of
Speaker 1: a season that has been preoccupied with understanding our attachments
Speaker 1: to objects, to rituals, to traditions, to elaborate bits of
Speaker 1: machinery like airplanes. This episode is about our attachment to
Speaker 1: our memories, the things we choose to remember as a society,
Speaker 1: and the things we choose to forget. In September of
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, when two hijacked passenger jets crashed
Speaker 1: into the World Trade Towers in New York City, a
Speaker 1: young architect named Michael Arod was living in downtown Manhattan,
Speaker 1: and later a couple of nights after the attack, I
Speaker 1: was on my bicycle and I made my way to
Speaker 1: Washingt Square Park and two or three in the morning,
Speaker 1: there were a dozen or so people standing around that
Speaker 1: fountain in the middle of the park, and there was
Speaker 1: no ceremony, there was no speech. There was just people
Speaker 1: standing there together, not even you know, in ones and
Speaker 1: twos and threes. And when I walked up to the
Speaker 1: edge of that fountain and stood next to a stranger,
Speaker 1: I felt for the first time in two three days
Speaker 1: that since that something shift, that I was supported by
Speaker 1: these people, and in turn, just by standing next to them,
Speaker 1: I was supporting them. And I think that sense of
Speaker 1: belonging for the first time pushed me in some way
Speaker 1: to want to participate in this idea for a memorial.
Speaker 1: A memorial. The vision that came to a Rod was
Speaker 1: of two giant, empty concrete vessels in the Hudson River,
Speaker 1: a few blocks from the twin towers, each roughly the
Speaker 1: size and shape of the footprint of the towers themselves,
Speaker 1: imagining the surface of the Hudson River somehow shorn open,
Speaker 1: forming these two square voids in the water, cascading into
Speaker 1: these voids and never filling them up, and so they
Speaker 1: remained these empty, inexplicable vessels. A few years later, the
Speaker 1: city set up a competition to design a memorial for
Speaker 1: the site. It was the largest design competition in history,
Speaker 1: over five thousand entries from sixty three countries, including some
Speaker 1: of the most famous architects in the world. Michael Arod
Speaker 1: was a nobody. He worked for New York's Housing Authority
Speaker 1: designing police stations. He took his original idea and moved
Speaker 1: it from the Hudson River to the actual site of
Speaker 1: the fallen towers. Two deep voids representing the footprint of
Speaker 1: the twin towers, each with a waterfall and reflect pool,
Speaker 1: ringed by the names of those who died. He entered,
Speaker 1: and he won. The towers were about two hundred and
Speaker 1: twelve feet across, and the reflecting pools they see on
Speaker 1: the site today are one hundred and seventy six feet
Speaker 1: across from waterfall to waterfall. That waterfall is ringed by
Speaker 1: eight foot wide water table that brings that out further
Speaker 1: to one hundred ninety six if I'm not mistaken, and
Speaker 1: then surrounding that water table where the names are displayed
Speaker 1: is an area where you can walk around the pools,
Speaker 1: and that area is ringed by trees, and so that
Speaker 1: first row of trees that surround each pool is precisely
Speaker 1: two hundred and twelve feet across. He called his design
Speaker 1: Reflecting Absence, a precise representation of what was taken away
Speaker 1: on the morning of nine to eleven. What I wanted
Speaker 1: to do is convey to people who come here, very clearly,
Speaker 1: without embellishment, how large these towers were. And that's very
Speaker 1: evident when you stand at the edge of that pool,
Speaker 1: and there is something that no photograph can capture until
Speaker 1: you're there, at the sense of the scale. If you
Speaker 1: as a person next to this enormous spaces, you have
Speaker 1: to experience there and to see the thousands of names
Speaker 1: that surround these two pools. To convey the loss of
Speaker 1: so many lives, a rod conceived of something simple and beautiful.
Speaker 1: The task of making it real fell to the Port Authority.
Speaker 1: The Port Authority builds and runs much of the transportation
Speaker 1: infrastructure in the New York region, the bridges, tunnels, airports.
Speaker 1: They're like the metuaria's in house engineer, contractor, and handyman
Speaker 1: all in one. If your Handyman had an annual budget
Speaker 1: and the billions they actually built the original World Trade Center,
Speaker 1: and the responsibility for building the memorial was theirs. As
Speaker 1: to say, I'm time, yeah, so were so. I asked
Speaker 1: the two former Port Authority executives who oversaw the memorial project,
Speaker 1: Chris Ward and David Tweedy, to meet me at ground zero.
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand what it means to make memory
Speaker 1: reel in the way that Arod was proposing. A complexity
Speaker 1: of just building it, then the complexity of the symbolism
Speaker 1: and the culture of why did people choose to put
Speaker 1: so much into the site, which then exacerbated her made
Speaker 1: we're going to walk around? Why don't we start by
Speaker 1: really simple? I'm the nine to eleven Memorial wasn't an
Speaker 1: ordinary project. The design committee made it clear that they
Speaker 1: wanted something built on the site of the old towers,
Speaker 1: which created a logistical nightmare because ground zero isn't some
Speaker 1: vacant lot, It's one of the most dense urban spaces
Speaker 1: in the country. I met the Port Authority guys in
Speaker 1: the lobby of four World Trade Center, which is seventy
Speaker 1: two stories high, but there's also a one World Trade
Speaker 1: Center at one hundred and four stories and a two
Speaker 1: or three, a planned five and a seven World Trade Center,
Speaker 1: plus the nine leven museum, are performing arts center, and
Speaker 1: a massive transit hub where the Path commuter trains enter
Speaker 1: from New Jersey. The hub looks like the bones of
Speaker 1: a beached whale or a giant hair clip, depending on
Speaker 1: your perspective. That structure also contains a mall, and underneath
Speaker 1: it all, running right through the middle, there's a subway line,
Speaker 1: the Number one train. All of these structures had to
Speaker 1: be built at the same time as Michael Aarrod's memorial voids,
Speaker 1: and because everything is basically on top of everything else,
Speaker 1: the logistics of planning and building were overwhelming. So you
Speaker 1: have memorialization, you have a museum, you have real estate,
Speaker 1: you've got a security center, you've got a ecumenical religious city.
Speaker 1: You pour all that in, and then you've got the
Speaker 1: over of the families. We're wondering, where's my commemoration? Where
Speaker 1: will I'm warn You put that all in, and it's
Speaker 1: impossible to disentangle a stead of priorities. Tweetywood and I
Speaker 1: stood by the two Blackstone voids in the pouring rain,
Speaker 1: and they tried to explain what they went through. So
Speaker 1: we use the analogy that the construction was so difficult
Speaker 1: because it was like the children's game of pickup sticks
Speaker 1: that if you if you know that little game where
Speaker 1: you've got the multi coolored sticks and if you pick
Speaker 1: one up, the other one moves and then you lose.
Speaker 1: Everything here is connected. The political leadership in New York
Speaker 1: made it clear that the memorial had to be finished
Speaker 1: in time for the tenth anniversary of the attacks September eleventh,
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, just to be tangible about it. The memorial plaza,
Speaker 1: which we were on a huge pressure to get done
Speaker 1: by the tenth anniversary, is sitting on the ceiling of
Speaker 1: the hub. The hub the place where all the underground
Speaker 1: transit lines converge. We have to completely refashion the construction
Speaker 1: process of how that hub got built at huge cost
Speaker 1: by the way, in order to get this done first,
Speaker 1: so they built top down rather than the normal traditional
Speaker 1: The normal traditional way is to build from the bottom up,
Speaker 1: start with the foundation, go from there and Tweety says
Speaker 1: the Port Authority originally had a plan to do things
Speaker 1: that way. The problem was when you did that schedule,
Speaker 1: the memorial plaza wouldn't have been done until the end
Speaker 1: of twenty thirteen, and so that's when we were starting
Speaker 1: to go, wait a minute, the city is not going
Speaker 1: to tolerate the port authority telling them me, telling them,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to wait till twenty thirteen before you
Speaker 1: can commemorate the anniversary and dates matter. I mean, ten
Speaker 1: years is different than thirteen years, which is different than
Speaker 1: twelve years. And you know, the engineers, a couple of
Speaker 1: them came up with the idea, build the ceiling first. Basically,
Speaker 1: go across the entire site with the ceiling, which is
Speaker 1: the ceiling of what's below the most important here, it's
Speaker 1: the floor of the plaza. And then once you've done that,
Speaker 1: build down from there. As if that wasn't enough, the
Speaker 1: governor of New York at the time insisted that the subway,
Speaker 1: the Number one line, keep running throughout all this. So
Speaker 1: they had to build a box around the subway tracks,
Speaker 1: suspend the box high above the site, and work around it.
Speaker 1: Which is one of those odd facts that you only
Speaker 1: think about if you live in New York and you
Speaker 1: took the Number one train, as I did many times
Speaker 1: in those years, and you suddenly realized that on all
Speaker 1: of those trips you were in a real life version
Speaker 1: of Jenga, you know the game where you have a
Speaker 1: stack of building blocks and you remove them one by
Speaker 1: one until everything crashes. So there was a whole re
Speaker 1: engineering of how you'd support the one train, how the
Speaker 1: path train would get protected. And remember you've got an
Speaker 1: operating railroad. So you're building a temporary structure and housing
Speaker 1: the ceiling of a hub with train tracks below you
Speaker 1: the ones here, but the path trains were building a
Speaker 1: platforms exactly. And then you build a platform and then
Speaker 1: you plump the memorial on top of the platform, and
Speaker 1: even as things are going on, and then you're feeding.
Speaker 1: And that's what I was getting up before. You're feeding
Speaker 1: the construction horizontally rather than vertically, which added, you know,
Speaker 1: added about sixty million dollars worth the additional cost to
Speaker 1: handle them. Like I was saying, at one point, you
Speaker 1: had people hand excavating underneath the one train because there
Speaker 1: just wasn't room to get any heavy equipment down there.
Speaker 1: If you could put the Memorial in the Hudson River,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have this problem. Of course, you just build
Speaker 1: some pilings into the riverbed and if you didn't have
Speaker 1: to race and finished by September eleventh, twenty eleven, your
Speaker 1: life would be easier as well. You could start at
Speaker 1: the bottom and build up the normal way, not start
Speaker 1: at the top and build down in the service of
Speaker 1: fulfilling the very strict requirements of memory. Something that would
Speaker 1: have been straightforward was turned into something very complicated. Okay,
Speaker 1: so again, take something as simple as exactly where we're
Speaker 1: standing here. Here's the brass with all the names. We
Speaker 1: were standing by the perimeter of one of the voids.
Speaker 1: Ward was pointing at the rows of names of all
Speaker 1: those who died in the attacks. The names are embossed
Speaker 1: in brass and inlaid into the voids stone walls. It's
Speaker 1: meant to be something solid that people can touch. But
Speaker 1: if you're the port authority, you have to think through
Speaker 1: the implications of that, due to the ability for brass
Speaker 1: to capture heat, and that if on a really really
Speaker 1: hot day someone could put their hand down on this,
Speaker 1: they could get literally a second degree burn if the
Speaker 1: sun had been on this all day. So there's a
Speaker 1: cooling system underneath this brass so that it will always
Speaker 1: stay safe. So people can end up touching it at
Speaker 1: the same time, if a little kid in the middle
Speaker 1: of winter when it's freezing came out here and wanted
Speaker 1: to stick his tongue on it, you know, the famous
Speaker 1: get stuck to the flag ball in the playground. So
Speaker 1: there's a heating system underneath here as well. So just
Speaker 1: to end up showing these names, you've got a system
Speaker 1: which is both heating and cooling. A copper facade here
Speaker 1: for where the names are edged. Wow, if you just
Speaker 1: did concrete, would you have There are a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways you could have put names, you know, yea
Speaker 1: out there, but this was in there. They're all backlip
Speaker 1: as you can see. So in some respects, would there
Speaker 1: be a more efficient way to have names were on it? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: but this is a special site. In the end, the
Speaker 1: price tag for the National September eleven Memorial and Museum
Speaker 1: came to somewhere around seven hundred million dollars. To put
Speaker 1: that in perspective, the cost of the Vietnam Memorial in
Speaker 1: today's dollars was twenty million. The cost of the Lincoln
Speaker 1: Memorial in today's dollars was forty five million. Now is
Speaker 1: seven hundred billion dollars too much? I don't know. It
Speaker 1: depends on what you're comparing it to. I suppose the
Speaker 1: point is that we could have done it for less,
Speaker 1: but we chose not to because we wanted to memorialize
Speaker 1: that event as perfectly and precisely as possible, down to
Speaker 1: its dimensions, location, and date of completion. When we want
Speaker 1: to we take our memories very seriously. The maintenance schedule
Speaker 1: on that kind of thing must be intense. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're right, you can't fail, right, it's exactly on the
Speaker 1: ice in the winter issue rights of warming makes it easier.
Speaker 1: So one of the problems is is if you'll see
Speaker 1: the way the water flows underneath the perimeter, it's horizontal
Speaker 1: to the ground. Here about the side, you get a
Speaker 1: heavy wind in the wintertime and it whips across the top.
Speaker 1: It picks up moisture and then blows it onto this brick,
Speaker 1: which then potentially creates ice conditions between keeping the fountains
Speaker 1: going and security and the heating and cooling systems and
Speaker 1: the museum staff and chipping the ice off the brick.
Speaker 1: The operating budget for the memorial comes to another eighty
Speaker 1: million dollars a year, so all told, we're somewhere over
Speaker 1: one point five billion dollars for the memorial. So far,
Speaker 1: the nine to eleven Memorial is option number one for
Speaker 1: memory management. The alternative option number two is Jacksonville. Do
Speaker 1: you have your high school plumbard our high school? Deflum.
Speaker 1: I am a bachelors degree from the Universal Effective Would
Speaker 1: you maituran? Okay? Um? Did you ever go to jailer bison? True?
Speaker 1: I went to Jacksonville, Florida during the count. Every homeless
Speaker 1: organization in the country does this during the last ten
Speaker 1: days of January. Volunteers go out and count the number
Speaker 1: of people living on the streets. The group I went
Speaker 1: to see changing Homelessness had one hundred and eighty volunteers,
Speaker 1: divided up into shifts morning, afternoon, and evening gathering information.
Speaker 1: Who are you working at work? One? Uh? Do word already?
Speaker 1: Actually do work? Yeah? So when he became homeless? Did
Speaker 1: you how homeless? Did you like run away from a family? Um?
Speaker 1: Was there violence at home? Any kind of differences in job?
Speaker 1: You start? Okay? Jacksonville did its first count more than
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago. More is an academic exercise than anything else.
Speaker 1: We really honestly thought, we knew, why do we need
Speaker 1: to do a registry right, we know everybody. That's Don Gilman,
Speaker 1: who runs Changing Homelessness. The more they thought about this
Speaker 1: idea of a registry, the more they wondered if they
Speaker 1: were missing people. What if they were homeless people out
Speaker 1: there who never stayed in a shelter or who never
Speaker 1: showed up looking for services. So Gilman decided to do
Speaker 1: a real count. So that was the first time we
Speaker 1: went out when it was convenient for our clients and
Speaker 1: not convenient for us. We went out between four and
Speaker 1: six am on a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: idea being, if you're on the streets in the early morning,
Speaker 1: you really are homeless. You are homeless, that's where you
Speaker 1: spent the night. So now for the count. The volunteers
Speaker 1: gathered before sunrise. College students formerly homeless, people who remember
Speaker 1: what it was like on the streets, teachers helping out
Speaker 1: before their day starts. Nurses from the nearby hospitals to
Speaker 1: carry with them hygiene kits, toothpaste, socks, soap, shampoo. They
Speaker 1: fan out across Jacksonville, looking under bridges, in parked cars,
Speaker 1: in abandoned buildings. If you're sleeping, they leave you alone.
Speaker 1: If you're awake, they ask you questions. What they learn
Speaker 1: gets fed into something called the by name list, and
Speaker 1: the data from that list is graft as a scatter plot.
Speaker 1: That was the chart I went down to Jacksonville to see.
Speaker 1: Each homeless person they found is represented by an icon
Speaker 1: on the chart. The vertical axis is a measure of vulnerability.
Speaker 1: Do they have disabilities or mental illness? Can they take
Speaker 1: care of themselves? The horizontal axis measures how long they've
Speaker 1: been without housing. If your name appears down in the
Speaker 1: left hand corner, that means you're pretty healthy and haven't
Speaker 1: been on the streets that long. If you're in the
Speaker 1: upper right hand corner vulnerable and homeless for an extended
Speaker 1: period of time, that's a different story. Looking at that
Speaker 1: scatter it's not dots, it's little people. So it's always
Speaker 1: bringing it back to Even though we're looking at aggregate data,
Speaker 1: we're always bringing it back to that individual who's experiencing homelessness.
Speaker 1: So we know their name, we know who they are.
Speaker 1: The fundamental condition of homelessness is invisibility. Those on the
Speaker 1: streets are the easiest to ignore and the easiest to forget.
Speaker 1: The scatterplot reminds us who they are, what their lives are,
Speaker 1: like what their needs are? I pointed to someone way
Speaker 1: over on the right hand side, the side where the
Speaker 1: most vulnerable people are clustered. Don Gilman's colleague, Charles Temple,
Speaker 1: recognizes the name right away. He's talked about every meeting
Speaker 1: that we have now that guy, that guy, because he's
Speaker 1: our guy. We get him house like our whole. That
Speaker 1: drops our whole avert Some of these clients, even if
Speaker 1: they're not up on the vulnerability index there, they can
Speaker 1: be difficult people to work with. Some people need all
Speaker 1: kinds of help. Others really only need one thing. Housing,
Speaker 1: But which which One's our Clay County guy that's been
Speaker 1: out there for a long time. He's been on the
Speaker 1: list for over a year, and like like you're saying,
Speaker 1: there's just nothing out there for him, But we bring
Speaker 1: him up every week. We talk about him every week,
Speaker 1: and actually just last week we may have identified a
Speaker 1: housing resource hud Vash might take him, make a waiver
Speaker 1: and actually accept him through. Every Tuesday, at one o'clock
Speaker 1: in the same room where I'm sitting, all the key
Speaker 1: housing advocates in Jacksonville gather and comb through this list,
Speaker 1: all the names, one by one, what's happening? I mean,
Speaker 1: what is the barrier? Is it because they want to
Speaker 1: stay in a particular part of our community and there's
Speaker 1: not a whole lot of affordable housing there. Is it
Speaker 1: because they have a very recent eviction? Is it because
Speaker 1: they have a very recent or a violent felony at
Speaker 1: some point? And how do we who are our landlords
Speaker 1: that will maybe work with this person? The names on
Speaker 1: the Jack Sinville list are arranged deliberately. Where they fall
Speaker 1: on the scattered plot gives each name meaning. And I
Speaker 1: was struck as I sat in that conference room by
Speaker 1: how similar that was to the names list at the
Speaker 1: nine to eleven memorial. The victims there suffer from the
Speaker 1: same condition of invisibility, and the list of the names
Speaker 1: around the top of the voids is supposed to give
Speaker 1: them permanence. Why not do it alphabetically like other memorials do?
Speaker 1: I think one the biggest reason, at least in my mind,
Speaker 1: is you lose so much of the story of these
Speaker 1: people by doing that. The job of figuring out which
Speaker 1: name went where on the parapet fell to another architect
Speaker 1: on Michael Arrod's team, Amanda Sachs. I think it's important
Speaker 1: to know if they were on a plane, if they
Speaker 1: were in the North Tower or South tower, if they
Speaker 1: were a first responder. Um. I think it adds a
Speaker 1: level of meaning. It brings meaning to their name as
Speaker 1: much as possible. I also think, you know, what are
Speaker 1: the other reasons? Just a very basic reason was there
Speaker 1: are there are a few people with very similar names.
Speaker 1: There are people with names that only the middle name
Speaker 1: is different. When you list these people alphabetically, I think
Speaker 1: it loses you lose the sense of people as individuals.
Speaker 1: The guiding principle of Sex's work was something Michael LaRod
Speaker 1: called meaningful adjacency. What it means is that every person
Speaker 1: is placed along the parapet in a adjacency with one
Speaker 1: or two or sometimes three people also obviously other victims
Speaker 1: that they were in some way close with. Two nine
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty two people died that day. Their names
Speaker 1: are first grouped according to the floor of the tower
Speaker 1: they worked on, or the plane they were on, or
Speaker 1: if they were emergency rescue, the latter company they belonged to.
Speaker 1: Then within those groups, each name of the dead was
Speaker 1: placed nearest to the people who meant the most of them.
Speaker 1: Sachs had to work out each of those relationships and
Speaker 1: determined the patterns behind all those long columns of names.
Speaker 1: I would say I spent two years to three years
Speaker 1: on this arrangement, just trying to understand their relationships, trying
Speaker 1: to do these kind of tests and see how it
Speaker 1: would work. And were there any adjacencies that were particularly meaningful.
Speaker 1: I have to say, I think for me, the whole
Speaker 1: I mean, every every person on that memorial was I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm getting emotional. I can't say that any any adjacency
Speaker 1: had any more important than any other. I mean, some
Speaker 1: stories are you know, you think the kind of crazy,
Speaker 1: like for example, but there were two one on flight
Speaker 1: one seventy five, and there was another woman on flight eleven,
Speaker 1: and I can't remember exactly what their relationship was, but
Speaker 1: I think one of them was the godparents of of
Speaker 1: the other. And you know, flight eleven went into the
Speaker 1: North tower and flight on seventy five m was went
Speaker 1: into the South tower, and the fact that there were
Speaker 1: people that knew each other on those plane is insane.
Speaker 1: Sas wanted to find a way to put the names
Speaker 1: of those two people as close together as possible. Maybe
Speaker 1: at the point at which the group of names who
Speaker 1: died in the North tower touched the group of names
Speaker 1: from the South Tower. We actually wanted them to be
Speaker 1: adjacent as adjacent as possible, So we wanted the one
Speaker 1: in the North pool to be on the lower right
Speaker 1: hand corner, and the South pool would anyway be towards
Speaker 1: the upper the north west corner. She tried a hundred
Speaker 1: different ways to plant it out, couldn't make it work. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of sad. The one adjacent see that we
Speaker 1: didn't get is the one that I'm that I'm remembering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I just, you know, as I said before, just
Speaker 1: every name, every person has so much importance. I don't
Speaker 1: I can't really say otherwise. We have a memorial for
Speaker 1: the dead at ground zero, arranged according to their relationships,
Speaker 1: and we have a memorial for the living in Jacksonville,
Speaker 1: a scatterplot of the homeless, arranged according to their needs.
Speaker 1: Two memorials with the same intent, because when we add
Speaker 1: context to names, names become real. But of course, once
Speaker 1: you start reflecting on the similarities between ground Zero and Jacksonville,
Speaker 1: then inevitably you start thinking about the differences. Initially, I
Speaker 1: was actually drawn to eastern white pine trees they're very tall, towering,
Speaker 1: and there was just some an evergreen and read some
Speaker 1: rare description of them described as serve the towering giants
Speaker 1: of the forest. Michael Rod was told his original design
Speaker 1: for the nine to eleven Memorial was too bleak, two
Speaker 1: voids on an empty, windswept plaza, so he decided to
Speaker 1: add trees. And I thought there was something beautiful about
Speaker 1: the idea of actually them directing your gaze upward toward
Speaker 1: the sky while you were there, and developed a design
Speaker 1: then had about seventy or eighty of them on the plaza,
Speaker 1: but that you didn't feel quite right enough. Arrod deliberated
Speaker 1: with his partner in the memorial's design, the landscape architect
Speaker 1: Peter Walker. They settled on swamp white oaks, a gorgeous tree,
Speaker 1: peeling bark, lustrous, lobed, twotoned leaves, green with a silvery underside.
Speaker 1: But then, of course it was left to the port authority,
Speaker 1: to David Tweety and Chris Ward to figure out how
Speaker 1: to plant a forest suspended atop a transit. So then
Speaker 1: adding all of these trees, weight of these trees, Yeah,
Speaker 1: The laid for at least a year figuring out the
Speaker 1: engineering to put all these tree pots, hard to put
Speaker 1: all these cheese, as the amount of dirt necessary and
Speaker 1: the moisture that goes into the dirt, and the weight
Speaker 1: because they're it's avoid underneath dollars of a different struct
Speaker 1: of additional structural support on the hub buildings underneath, just
Speaker 1: to support the weight of the trees. And how many
Speaker 1: cheese are there? We're gonna say so each each tree.
Speaker 1: So here's a tree here? What what? What? What's bene box?
Speaker 1: And there's literally man made dirt which is super light
Speaker 1: compared to nature made dirt with a material in it
Speaker 1: which allows it to capture moisture to be very efficient
Speaker 1: for maintaining the health of the trees. But each box
Speaker 1: has its own moisture reader inside of it, so they
Speaker 1: can tell you know, when it's you know, the tree
Speaker 1: is threatened. So you've got an each little part of it.
Speaker 1: You've got this amount of technology that put anywhere else.
Speaker 1: You go, oh my god, this is These are just trees,
Speaker 1: but not just trees, perfect trees, peeling, bark, lustrous, lobe,
Speaker 1: two toned leaves, trees that are fed and cared for
Speaker 1: and each given their own place to live. How big
Speaker 1: is the box probably out the light here, so like
Speaker 1: ten by ten. And the problem was when you began
Speaker 1: to move them over areas where it was there was
Speaker 1: less infrastructure underneath it, it got even more expensive to
Speaker 1: build the box and then bring this infrastructure to support
Speaker 1: the box trees with an expensive, bespoke, carefully engineered social
Speaker 1: support system. Yeah, but again that was driven from how
Speaker 1: are you good? Do you? Suddenly a security guard came
Speaker 1: running up. Apparently we needed authorization to conduct our interview.
Speaker 1: The attention to detail at the nine eleven Memorial extends
Speaker 1: even to when and how you're allowed to engage in
Speaker 1: recorded conversation. These are the guys who built this whole thing.
Speaker 1: How as the executive director of the Port Authority, we
Speaker 1: just talking a police officer real quick. Yes, but unfortunately
Speaker 1: the media department does not work. And but yeah, we
Speaker 1: ended up leaving the memorial plaza for the sidewalk fifty
Speaker 1: yards away. We stood in the rain and looked back
Speaker 1: at the exacting beauty of this act of collective memory.
Speaker 1: The nine eleven Memorial is perfect, but the Jacksonville Memorial
Speaker 1: is not. It's messy, a work in progress. Names get
Speaker 1: taken off the list when people find apartments or move away,
Speaker 1: and new people get added to the list all the time.
Speaker 1: Do the exits stay ahead of the entries. We do
Speaker 1: measure our inflow outflow on a regular basis, and we
Speaker 1: want to see our inflow less than our outflow. But
Speaker 1: we are teetering pretty much on the same amount that
Speaker 1: we are exiting. We're the ones we are housing. It's
Speaker 1: the same amount that we are seeing, So it's pretty close.
Speaker 1: But I think there's still a gap in there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you're not over time, you're not. The rumba is not.
Speaker 1: It is shrinking, but it is painfully slow. There's no
Speaker 1: mystery why it's painfully slow. We would love to master
Speaker 1: lease one hundred one bedroom units that are at a
Speaker 1: price point that our rapidly housing clients could reasonably maintain,
Speaker 1: and we can't find them. There were a number of
Speaker 1: years where I've been here, I think, well you were
Speaker 1: been doing this too, where we could find those They existed,
Speaker 1: they were out there, like many other places, some of
Speaker 1: those older units. They're quirky and interesting. They're starting to
Speaker 1: get rehabbed. The rents will go up, and then the
Speaker 1: people that used to be able to afford them cannot anymore.
Speaker 1: Gilman said that right now she can find the money
Speaker 1: to put her clients in apartments that run for up
Speaker 1: to six hundred and fifty dollars a month, but that
Speaker 1: just aren't any apartments in that range in Jacksonville. If
Speaker 1: she could find the money for an eight hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a month apartment, it would make things far easier. But
Speaker 1: where are you going to find an extra hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty dollars a month? Who has that kind of money
Speaker 1: lying around? We are hitting the wall. We really now
Speaker 1: as a community have to pay attention to this. If
Speaker 1: our goal is to have fewer people out on the
Speaker 1: street instead of more, we got to start figuring out
Speaker 1: how do we build more deeply affordable housing faster. Some
Speaker 1: portion of the people who do not get help end
Speaker 1: up dying on the streets. Almost every community in the
Speaker 1: country has a service for those who've fallen. It happens
Speaker 1: in late December on Winter Solstice. It's become a tradition
Speaker 1: in Jacksonville. The service is held at the City Rescue
Speaker 1: Mission downtown. Acquire sings, a local pastor gives the homily,
Speaker 1: then don Gilman performs her final duty of the year.
Speaker 1: I've had the honor for the last ten years of
Speaker 1: reading the names, and the list is always too long.
Speaker 1: And before I read the name, I remind everybody that
Speaker 1: there are six categories of homeless people, and that someone's
Speaker 1: mother or someone's father, someone's son, or someone's daughter, or
Speaker 1: their sister or their brothers. It's it's more than dots
Speaker 1: on a scattered plot. How many people were on the
Speaker 1: list last in December thirty six, thirty six. The optimist
Speaker 1: in me always thought that the ultimate purpose of memorials
Speaker 1: was that they were dressed rehearsals for our collective memory,
Speaker 1: that in the course of building a shrine to the fallen,
Speaker 1: we reminded ourselves of our broader obligations to the vulnerable.
Speaker 1: You give the benefit of your empathy and generosity to
Speaker 1: the memory of someone who was on a plane hijacked
Speaker 1: by terrorists, or to the memory of someone who worked
Speaker 1: in a toppled tower, and then it becomes easier to
Speaker 1: extend that empathy and generosity to the lonely and the
Speaker 1: suffering who are still among us. You get good at
Speaker 1: meaningful adjacency for the dead, and that makes you better
Speaker 1: at practicing it on the living. But that's not what happens.
Speaker 1: Is it we go to any length, any length to
Speaker 1: commemorate one person's death, deploy armies of architects and engineers, then,
Speaker 1: in the same breath, look the other way as we
Speaker 1: step over someone lying on the street. A gorgeous mausoleum
Speaker 1: for the dead, A scatterplot for the living. Crystal Panzer,
Speaker 1: age thirty two, Sam Sadowski, age twenty five. I went
Speaker 1: home from Jacksonville and spent an afternoon watching Winter Solstice
Speaker 1: services on YouTube. Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Spokane, San Francisco. Small groups
Speaker 1: of people huddled together in the cold of a December night,
Speaker 1: holding candles, singing hymns. Margaret, Josephine Thompson, Jacko Hudson, Margarita,
Speaker 1: then reading the names of the dead, hundreds of them.
Speaker 1: George Randall, Olivar, age twenty three, Edward Ruhe Tunissen, age
Speaker 1: forty seven, unknown, unknown unknown. I watched until I couldn't anymore.
Speaker 1: Then I wept. Revisionist History is produced by Milobelle and Leemingistu,
Speaker 1: with Jacob Smith, Eloise Lynton and On a naim Our.
Speaker 1: Editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering
Speaker 1: by Flawn Williams. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin crew, Heather Faine, Carly Magliori, Maya Kanik,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: and from everyone here at Pushkin, thank you for listening
Speaker 1: to another season of revisionist history. You are the reason
Speaker 1: we have the privilege of revising history every year. I'm
Speaker 1: Malcolm Glappo coo coo coo,