SPEAKER_09: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters i x l dot com slash invisible. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Happy New Year, beautiful nerds. As is our tradition, we are launching 2023 with another batch of mini stories from the 99 PI crew. We took an episode in between to send a big box of Christmas gifts to our Lola, but we wouldn't leave you with only one mini stories episode. Of course not. We have stories of liminal space discombobulation, the wildest theme park in the world, and the new family road trip game that will soon be sweeping the nation called, Should This Be a Street or a Road? Stay tuned. Hey Delaney Hall, what's your mini story about?
SPEAKER_07: Hey Roman, my mini story is about a word that I learned recently and the word is strode, which is a portmanteau of street and road. And are you familiar with the term?
SPEAKER_09: I am. I don't know the word strode, although I don't think I know everything. So let's yes, let's talk about it.
SPEAKER_07: Okay. So for people who aren't, it describes a thoroughfare that basically tries to do two incompatible things at once. And in the process it does both things badly.
SPEAKER_05: We call this the futon of transportation.
SPEAKER_07: So this is Charles Morone. He's also known as Chuck and he invented the term strode.
SPEAKER_05: If you think of a futon as being an uncomfortable couch that makes into an uncomfortable bed, a strode tries to do two things at once and it fails at both. It tries to be both street and road.
SPEAKER_09: I think most people think of those two things as synonyms, but so what is the difference between a street and a road?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Most of us don't think of there being any difference, but Chuck is a former traffic engineer and he gave me his take on how he thinks about those two different things. So we'll start with how Chuck defines a road.
SPEAKER_05: A road is about moving things over distance at speed.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, so that's a road. It's all about getting people quickly from point A to point B. A street, according to Chuck, is a place like where people go to shop and hang out.
SPEAKER_05: In an urban setting, a good street is one where you are going to experience more people outside of a vehicle than within a vehicle. You will have narrower streets. You will certainly have slow traffic. You will have lots of space for people. A good street is one that prioritizes being in the place over getting through the place.
SPEAKER_09: Okay, I get it. So if you take the features of a road and you mash them together with the features of a street, you get a strode, which is a place where traffic is moving relatively fast and there's a lot of development and people. Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_07: It's like an unholy combination of the two things. Strodes usually have multiple lanes of traffic going in each direction. And then they're also lined with strip malls or big box stores or just business establishments that people are trying to get to.
SPEAKER_05: This is a place that when you look at it, the dominant feature of it is automobile mobility. The dominant feature is moving cars quickly. And in that case, it has a certain highway kind of sense to it. But appended to that is in this very almost freakish kind of way is this afterthought of humanity. So we'll put on the edge a little bit of place for people to walk. Maybe we'll throw in a bench here or there or a garbage can because there might be somebody walking by with a Coke bottle they want to throw away.
SPEAKER_09: I love the way he puts that, an afterthought of humanity. You'll get a garbage can if you're lucky.
SPEAKER_07: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's their concession to people is a garbage can. And the way Chuck describes it, and I think the way most people who've driven down a strode experience it, is that because they're confused about their purpose, they're very stressful. Like for everybody.
SPEAKER_05: If you're driving through these environments, they create a lot of tension within you because everything about the design is saying go fast. But everything about the from the speed limit to the traffic signals to the turning traffic is slowing you down artificially from what the design is expressing to you.
SPEAKER_07: And so when you're in a car, you're like, why is it so crowded here? Like why is it so stop and go? And then if you're a pedestrian or a bicyclist, you're just like, try not to die. 80% of the crashes that result in a fatality or a traumatic injury are on arterials and
SPEAKER_05: collectors which essentially are our strodes. These are really dangerous environments and everybody can feel them when they're in that.
SPEAKER_07: And the wild thing is that even though strodes are dangerous and disorienting and all the things Chuck has just described, they are everywhere in America. Like I've definitely had this experience where now that I know the word strode, I cannot stop seeing them everywhere. It's like I have magic glasses on. And I think that's true for most people, especially here in the US. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. So why are there so many strodes in the US? What makes them happen here more than anywhere else?
SPEAKER_07: Well, Chuck says that it has to do with the history of development in this country and how we came to be a country with a lot of sprawl. Back in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, we began to connect the country with a vast network of roadways. It was, as you know, a huge investment. It was driven by the work of civil engineers and it was motivated by a very idyllic picture of what the country could be.
SPEAKER_05: We need you to go out and spend billions and billions of dollars building this brand new system to connect places. We're going to create a middle class. We're going to create suburbia. We're going to do all this so that we don't slide back into depression and so that we create like this great new version of America. That was the marketing brochure.
SPEAKER_07: And if you just take the marketing brochure on its face, like hold off on all the downsides we know about now, you can see why mobility and roads were so important to this essentially suburban vision of America.
SPEAKER_05: We can get more people to more jobs, to more places, to more opportunity, to more shopping, to more, more, more, more, more, more, and we can really drive our economy. And so what is handed down to modern engineers is an ethic of mobility.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and of course the mobility is really important. Like it was genuinely transformative to connect the country through the interstate highway system.
SPEAKER_07: Yes, totally. But the value placed on car based mobility also created this situation we're in now where a lot of us live in communities that aren't quite cities and aren't quite towns and where strodes are really the bedrock of that suburban development style. And so over time we've just built a lot of places that are very car dependent and just they prioritize cars over people.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. So I get that the history of the development of the United States has led to a lot of strodes, but if we're realizing that strodes are bad, which I think that more people than Chuck have realized that strodes are bad, like why do we keep building them?
SPEAKER_07: I'm sure part of it's just inertia. That's how we've done it for a long time. I mean, Chuck described being a young traffic engineer and basically being handed this manual of standards that are just like received wisdom about how you build streets and they should be this wide.
SPEAKER_05: And when this knowledge was given to me, it was given to me as, you know, you would give any sacred text. Like here is our code of being and this is the way we do things.
SPEAKER_07: But there's another reason too, which is that over time, Chuck says, a certain theory of development has taken hold in a lot of communities. And basically the theory goes, if your city or town has economic problems, then it should build more roads because there's a lot of state and federal money to fund transportation projects.
SPEAKER_05: We have problems with economic development. We have problems with job creation. We have challenges with getting this park fixed, you know, on and on and on. And they all become in one way or another transportation challenges because that's where the money is.
SPEAKER_07: And back when he was an engineer working on transportation projects, Chuck would make the argument to cities and towns that their investment in stuff like strodes would eventually pay off. But over time, he came to doubt that that financial argument was even true. Like there's now a lot of research that shows that dense downtowns are not just safer and more pleasant. They're also a much better bet financially than suburban style stroad development. What they have found time and time again is that the pre-Great Depression pattern of development,
SPEAKER_05: the pattern that was built around essentially people walking, that pattern has enormous levels of financial productivity. In other words, the community is getting more tax revenue out of those places than it costs to provide ongoing service and maintenance.
SPEAKER_07: And on the other hand, development that looks more like big box stores kind of strung along vast stretches of stroad, that is not a great investment.
SPEAKER_05: Because they're built in a static way, not a dynamic way, not a way where they evolve and change over time, they also tend to lose their financial productivity when maintenance starts to come due. Oh, that's so interesting.
SPEAKER_09: So is there any way to un-strode a stroad if you want to make that environment a little bit better for everybody? Well, in many ways that is now Chuck's work.
SPEAKER_07: Like he eventually left his job as a traffic engineer because he felt like his work was harming the places where he lived and worked. He even wrote this book called Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. So now instead of building stroads projects, he's become a kind of evangelist for denser urbanism and he travels around the country talking to people about how to build stronger towns and he says that one of the most important things a community can do is just decide what is a street and what is a road.
SPEAKER_05: Give me two categories. I'm either trying to build a place or I'm trying to move vehicles quickly. I can't do both. I can't do both at the same time and have it be safe, have it be productive, have it be a good investment. I got to do one or the other. Give me a road or give me a street.
SPEAKER_07: And then, you know, once you've decided something is a road, treat it like a road.
SPEAKER_05: No more trying to induce that cheap development. No more making huge investments in infrastructure. And in these places, we focus on moving vehicles quickly. We focus on not trying to accommodate pedestrians in a marginal way. We really focus and put our resources on how do we move cars really quickly here.
SPEAKER_07: And then on the other hand, when you decide something is a street, you invest in it and you make it better and you make the street safer and slower and you think about pedestrians and cyclists as you're designing it and you encourage dense development along the street.
SPEAKER_09: This is so interesting, kind of forcing that binary to make people think about what they want out of these, you know, conveyances. It's hard not to use the word street and road. So hard. So hard. Making it like this circular tautology. But anyway. Biggest challenge of the story. But like, you know, for people who travel every day, it really, you know, it's really important to think about what is this for and then, and then, you know, and then design for that.
SPEAKER_07: Totally. And, you know, it gets back to that idea that I have these magic strode glasses now that like help me understand the built environment in this new way. And just as an example, a couple of days ago, I was driving down a road in Santa Fe. It was unambiguously a road. Like it carried me quickly across town. There was not a lot of development or stores on either side. Weren't a lot of stoplights, weren't a lot of pedestrians. Its purpose was just very clear and traveling on it was pleasant. And as I was driving, I muttered, now this is a road, which was really confusing for my husband who was riding along with me. He was like, yeah, obviously this is a road. What are you talking about? So then, you know, I locked all the doors so he couldn't get out and gave him a lecture on strodes and why they're horrible, which is my favorite topic of conversation these days.
SPEAKER_09: Well, I think it's going to be a lot of people's favorite conversation. Like when you're just driving around, it's like street or road, street or road. What should this be? Yeah. Well, this is awesome. Thank you, Delaney. Thank you, Roman.
SPEAKER_07: Happy New Year. So
SPEAKER_09: I'm here with producer, Jacob Maldonado Medina, whose name you've heard, but whose voice you haven't heard yet. So what are we going to talk about today, Jacob?
SPEAKER_06: So Roman, in my short time on the show, I think you guys have all realized that I've got a real fascination with amusement parks. I've noticed that pattern in your pitches.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, I love all amusement parks. I love the big ones, your Disney's, your Universals, but I'm especially fascinated by smaller parks. I think the more niche and weird it is, the more interested I am in it. And in doing some research for a pitch, I got really obsessed with this one park called Hacienda Napoles in Puerto Trinfo, Colombia. So this park covers almost eight square miles and is located four hours from Medellin on the Magdalena River. The area is honestly pretty secluded, which was a good thing for the previous owner of this land, Pablo Escobar. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_09: So the land that this amusement park sits on today used to belong to, you know, world famous notorious drug trafficker, Pablo Escobar. So tell me about how that happened and what was he doing with those eight square miles?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So when this land belonged to Escobar, it sort of was his theme park. He was somebody who was not afraid to flaunt his wealth and spoil those around him, his family, his friends. Not only that, but he was so rich that he just truly didn't know what to do with all of his money. So he had to start spending some of it. So he built Hacienda Napoles in the late eighties and the early nineties. And quite often he let the people from the surrounding area come visit the estate and experience everything that he had to offer. Which was what? It was a lot of stuff. First of all, he had his house, which was a Spanish colonial style mansion. There was a racetrack. There were many pools, 27 artificial lakes, a bull fighting ring, a brothel, vintage cars, a sculpture park with some really ugly sculptures, including some dinosaur ones that are bizarre looking. And of course an airstrip because you're Pablo Escobar, you need it. And over the archway of the property, there was a life-size replica of the first plane Escobar used to smuggle drugs into the U S and on top of all of that, there was not just one, but three zoos.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, three. That sounds like a lot. So why have three zoos when one would probably do you think one would be enough, but Escobar
SPEAKER_06: had a real obsession with exotic animals. He had elephants, ostriches, giraffes, rhinos, antelope, zeros, exotic birds, all of that. And most notably he had four hippos, which we will get back to in just a minute.
SPEAKER_09: Tantalizing tease. Okay. So, so Escobar builds this giant playground for himself, you know, exalting in his past exploits and also just fun stuff to do with him and his friends. And then, you know, they're all having fun in these, you know, three zoos and a bull fighting ring and brothel. I mean, what happens when it all comes crumbling down?
SPEAKER_06: So the good times are rolling until December of 1993.
SPEAKER_01: The killing of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is sending a tougher message. Mr. Escobar was gunned down yesterday and Colombian authorities say its message to other drug lords is to surrender or you will be killed.
SPEAKER_06: So Pablo Escobar is shot and killed by the Colombian police. And after his death, there was a lengthy legal dispute over who owns this land. The government or Escobar's family. The government eventually won and they seized control of that land.
SPEAKER_09: Okay. So the Colombian government takes control of Escobar's park. What did they do with everything that was there?
SPEAKER_06: They didn't really do much. Most of the animals that were there were moved to different zoos around the world, but the structures that sat on the land were mostly left abandoned. It was sort of the government's way of saying that they weren't going to honor the legacy of Escobar. But that all changes in 2007 when the government finally leased the land to a guy who wanted to build an amusement park. His name is Hombre dar Martinez.
SPEAKER_00: In an interview with TV news show The National Desk, Martinez said that the mission was to
SPEAKER_06: take this region that was struggling because of security issues and reinvigorate it. He was going to bring tourism back, essentially. There was a lot of violence that surrounded La Nápoles when Escobar was there, which scared off visitors. So Martinez took over this property and took aspects of what was originally there, but kind of turned them on their heads to make this theme park.
SPEAKER_09: So what do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_06: Well, the theming of this park is interesting and it's kind of all over the place. There's one section that's Jurassic Park themed, not licensed, of course. It's called Jurassic Adventure. And it's like if Rainforest Cafe met Jurassic Park. That part of the park kind of feels like a nod towards Escobar's own dinosaur sculptures that he had when he owned the land. There's also a water park that's Pangaea themed, which I don't totally understand that as a theme for a water park. Escobar's original bullfighting ring is still there, but they converted it into an amphitheater. And then the park features tons of animals. But unlike Escobar, the animals on the park now are rescues. So they're brought in from other zoos and the goal is to give them a comfortable place to spend the rest of their lives. So they're home to tigers, lions, elephants, kabibaras, monkeys. On top of that, there's a butterfly house, a bird and reptile house. And of course, there are those hippos, which I mentioned earlier.
SPEAKER_09: Here we go. OK, hippo time. Tell me what happened with the hippos.
SPEAKER_06: After the government sees control of this land, the hippos that were Escobar's remained on the land because transporting hippos is really expensive and really hard to do. But they managed to escape from their enclosures and they reproduce rapidly. It's hard to say exactly how many hippos there are, but there are well over 100 and some of them still roam near the park. So there are signs posted all over warning people about wild hippos. And that might seem like a funny park theming thing, but it's true. There are wild hippos in the area. And this has become such an issue that in March of this year, the Colombian government declared hippos an invasive species. Scientists have predicted that their numbers could multiply to over 700 in the next decade. And there are a lot of differing opinions on what the solution should be. And some of the offsprings of those original hippos now live at the theme park. So Roman, I'm going to show you a picture of the park's mascot and I want you to describe her to me.
SPEAKER_09: OK, so this is a hippo on two legs, bright magenta, like bright magenta with a crown. I would say it's a little femme hippo skirt, the necklace. Really lovely. It's great.
SPEAKER_06: Great lashes. Really, really big lashes.
SPEAKER_09: Strong lashes.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So that's Vanessa the hippo. She is based on one of the actual offspring of Escobar's original hippos who lived on the land. Vanessa was rejected by the larger group of hippos, which I found out a group of hippos is called a bloat of hippos. She was rejected. And so she's been raised at the park by humans and is very social. You can meet Vanessa, feed her carrots and she'll respond to her name. And she's got her own blog, which I'll be honest, it's a little bit lackluster. There's not much going on. It's a few pictures and all the lorem ipsum is still on the blog.
SPEAKER_09: So independent of the aggressive hippos that might be taking over Columbia, what have they done with the Escobar part of this area? Like if they kind of erased it, are they preserving it and presenting it? Like what happens to all things Escobar when it comes to this amusement park?
SPEAKER_06: The focus of the park definitely is not Escobar. In fact, it's sort of intentionally hidden, but there is a place on the property that's vaguely named the Memorial Museum. Most of the structures that Pablo Escobar built have crumbled except for pieces of the mansion. So this is one of the few places across the whole 3,700 acre park that openly acknowledges Escobar's connection with the property. And if you go to their website, you've even got a dig to find that. It's not one of the main listed attractions.
SPEAKER_09: It's no Vanessa. No, it's no Vanessa. It doesn't get a blog.
SPEAKER_06: No. This is where you can see a few of Escobar's vintage cars parked outside. These are all like burnt out and riddled with bullet holes. And inside the remains of the mansion is a museum commemorating some of the journalists and politicians Escobar had killed. It's meant to sort of be an anti-crime museum. This is partially an effort by the government to make sure that the life of a narco trafficker isn't glorified. Because with shows like Narcos that really show the glamour of the drug trade, the government's actively working against that. It's definitely a weird juxtaposition with the pink hippo in a tutu, but I think it'd be equally weird if they just didn't acknowledge Escobar at all. It's a pretty tricky line to walk, but the park really isn't meant to be Escobar themed. It's just a theme park on what used to be Escobar's land.
SPEAKER_06: And the best example of this is that archway at the entrance of the land. So when Escobar lived there, he had that replica of his plane, the little Cessna. And then when Asienda Nápoles' theme park took over, they took the plane and they painted zebra stripes onto it, sort of to add that like safari theme right in the entrance. But it was still too connected to Escobar. People who were watching Narcos would come to take a picture with the iconic archway and plane because it reminds them of who the park belonged to. And so eventually the park took that plane down and knocked that whole archway over. The plane was brought into the park so that it's not the first thing you see when you get there. So you can still find those hints of Escobar, but you've got to look for them in the park.
SPEAKER_09: Wow. You definitely found one of the most unusual amusement parks in the history of the world, probably. I think so. What a series of conundrums that they have to solve, not least of which is the wild hippos that have now taken over parts of Colombia. I mean, what an amazing place connected to a really horrible man.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. It's an interesting repurposing of the land for sure.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is fascinating stuff, Jacob. Thanks so much for bringing us the story. And it's a pleasure to have you on the show.
SPEAKER_06: Thanks, Roman.
SPEAKER_09: We'll go down a dark alley with Kurt Kohlstedt after this. USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long-term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence, and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs, like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large-scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance, help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life-saving care and hope for a better future. Visit to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern, coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the GEOM sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses, or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter? Or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new vlogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website and save 10% off your first purchase of a website.
SPEAKER_08: Basically
SPEAKER_08: and are dense and bustling with city life, but in this cozy and comfortable way that I really loved, and these already narrow alleys in turn branched off into even narrower paths, like veins and arteries forking into capillaries. But when I started to wander down one of these smaller paths, this old woman appeared at a doorway and she waved me off, because apparently I'd crossed some kind of invisible threshold between public and private space. It was this line that only she could see, and to my dad and my brother, it was just a curiosity. But to me, I mean, you know me, I was very deeply intrigued and I had to know more.
SPEAKER_09: Like, I can't let this go. Of course not. No, me of all people, no, no way. And so after the trip,
SPEAKER_08: I started digging into the long history of hutongs to try and understand what my transgression had been, right? And I learned a lot about the history of these hutongs along the way, which have changed a lot over time. Way back in the 13th century, hutongs were simply these utilitarian alleyways that helped Beijing function.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, it makes sense. A lot of cities have alleys. I mean, so what was different or specific about hutongs?
SPEAKER_08: Historically, it was less that the alleys themselves were different, more that the architecture they served was, because the city's residential vernacular was dominated by this special kind of courtyard home that took up a lot of space. We're talking about huge walled estates, each containing multiple houses arrayed around this central open space. And so unlike alleys in the way that we think of them, running behind blocks, these ran behind blocks, between blocks, because what they were serving was these huge courtyard complexes.
SPEAKER_09: Right, okay, I see. So you have this open space. There's lots of freestanding buildings between them. These alleys, they're not in a grid necessarily. They're basically like roads to access all these different spaces within these courtyard systems.
SPEAKER_08: Exactly, and these hutongs serve other walled structures too. Like this courtyard approach that I'm talking about was used for palaces and markets and temples and all kinds of other architecture. And in a way, the city itself was kind of like a giant courtyard mega complex because it had its own walls and watchtowers. But then in the early 1900s, everything changed.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, you talk about like the fall of, you know, the last Chinese dynasty, you got political struggles, you got revolutions, you got modernization, urbanization. You're like, I can imagine that all of that had an impact on the capital city as well.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, just a little bit. And so the built environment was reshaped really quickly and really dramatically with all of those forces you just mentioned. And to begin with, they started pulling down those walls around the city so that Beijing could grow outward. But of course, there's also this growing population inside the city.
SPEAKER_09: And I'm guessing that the courtyard homes and all that extra space was pretty tempting when it came to like developing some new spaces for people to live and exist, yeah.
SPEAKER_08: Oh yeah, and so to make room, some of these courtyard houses were predictably just demolished, which left an empty site for denser, taller architecture to be built up. But a lot of them were just filled in instead. So filled in, in what sense? Well, as in those open courtyards I was talking about became packed with these new buildings. But of course, the hutong alleys were running alongside these big residential blocks. Well, suddenly there were buildings inside of the former courtyards that they couldn't reach anymore.
SPEAKER_09: So they basically had to make more hutongs to reach everything inside. And was this like a planned thing or does that kinda happen?
SPEAKER_08: I mean, as far as I could tell, it really wasn't. It was pretty organic and residents just sort of negotiated this mishmash of remaining voids so that everybody could have at least some narrow path into and out of the complex to get to their house. And these new paths that were formed in these courtyards aren't exactly public spaces, but they aren't exactly private spaces either. They're liminal spaces. Or at least that's, I hope, why I was shooed away from one when I was in Old Beijing.
SPEAKER_09: Right, so you passed this threshold where this bigger alley became a smaller alley that basically became like the pathway to someone's door, essentially. And there was no marking to delineate that,
SPEAKER_08: but that's exactly what it was. And of course, for me, all of this was really charming and interesting, but that's always the case for an outsider and things can be different for people who live there. And when I was researching this afterward, I learned that in some cases, for example, a large number of these very small households don't have enough space to have their own bathroom. And so they have to share a communal one. But some dwellings alongside the hutongs are still quite expansive and luxurious too. Like in most places, there's a huge range in terms of the quality of life and the cost of living there. Yeah, I mean, so you researched all this after the fact.
SPEAKER_09: You didn't know this at the time. I mean, but what made you go down a hutong to begin with?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, no, it was so many things. There were all of these little grocery shops and cafes and bars. And there were residents just relaxing and playing chess and sipping tea. There was like laundry strung up above the hutongs, bikes leaning up against the walls, and basically any niche that hadn't been filled by something else had plants in it. And so it was like the closeness and the density of this space pushed everything out into a shared public sphere. And again, it's easy for me to say, oh, that's cozy rather than cramped because I don't have to live there. And I should also mention that the meaning of the word hutong itself has evolved as well, much like these physical spaces that we're talking about. So these days, hutong can still mean alleyway, but it's also become a term for the neighborhoods that grew up around these old alleys.
SPEAKER_09: That makes sense. Like just naming something after the defining feature, like, I don't know, Hermosa Beach or something like that. Like the whole thing is not a beach. No, but yeah, but it gives it its character
SPEAKER_08: and that's what people think of when they think of the place. And for me as an urbanist, I really loved these hutongs. They're dense and walkable with all this street life and all of these shops. And you could say that they're right up my alley. No, you could not say that.
SPEAKER_09: Not in this house. Really? Am I not, okay. Too far, too far. Too far.
SPEAKER_09: I feel like over the years, we might've trained people to see the hutongs and not the great wall or do both. Yeah, I'd like to think so, yeah.
SPEAKER_08: It's very much, you know, always read the plaque, take a minute, look closely at the thing. It's so easy to overlook and it's so hard to miss the great wall of China. Exactly.
SPEAKER_09: Well, thank you for, you know, another year of helping us see the things that are pretty easy to mis-guard. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, well you too, Roman.
SPEAKER_09: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Delaney Hall, Jacob Maldonado Medina, and Kurt Kohlstedt. Sound mix by Martin Gonzalez. Music by our director of sound, Suan Riel. The rest of the team is Vivian Lay, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Berube, Loshma Dawn, Jason De Leon, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org. You're listening to a Stitcher podcast from Sirius XM.
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