00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkambe. One of my favorite books is Middle March by George Elliott. It's about the life and manners of a small English town in the nineteenth century. It's also a cautionary tale for the kind of person I am. There's a character in the book named Edward Kasabon, a dreary, middle aged man who's engaged in a decades long writing project. Kasabon collects facts he writes on little sheets of paper that he stores in the pigeonholes of his library shelves. He claims that someday he's going to use these facts to prove that all the myths of the world are really one myth. He's obsessed. He calls it the key to all mythologies, and he sees it everywhere. I'm not middle aged, and I am fairly uppeed, but I fear that last bit is me. I see the Statine Island secession movement everywhere in our world today. I've carried my facts about the Staten Island secession movement around with me for quite a while. Now they burn a hole in my pocket. I go to parties, and inevitably I wind up in the corner with the Staten Islander who has suddenly revealed themselves. They look interested and then mildly concerned as I pull from memory the facts that I have stored in the pigeonholes of a document I have titled Excellent Staaten Island Facts. Did you know the towers of the Verizonto and Narrows Bridge are so far apart that they had to take into account the curvature of the earth when they built them. Did you know that Staten Island claims to have been home to the true and forgotten inventor of the telephone? Am i kazabon God? I hope not. I caution myself against seeing my project everywhere. Don't be the hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Don't try to write the key to all mythologies. And then I learned something like this. Wu Tang Clan, arguably the most important group in hip hop history, is from Staten Island. They made their first album, Enter the Wu Tang thirty six Chambers, entirely during the height of the secession movement, and it came out in nineteen ninety three, just one week after the island was gonna vote on secession. 00:02:27 Speaker 2: I'm going to klomp sat the new joke chaf Sa saying the love was no job at second hand. 00:02:32 Speaker 1: Mons bells don't know a man. So then we moved the salon land. I began to listen to this record every day. I worked on this project on the ferry to the archives, on the subway to work. Shall in what they called Staten Island is all over it. 00:02:47 Speaker 2: I'll come from the Sallins slump and the halo whom it's come a wopn meggas and guns. 00:02:52 Speaker 1: Their music is all about their lives, what they witnessed on the island at the time. Like listen to this from the song Wu Tang seventh Chamber. They bring up the projects in northern Staten Island where Wu Tang formed nicknamed Kill a Hill. 00:03:08 Speaker 3: Like clash the Russia Slash a switt and they go back like a Dutch mask of Chilla now jumped off and Chilla Pilla. I was the thrilla in the Ali Faisa Manila. 00:03:18 Speaker 1: It's all about their lives in New York City in the early nineteen nineties, who they were becoming, and what it all had to do with being from the rugged lands of Shaolin. I considered putting this on my list of excellent Staten Island facts and leaving it at that. But I had no choice. I put on my headphones, I picked up the phone, I opened my notebook. Casiman rides again. You're listening to revisionist history. I'm Ben Thatt of Haaffrey, and this is the Staten Island Problem, the series about the movement that threatened to bring down the greatest city in the country. In this episode, I bring you the story of the rise of one of the greatest rap groups in history. That happened all while the Secession movement unfolded in the background. We're going to zero in on an entirely different experience taking place on the island at the same time, one that reveals just how entrench the Staten Island problem really is, but one that also I think might show us a way to solve it. This is episode four, Wu Tang versus the Shoutlin. I should say off the bat that I was unable to reach the Wu Tang clan. For a brief moment, the manager of a lesser known member of the group considered giving me an interview. Then he stopped taking my calls. Domingo, if you hear this, I'm ready when you are. But luckily I was able to track someone else down. 00:05:01 Speaker 4: I was actually one of the first journalists to ever deal with Wu Tang because their record label, Loud called me up. 00:05:09 Speaker 1: Fernando was a hip hop journalist in the eighties and nineties. He covered Wu Tang from the beginning. Had he ever considered the crucial overlap of Wu Tang's formation in Staten Island secession? He had not. 00:05:22 Speaker 4: I had no idea any of that stuff was going on at the time. 00:05:25 Speaker 1: I don't even know if they did. Like it was the they must have. It was the biggest story on Staten Island. What was it going to be? 00:05:33 Speaker 4: Just like Staten Island was just going to be a city. 00:05:36 Speaker 1: Yeah. When the Wu Tang cland first formed their label called Skiz to write their bio, so he connected with the group's to facto leader, a guy named Bobby Diggs who went by the name Rizza. 00:05:48 Speaker 4: And I was immediately struck by this guy, like I could detect like some serious intelligence in this sky. 00:05:56 Speaker 1: Rizza was a former drug dealer with no professional prospects living out on Staten Island. That alone was strange in the pantheon of hip hop. Brooklyn and the Bronx Reign Supreme. Nobody is from Staten Island. 00:06:10 Speaker 4: All of the five Borrows in New York were pretty represented in hip hop in the nineties. 00:06:15 Speaker 1: You had the you know you had like the Boogie Down Bronx. It's one of them. 00:06:23 Speaker 4: So obviously Brooklyn. 00:06:26 Speaker 1: From the next team a man saying. 00:06:28 Speaker 4: That from the projects the money make in Manhattan. 00:06:32 Speaker 2: Now I'm the guy named Curtis blow Ain't Christmas is one thing I know? So every year just about this time, I celebrate kids with a rhyme. 00:06:41 Speaker 4: You know, queens you had Queensbridge projects produced so many amazing artists like nas Mob. 00:06:47 Speaker 2: Deep every day deal with the Russia and mixed up in. 00:06:53 Speaker 4: And like Staten Island. You know who was from Staten Island. There was not a lot of acts coming out of Staten Island. 00:07:00 Speaker 1: You know you had. 00:07:03 Speaker 4: Jesus I'm blanking. 00:07:06 Speaker 1: This is all to say. Skiz was surprised. Here was the relatively unknown MC from the island with an encyclopedic knowledge of kung fu movies and a crew of eight other EMCs who named themselves after a form of martial arts invented by a Taoist hermit. 00:07:22 Speaker 4: Skiz was like, what, Wow, this guy is something else. 00:07:32 Speaker 1: So Skiz journalist that he is began a decades long process of figuring out how exactly the Wu Tang clan came to be. Rizza decided what he wanted to do with his life on America's two hundredth birthday. He was in the park Hill projects of Staten Island, who was July nineteen seventy six, and there was a party in the courtyard. A DJ was spinning records and rapping over them. 00:07:56 Speaker 4: He dip dip dive and socialized. I think those are the exact words that Rizza remembered, and that kind of just just that energy and just the excitement of that whole thing of seeing this free party happening in this environment. You know, all these kids running around and adults and people just enjoying the music and enjoying each other's company. This was how this was how hip hop started. 00:08:23 Speaker 1: Rizza was seven at the time, and. 00:08:27 Speaker 4: When you're a young kid exposed to this and this is like the excitement that's happening in your neighborhood, you want to be a part of it. And he wanted to be a part of it. 00:08:38 Speaker 1: He stayed up late into the night transfixed. 00:08:41 Speaker 4: So immediately he goes home and he starts writing rhymes, you know, and then as soon as he could, he starts DJing. 00:08:54 Speaker 1: Riza moved around a lot as a kid. He was born in Brooklyn, spent some of his childhood in North Carolina, but he landed in the park Hill Projects on the north shore of Staten Island. The buildings were built in nineteen sixty five, around the same time as the bridge and the express that split the island down the middle into north and south shore. North was where the black people lived, South was where the white people lived. Several Staten Islanders told me the Expressway was their equivalent of the Mason Dixon Line. 00:09:22 Speaker 5: People like, where are you from? And I'm like so. I used to say, if I tell you, I have to kill you, and you're like why, And then I'm like Staten Island. 00:09:31 Speaker 1: One day, when I was listing excellent Staten Island facts to a friend, she told me you should meet Daphne McWilliams. She's a filmmaker from Staten Island. 00:09:40 Speaker 5: There were only three houses on my parents' block, and then as from the lake was park Hill Projects. 00:09:47 Speaker 1: Her parents were from Trinidad and Jamaica and didn't really know the intricate racial codes of Staten Island. Her family moved to the white area across from the Park Hill projects back in the nineteen seventies. 00:09:57 Speaker 5: But when my mother found that house, she got a threatening, I guess call or something where they were like, oh you something like you better hope that you don't see your kids floating in and in the pond. 00:10:12 Speaker 1: By one estimate, there were fewer than a thousand people have called her South of the Expressway. Daphne stuck out. She told me a story from when she was a kid about having a crush on an Italian American boy named Billy. One day she called his. 00:10:25 Speaker 5: House and his mother picked up, and she was like, don't ever call this house again. So I went to school the next day. I was upset and I went and speak to this priest. I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know what I did wrong, And telling the guy goes, well, you see, he says something to like almost like this that's a little happened for white kids, and it's like a little. 00:10:49 Speaker 1: Heaven for black kids segregated. 00:10:52 Speaker 5: I was like, oh my god, Like I had no idea when I look back and think about it, we always stood out because we were always the. 00:11:02 Speaker 4: The black family. 00:11:05 Speaker 5: My parents didn't raise us in a segregated mindset. We just never It was the community that made us feel different, especially as you get older. 00:11:19 Speaker 1: But the truth is all of New York City was segregated. Then it seemed like there was a defining race riot every year. Very do the right thing. The reality that Mayor Dinkins's vision of a beautiful mosaic obscured is that if one bit of colored glass from the mosaic crossed another, someone might end up shot or run over, and then the riots would begin again. But Southern Staten Island was a particularly dramatic case. It may as well have been the Deep South. When one Wu Tang member went to Daphne's area, he remembered getting chased out by white kids with motorcycles. They spray painted KKK on the rocks to warn the black kids away. This was the Staten Island Riza grew up on, but he had a way of escaping that reality. Hip hop. By the time Rizza was in his early twenties, hip hop had gone stratospheric from the courtyards and wreck rooms of the New York City projects to the top of the Billboard charts. The labels were grabbing at any artists they could. Rizza got a deal. He brought his new label a bunch of songs, and they said, we think girls will like you. So we wound up releasing an EP called Ooh We Love You Rakkim, a record that presented him as a sweet ladies man named Prince Rakim Many Ladies. It was an attempt to do something extremely commercial, totally inoffensive and upbeat, and also fundamentally false and corny, and maybe for that reason it bombed. Rizza got dropped from his label and he was back to zero. That's when he started dealing drugs and almost went to prison for attempted murder. He argued self defense and beat the charges in the end, and he had ten thousand dollars left. It was enough to buy some drugs and sell them. But he had a kid on the way. He had to make a choice, and this choice became so legendary that he's still talking about it. Here he is on a recent episode of a podcast called Flagrant. 00:13:29 Speaker 6: I had t k and the gag was The plan was to get a brick, so so we figured, oh, if we flipped this twenty we could at least get eighty. The thing was, Joe I had a baby in the oven or maybe just born right, So life was like what are you going to do? Yeah? 00:13:49 Speaker 1: But then. 00:13:51 Speaker 6: I was like, nah, I have a second chance. 00:13:55 Speaker 1: That's when he started calling himself Rizza r z A. He would later say it was short for rakeem zig zag zig allah. While everyone else zigged, it was time for him to zag. And so, moving on a Staten Island that was in the middle of its own very big zag, he began to make a bold plan for an independence movement of his own, something called Wu Tang Clan. After he beat his charges, Bobby Diggs aka there is A began to walk around Staten Island and he started to take these long, drawn out walks day after day. 00:14:49 Speaker 6: So I'm walking and I'm thinking, yo, and I'll walk in off step, I'll walk up the stand and people people thought there was the people who thought I was losing my mind because I'm walking and I'm talking to myself. 00:15:00 Speaker 1: And he would walk the island and think Staten Island was more than twice the size of men, and Rizza could just walk and walk. He would start at the projects on the north shore, then maybe journey along the coastline through the suburban streets. Rizza was ready to make music again, but the first time out with his Prince Rakim project had gone badly. But the idea he was coming up with now was going to be different. And I want to argue here that it has everything to do with Staten Island. Let me share with you some writing from Rizza's book, The Tao of Wu. I spent my formative years on an island, Staten Island, which is a blessing I've taken with me through life in Staten Island. Wu Tang were set apart from all the influences and fads that were happening in the other four boroughs. A nine man hip hop crew based on mathematics, chess, comics and kung fuflicks wasn't springing up in the middle of a Manhattan arts scene. Only on a remote island can some thing like King Kong grow to his full capacity. But the projects in Staten Island were a difficult place to live. A few of the Wu Tang members have written books, and reading them it's clear that it wasn't just the remoteness of Staten Island that led them to the Wu Tang clan. It was also what they experienced there, especially in the projects. One Wu Tang member. You God wrote about the first time he saw somebody die. He was five years old, sitting with his mom listening to Loving You by Minnie Ripperton play on the radio outside. When he heard a crowd forming in the courtyard. He ran out to look. A woman was standing on the roof screaming. He watched so long his neck one stuff. Then she jumped or fell, You, God wrote in his book called Raw. I was a toddler. The sound of her hitting the concrete steps would resonate with me forever. So when Rizza walked Staaten Island, and it wasn't just this utopian vision of the isolated island where you can dream big. It was also the deeply segregated place where kids living on their own little island watched adults fall to their death, a kind of paradox. And my theory is that paradox was expressed in the word Shao limb. 00:17:32 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:17:34 Speaker 1: When Rizza was a kid, he and his cousin used to go to a Times Square porno theater. Sometimes it showed Kung Fu and one movie that they loved, in particular, the thirty sixth Chamber of Shao Lim. 00:17:47 Speaker 7: But sure or a man choose, Oh well armed, what can we do? 00:17:51 Speaker 4: No man so we he cannot help. 00:17:54 Speaker 1: Most people came to that Times Square movie theater to jerk off, sniff glue, or shoot heroin. But Rizza would later say in interviews that he and his cousin were locked in on this poorly dubbed movie about a small village in China that was being oppressed by a distant government. Hero of the movie is a villager who journeys to the Shaolin temple in China to learn to fight back. Rizza saw this movie over three hundred times. He hadn't realized that kind of oppression happened to people who weren't black. This is from the thirty six Chamber when our hero learns what Shaolin. 00:18:31 Speaker 7: Is shallin school is restricted. 00:18:35 Speaker 4: Only monks had taught that if Shaolin techniques could be taught here and the people could use it to fight the Manchu troops, that would be good. 00:18:45 Speaker 1: At some point, Rizza started to call Staten Island Shaolin, the place he learned his secret weapon to fighting oppression hip hop but Staten Island was also a version of that distant oppressive government he saw in the films. And as he walked the island trying to come up with his next play, he didn't decide to start a group called the Shaolin Clan. He came up with an idea for something called the Wu Tang Clan, named after Chao Lin's rival. This is from another kung fu movie they loved, called Shao Lin Versus Wu Tang. 00:19:17 Speaker 3: Isn't it true that you think you're better than us, but you're afraid that one day the Wu Tang will overtake you? 00:19:21 Speaker 7: You so you he was your special person to get rid of. 00:19:23 Speaker 8: By master, who was your biggest threat on sen No, it isn't nice song with my own earnsense, Chao Lynn, I'm. 00:19:27 Speaker 6: Afraid of the Wu Tang will Wu Tang will find Listen to me. 00:19:30 Speaker 3: Someone is trying to frame me. 00:19:34 Speaker 1: Rizza kept walking and thinking Shao Lin Wu Tang thirty six chambers, Shao Ln Wu Tang thirty six chambers. Wu Tang biographer Skiz Fernando knew all about those walks Rizza would take. 00:19:51 Speaker 4: That's one good thing about state. Neile and you can walk around in these nice neighborhoods with like Victorian mansions, you don't have to worry about getting bugged necessarily. 00:20:02 Speaker 1: And what would have been on the lawns of all those Victorian mansions. Rizza was walking by signs that said vote yes for the City of Staten Island, secession means a better life, billboards for secession above the streets, the same thing as was on the front page of the paper all the time, the same thing the NAACP of Staten Island was hosting meetings about, worrying that this could be really bad for black people living on Staten Island. Let me be clear, I have never found Riza himself talking about Staten Island secession, but in my Kasmon mode I see a connection. Because as he walked a Staten Island that felt like it wasn't welcome in New York City and was striking out on its own, this guy, who had had every reason not to feel welcome on Staten Island formed a plan for an unlikely hip hop group from Shoolin that was about to do the same. Maybe he thought they could skip the whole major label thing that had screwed him before. Maybe he didn't have to sanitize his life in character to succeed. Maybe there could be a hip hop group from the forgotten borough that made it all happen on its own, and that group would be Wu Tang Clan. He began to assemble his crew, and the core ideology for Riza I think had a whole lot in common with the Secession movement. It's the exact same fantasy. If some central authority is dominating you and you don't like it, what do you do? Go away to shoolin, learn the truth, build a movement, and go to war with the oppressor till you remake it in your own image. Let me put my kasavon rode back on and bring you back into my library. Please sit at the table, have a mug of tepid tea. I believe that the fantasy Wu Tang Clan had was that there's a way to strike out on your own, independently and take over the forces that oppressed you. And that's the exact fantasy of the secessions emanating from the exact remote island at the exact moment. So many people on the island experienced it, and it was the spirit of what skiz that Wu Tang biographer told me that Riza did next. 00:22:23 Speaker 4: He took the whole mythology that was in the movies and he appropriated it to his current conditions of a black man living in Staten Island doing battle in this game call rap against the music industry. 00:22:45 Speaker 1: Walking the island. Rizza had come up with a five year plan. He'd go to the greatest underrated mcs he knew on the island and banned them together into the Wu Tang clan. He'd been burned by the labels before with that Prince Rackim album, so now he wanted to go it alone. He'd take the ten thousand dollars he'd saved and use it to start a production company. 00:23:05 Speaker 4: These guys had absolutely no future. They're all caught up in the same They're all selling crack, you know, two for five on the street. 00:23:17 Speaker 1: They didn't want to be doing that. The guys all went out to a diner on Staten Island. They toasted Wu Tang with a bottle of champagne. Each member put up one hundred dollars for studio time. The next day they started recording what became their first single, protect Yanik, putting eight mcs on a track and making it all blend together is as difficult as making five burrows feel like one city. The difference is that Rizza was about to pull it off. It took days of recording until all the verses were in place. Like students at Shaolin and Wu Tang, each MC was trying to one up the other, pushing farther and farther beyond the reaches of what existed in hip hop at the time. Rizza knew each one's style and how to draw out what made them unique. It was the opposite of some oppressive label telling him we think girls will like it and new tering his art. He didn't need the label. By December of nineteen ninety two, the song was finished. The group took the cassette of Protecting Neck to the hottest hip hop radio show in Town Stretch and Babido Babido was alone in the studio. 00:24:27 Speaker 8: I'm not quite sure how members of the Wu Tang clan got into our hallway, but I hear a knock on the studio door. I open it and there's five dudes out there, and then, not smiling. 00:24:45 Speaker 1: They shoved an unmarked record into his hands. They're like yo man, Yo, you got played this. You got played Yo, we played it right now. 00:24:52 Speaker 4: I was like, yo, fella is like, I can't. 00:24:54 Speaker 8: I felt like I was being strong armed to play their record immediately I was. 00:25:01 Speaker 4: I was like, all, I fella's cool. 00:25:02 Speaker 1: So I took the record. 00:25:04 Speaker 4: I threw it all because I was. 00:25:05 Speaker 8: I was intrigued. I was like, how did these does mysteriously get into the studio. 00:25:10 Speaker 1: He listened to it privately first. 00:25:13 Speaker 8: And I hear the earner and earner, you know, the martial arts, and uh, I'm like, oh, this this is dope. You know I'm gonna play it. 00:25:23 Speaker 1: It was the premiere that launched the Wu Tang clan. 00:25:26 Speaker 2: Tell me about the damn like tups in Pakistan, swinging through your town like your neighborhood spot a man so on TikTok ticket. 00:25:34 Speaker 8: But yeah, I mean immediately the phone lines let up. Immediately. I'll never forget my friend. He called up and was. 00:25:40 Speaker 1: Like, Yo, Wow, what the EPP is Dad? 00:25:42 Speaker 8: I was like, Yo, I don't. 00:25:43 Speaker 1: Know, I don't know, I don't know what the record is. All right. I love this song And my favorite part is the final verse, when Jesse explains the entire philosophy of Wu Tang is that they don't need some centralized music industry to take over the world. They can do it all on their own. 00:25:59 Speaker 2: The woe was too slammon, but he's called killing label, so he had to hit. Since I sing can't table, he doing one on a sitting like Tang did table. 00:26:06 Speaker 1: Now, any money's getting stuck till the gum under the table. That's what what I avent poles And basically, you had your chance, you lost it. We don't need you. It's our time now the song blew up. You know what I want here? What you want to hear? I want Wu Tang again. So of course the labels came knocking. But this time Rizza was ready no more Prince Rakim. He was the king and he had a plan for world domination. They would make a deal for Wu Tang as a group, but he would do something totally unprecedented in the industry. In the contract, there would be a clause. Though all the mcs and Wu Tang might be consolidated under the name Wu Tang Clan, and Wu Tang might sign a record deal. Each MC was going to retain local control of their own career. Each one could make any deal he wanted with any other record label. Loud Records agreed to Rizza's terms. Skiz Fernando a revolutionary deal in the music industry. 00:27:12 Speaker 4: The whole first round of Wu Tang solo albums was like that, all on different labels and different artists, but like all the Wu Tang's on each album, So they're using the major label system to spread their own brand out there. That was the genius of it, Like no one had ever done anything like that before. 00:27:36 Speaker 1: On November ninth, Wu Tang Clan played their album release show for Enter the Wu Tang thirty six Chambers at Webster Hall in the heart of Manhattan. Skiz was there. 00:27:46 Speaker 4: The floor was packed with people. They were showing thirty six Chambers the original on the big screen, and then when the group got on to perform, Honestly, it seemed like all of Staten Island was on stage. You didn't know who was in the group and who wasn't because it was just like the whole stage was packed, The whole floor was packed. That whole floor was just bouncing up and down these wooden rafters. I thought the whole thing was going to collapse. It was just like people were ready to tear shit down, the energy, the excitement because they came from Staten Island. It was like a sneak attack, like no one saw it coming. 00:28:36 Speaker 1: Riza executed his plan flawlessly. Wu Tang released their debut album, an absolutely bizarre hour long hip hop record full of kung fu samples and weird jazz and nine unheard of mcs, most of whom hailed from a forgotten island, an island they'd renamed after a Chinese martial arts school, and it went quadruple platinum. Here's method man on TV. 00:29:00 Speaker 2: And we tried to lock down the industry, which you cannot do because they already set in their ways, like I said before, So what we have to do is build our own industry to make it right. 00:29:10 Speaker 1: Wu Tang's still playing together. So for me, in this series on Secession, it's a lesson in how to keep a group of people together. Not that the clans without its problems, but the genius of the whole thing is that Riza figured out how to showcase each rapper's own personality and give them their own career. He went on to produce a round of solo albums for each of the mcs in the group hit after hit after hit, each one on different record labels who were feverishly trying to ride the Wu Tang wave method. Man on def Jam Platinum, Old Dirty Bastard on WMG platinum, Rayquon on RCA Platinum, Ghost Face Killer on Epic Platinum, Jizz on Geffen Gold. Six hit albums in three years. Wu Tang Clan ran the industry. These guys who had so much working against them went to shoolin, came back on their own terms and toppled the oppressor. 00:30:07 Speaker 3: Don't think that because he has a solo deal and I have a solo deal, this man may get a solo deal that we all we all just separating and breaking up. It's not that type of thing, man. We just we just expanded because the talent is so great. It's like we have we have mad talent in this, you know, and. 00:30:23 Speaker 4: We just got the spread out. 00:30:25 Speaker 3: You know, you can't come out on one chain when you just got the. 00:30:27 Speaker 1: Spread This is the fantasy of secession. You break away, you come back with a crew of guys from Staten Island and you dominate. That's what Wu Tang did. That's what the Staten Island secessionists dreamed of doing. It's the zeitgeist, the key to all mythologies. Some force in the early nineties of New York City was shouting secede, seceede. 00:30:52 Speaker 3: Oh. 00:30:53 Speaker 1: And by the way, the vote on secession it happened seven days before the Wu Tang Clan put out their album, and that vote was going to leave an even bigger mark on our world today. That's coming up on the last episode of The Staten Island. 00:31:09 Speaker 2: Problem live here on Channel seventy seven from Secession headquarters at the Island Chateau, Channel seventy seven bringing you that live happening as. 00:31:19 Speaker 4: It's so parallel. 00:31:21 Speaker 1: Who gets to be in this position? 00:31:23 Speaker 4: What's fair and what's not? 00:31:25 Speaker 6: Who gets to wheel power? 00:31:26 Speaker 4: Who doesn't? 00:31:27 Speaker 9: These sentiments show up in so many places and parts of our population right that sense of low boiling resentment towards the people in charge, Like who doesn't feel that? 00:31:44 Speaker 6: Right now? 00:31:46 Speaker 9: Do you realize as a city that can plan for its own, that doesn't have to say may I, may I do this, and may I do that? 00:31:53 Speaker 4: Where are we going? 00:31:54 Speaker 1: What are we standing on top of? Right now? 00:31:57 Speaker 7: We're standing on the story of New York City. If you lived here between nineteen forty eight and two thousand and one. You're here somewhere, maybe not in this exact mound, but some piece of you, even if you just passed through, some piece of you is underneath us. 00:32:18 Speaker 1: The Staten Island Problem is written and produced by me Ben Matta Haffrey, with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Schakerji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Russick, Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky. Original music by Stellwagon, Symfinette, Luis Gara, Jake Gorsky, and thanks to Todd Reynolds for his track The Solution from the album Outer Borrow Special thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Ben mattap Haaffrey. Here. Episodes of Revisionist History The Staten Island Problem early and ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus line up on the Revisionist History Show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, and exclusive binges of true crime podcasts throughout the year.