Speaker 1: Bushkin. 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 eleven Memorial. I'm
Speaker 1: ashamed to say I'd never visited before, even though I
Speaker 1: live in Manhattan, one Express subway stop away. I'd seen pictures,
Speaker 1: I'd walked right by it, but for some reason, I'd
Speaker 1: never gone right up to it. So I did. Finally
Speaker 1: saw the two big holes in the ground marking the
Speaker 1: 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 scatterplot X axis, Y axis, a
Speaker 1: bunch of dots, each in the shape of a human figure.
Speaker 1: At the time, I didn't think of my visit to
Speaker 1: Florida and my visit to the nine eleven Memorial as connected.
Speaker 1: They were just two random quests that seemed like they
Speaker 1: might lead somewhere. That's what I do at the beginning
Speaker 1: of every year when I start the research for a
Speaker 1: new season of the show. I spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time pursuing random ideas. But then March came and the
Speaker 1: world turned very strange and very dark, and I sat
Speaker 1: in my room and realized that those two trips were
Speaker 1: about the same thing. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This is the final episode of a season that has
Speaker 1: been preoccupied with understanding our attachments to objects, to rituals,
Speaker 1: to traditions, to elaborate bits of machinery like airplanes. This
Speaker 1: episode is about our attachment to our memories, the things
Speaker 1: we choose to remember as a society, and the things
Speaker 1: we choose to forget. In September of two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: when two hijacked passenger jets crashed into the World Trade
Speaker 1: Towers in New York City, a young architect named Michael
Speaker 1: Arod was living in downtown Manhattan.
Speaker 2: And a couple of nights after the attack, I was
Speaker 2: on my bicycle and I made my way to Washington
Speaker 2: Square Park and at two or three in the morning,
Speaker 2: there were a dozen or so people standing around that
Speaker 2: fountain in the middle of the park, and there was
Speaker 2: no ceremony, there was no speech. There was just people
Speaker 2: standing there together, not even you know, in ones and
Speaker 2: twos and threes. And when I walked up to the
Speaker 2: edge of that fountain and stood next to a stranger,
Speaker 2: I felt, for the first time in two three days
Speaker 2: since something shift that I was supported by these people,
Speaker 2: and in turn, just by standing next to them, I
Speaker 2: was supporting them. And I think that sense of belonging
Speaker 2: for the first time pushed me some way to on
Speaker 2: to participate in this idea for a memorial.
Speaker 1: A memorial. The vision that came to a Rod was
Speaker 1: of two 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.
Speaker 2: Themselves, imagining the surface of the Hudson River somehow shorn open,
Speaker 2: forming these two square voids in the water, cascading into
Speaker 2: these voids and never filling them up, and so they
Speaker 2: remained these empty, inexplicable vessels.
Speaker 1: A few years later, the city set up a competition
Speaker 1: to design a memorial for the site. It was the
Speaker 1: largest design competition in history, over five thousand entries from
Speaker 1: sixty three countries, including some of the most famous architects
Speaker 1: in the world. Michael Arod was a nobody. He worked
Speaker 1: for New York's Housing Authority designing police stations. He took
Speaker 1: his original idea and moved it from the Hudson River
Speaker 1: to the actual site of the fallen towers. Two deep
Speaker 1: voids representing the footprint of the twin towers, each with
Speaker 1: a waterfall and reflect pool, ringed by the names of
Speaker 1: those who died. He entered, and he won.
Speaker 2: The towers were about two hundred and twelve feet across,
Speaker 2: and the reflecting pools that you see on the site
Speaker 2: today are one hundred and seventy six feet across from
Speaker 2: waterfall to waterfall. That waterfall is ringed by eight foot
Speaker 2: wide water table that brings that out further to one
Speaker 2: hundred and ninety six if I'm not mistaken, and then
Speaker 2: surrounding that water table where the names are displayed is
Speaker 2: an area where you can walk around the pools, and
Speaker 2: that area is ringed by trees, and so that first
Speaker 2: row of trees that surround each pool is precisely two
Speaker 2: hundred and twelve feet across.
Speaker 1: He called his design Reflecting Absence, a precise representation of
Speaker 1: what was taken away on the morning of nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: What I wanted to do is convey to people who
Speaker 2: come here, very clearly without embellishment, how large these towers were.
Speaker 2: And that's very evident when you stand at the edge
Speaker 2: of that pool, and there is something that no photograph
Speaker 2: can capture until you're there. At the sense of the
Speaker 2: scale of the you as a person next to this
Speaker 2: enormous space is you have to experience it there and
Speaker 2: to see the thousands of names that surround these two pools.
Speaker 2: To convey the loss of so many lives.
Speaker 1: A rod conceived of something simple and beautiful. The task
Speaker 1: of making it real fell to the Port Authority. The
Speaker 1: Port Authority builds and runs much of the transportation infrastructure
Speaker 1: in the New York region, the bridges, tunnels, airports. They're
Speaker 1: like the metro areas in house engineer, contractor, and handyman
Speaker 1: all in one. If your handyman had an annual budget
Speaker 1: in the billions. They actually built the original World Trade Center,
Speaker 1: and the responsibility for building the memorial was theirs.
Speaker 3: Nice to see you on time today. Yeah, so we
Speaker 3: were just so.
Speaker 1: I asked the two former Port Authority executives who oversaw
Speaker 1: the memorial project, Chris Ward and David Tweety, to meet
Speaker 1: me at ground zero. I wanted to understand what it
Speaker 1: means to make memory real in the way that Arod
Speaker 1: was proposing.
Speaker 4: What a complexity of just building it, then the complexity
Speaker 4: of the symbolism and the culture of why did people
Speaker 4: choose to put so much into the site, which then
Speaker 4: exacerbated or made instructibility.
Speaker 1: You can walk around a bit, sure, why don't we
Speaker 1: start by really simple? I'm happy the nine to eleven
Speaker 1: Memorial wasn't an ordinary project. The design committee made it
Speaker 1: clear that they wanted something built on the site of
Speaker 1: the old towers, which created a logistical nightmare because ground
Speaker 1: zero isn't some vacant lot, It's one of the most
Speaker 1: dense urban spaces in the country. I met the Port
Speaker 1: Authority guys in the lobby of four World Trade Center,
Speaker 1: which is seventy two stories high, but it is also
Speaker 1: a one World Trade Center at one hundred and four
Speaker 1: stories and a two or three, a planned five and
Speaker 1: a seven World Trade Center, plus the nine eleven Museum,
Speaker 1: a performing arts center, and a massive transit hub where
Speaker 1: the Path commuter trains enter from New Jersey. The hub
Speaker 1: looks like the bones of a beached whale or a
Speaker 1: giant hair clip, depending on your perspective. That structure also
Speaker 1: contains a mall, and underneath it all, running right through
Speaker 1: the middle, is a subway line, the Number one train.
Speaker 1: All of these structures had to be built at the
Speaker 1: same time as Michael Arod's memorial Voids, and because everything
Speaker 1: is basically on top of everything else, the logistics of
Speaker 1: planning and building were overwhelming.
Speaker 5: So you have memorialization, you have a museum, you have
Speaker 5: real estate, you've got a security center, you've got an
Speaker 5: ecumenical religious city. You pour all that in and then
Speaker 5: you've got the overlag of the families were wondering, you know,
Speaker 5: where's my commemoration?
Speaker 3: Where will I warn? You put that all in?
Speaker 5: And it's impossible to disentangle a stet of priorities.
Speaker 1: Tweetywood and I stood by the two black Stone voids
Speaker 1: in the pouring rain, and they tried to explain what
Speaker 1: they went through.
Speaker 5: So we use the analogy that the construction was so
Speaker 5: difficult because it was like the children's game of pickup
Speaker 5: sticks that if you if you know that little game
Speaker 5: where you've got the multi colored sticks and if you
Speaker 5: pick one up, the other one moves and then you lose.
Speaker 3: Everything here is connected.
Speaker 1: The political leadership in New York made it clear that
Speaker 1: the memorial had to be finished in time for the
Speaker 1: tenth anniversary of the attacks September eleventh, twenty eleventh.
Speaker 3: Just to be tangible about it.
Speaker 6: The memorial plaza, which we were on a huge pressure
Speaker 6: to get done by the tenth anniversary, is sitting on
Speaker 6: the ceiling of the hub.
Speaker 1: The hub the place where all the underground transit lines converge.
Speaker 6: We have to completely refashion the construction process of how
Speaker 6: that hub got built. That huge costs by the way,
Speaker 6: in order to get this done first, so they built
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: The problem was when you did that schedule, the memorial
Speaker 5: plaza wouldn't have been done until the end of twenty thirteen.
Speaker 5: And so that's when we were starting to go, wait
Speaker 5: a minute, the city is not going to tolerate the
Speaker 5: port authority telling them me, telling them, you're gonna have
Speaker 5: to wait till twenty thirteen before you can commemorate the anniversary.
Speaker 3: And dates matter. I mean, ten.
Speaker 5: Years is different than thirteen years, which is different than
Speaker 5: twelve years. And you know, the engineers, a couple of
Speaker 5: them came up with the idea build the ceiling first, basically,
Speaker 5: go across the entire site with the ceiling, which is
Speaker 5: the ceiling of what's.
Speaker 3: Below, but most important, it's the floor.
Speaker 5: Of the plaza. And then once you've done that, build
Speaker 5: down from there.
Speaker 1: As if that wasn't enough, the governor of New York
Speaker 1: at the time insisted that the subway, the Number one line,
Speaker 1: keep running throughout all this. So they had to build
Speaker 1: a box around the subway tracks, suspend the box high
Speaker 1: above the site, and work around it. Which is one
Speaker 1: of those odd facts that you only think about if
Speaker 1: you live in New York and you took the Number
Speaker 1: one train, as I did many times. In those years,
Speaker 1: and you suddenly realized that on all of those trips
Speaker 1: you were in a real life version of Jenga, you know,
Speaker 1: the game where you have a stack of building blocks
Speaker 1: and you remove them one by one until everything crashes.
Speaker 5: So there was a whole re engineering of how you'd
Speaker 5: support the one train, how the path train would get protected.
Speaker 3: And remember you got an operating railroad.
Speaker 6: So you're building a temporary structure and housing the ceiling
Speaker 6: of a hub with train tracks below you, below the
Speaker 6: ones here, but the path trains were right under.
Speaker 3: The building up platforms exactly, That's exactly.
Speaker 1: And then you build a platform and then you plump
Speaker 1: the memorial on top of the platform, and even as
Speaker 1: things are going on there.
Speaker 3: And then you're feeding. And that's what I was getting
Speaker 3: up before.
Speaker 5: You're feeding the construction horizontally rather than vertically, which you know,
Speaker 5: added about sixty million dollars worth of additional cost to
Speaker 5: handle them. Like I was saying, at one point, you
Speaker 5: had people hand excavating underneath the one train because there
Speaker 5: 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 finish 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.
Speaker 5: Okay, So again, take something as simple as exactly where
Speaker 5: we're standing here. Yeah, here's the brass with all the names.
Speaker 1: We 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 void's 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.
Speaker 3: Due to the ability for brass to capture heat.
Speaker 5: And then if on a really really hot day someone
Speaker 5: could put their hand down on this, they could get
Speaker 5: literally a second degree burn if the sun had been
Speaker 5: on this all day.
Speaker 3: So there's a cooling system underneath.
Speaker 5: This brass so that it will always stay safe, so
Speaker 5: people can end up touching it. At the same time,
Speaker 5: if a little kid in the middle of winter when
Speaker 5: it's freezing, came out here and wanted to stickness tongue
Speaker 5: on it, you know, the famous get stuck to the
Speaker 5: flagpole in the playground.
Speaker 3: So there's a heating system underneath here as well.
Speaker 5: So just to end up showing these names, you've got
Speaker 5: a system which is both heating and cooling a copper
Speaker 5: you know facade here for where the names are atched.
Speaker 1: Well, if you just did concrete, would you have.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of different ways you could have
Speaker 5: put names, you know out there, but this was and
Speaker 5: there they're all backlit as you can see.
Speaker 3: So in some respects, would there.
Speaker 6: Be a more efficient way to have names r absolutely,
Speaker 6: but this is a special site.
Speaker 1: In the end, the price tag for the National September
Speaker 1: eleventh Memorial and Museum came to somewhere around seven hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars. To put that in perspective, the cost of
Speaker 1: the Vietnam Memorial in today's dollars was twenty million. The
Speaker 1: cost of the Lincoln Memorial in today's dollars was forty
Speaker 1: five million. Now, is seven hundred million dollars too much?
Speaker 1: I don't know. It depends on what you're comparing it to.
Speaker 1: I suppose the point is that we could have done
Speaker 1: it for less, but we chose not to because we
Speaker 1: wanted to memorialize that event as perfectly and precisely as possible,
Speaker 1: down to its dimensions, location, and date of completion. When
Speaker 1: we want to we take our memories very seriously. The
Speaker 1: maintenance schedule on that kind of thing must be intense.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're right, you can't fail, right, it's exactly.
Speaker 3: On the ice in the winter issue, right, It's just
Speaker 3: every part of that. Global warming makes it easier.
Speaker 5: So one of the problems is if you'll see the
Speaker 5: way the water flows underneath the perimeter, it's horizontal to
Speaker 5: the ground. Here about the side, you get a heavy
Speaker 5: wind in the wintertime and it whips across the top.
Speaker 5: It picks up moisture and then blows it onto this brick,
Speaker 5: which then potentially creates ice.
Speaker 1: Conditions between keeping the fountains going and security and the
Speaker 1: heating and cooling systems and the museum staff and chipping
Speaker 1: the ice off the brick, the operating budget for the
Speaker 1: memorial comes to another eighty million dollars a year. So
Speaker 1: all told, we're somewhere over one point five billion dollars
Speaker 1: for the memorial so far. The nine to eleven Memorial
Speaker 1: is option number one for memory management. The alternative option
Speaker 1: number two is Jacksonville.
Speaker 7: Do you have your high school Clumbar Jr.
Speaker 3: High School, Dicloma AMA veneer's degree from the University of Connective. Wow,
Speaker 3: what'd you major in?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 8: Did you ever go to jailer Quicksand?
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 9: What are you working at?
Speaker 3: I work, do someone and do what I already actually do?
Speaker 6: Wherever were Yeah?
Speaker 1: So when you became homeless?
Speaker 3: Did you become homeless?
Speaker 9: Did you like run away from a family?
Speaker 3: Was there violence at home? Any kind of differences?
Speaker 1: Jobs?
Speaker 3: Did you start?
Speaker 7: Okay?
Speaker 1: Jacksonville did its first count more than fifteen years ago
Speaker 1: more as an academic exercise than anything else.
Speaker 7: I honestly thought, we knew, why do we need to
Speaker 7: do a registry?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 7: We know everybody?
Speaker 1: That's Don Gilman, who runs Changing Homelessness. The more they
Speaker 1: thought about this idea of a registry, the more they
Speaker 1: wondered if they were missing people. What if there were
Speaker 1: homeless people out there who never stayed in a shelter
Speaker 1: or who never showed up looking for services. So Gilman
Speaker 1: decided to do a real count.
Speaker 7: So that was the first time we went out when
Speaker 7: it was convenient for our clients and not convenient for us.
Speaker 7: We went out between four and six am on a Tuesday, Wednesday,
Speaker 7: and Thursday.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The idea being, if you're on the streets in the
Speaker 1: early morning, you really are homeless.
Speaker 7: You are homeless, that's where you spent the night.
Speaker 1: So now for the count. The volunteers gathered before sunrise
Speaker 1: College students, formerly homeless, people who remember what it was
Speaker 1: like on the streets, teachers helping out before their day starts.
Speaker 1: Nurses from the nearby hospitals. I carry with them hygiene kits, toothpastes, socks, soap, shampoo.
Speaker 1: They fan out across Jacksonville looking under bridges, in park 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 scatterplot.
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.
Speaker 7: Looking at that scatter plan, it's not dots, it's little people.
Speaker 7: So it's always bringing it back to even though we're
Speaker 7: looking at aggregate data, we're always bringing it back to
Speaker 7: that individual who's experiencing homelessness, so we know their name,
Speaker 7: 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 scatter plot reminds us who they are, what their
Speaker 1: lives are like, what their needs are. I pointed to
Speaker 1: someone way over on the right hand side, the side
Speaker 1: where the most vulnerable people are clustered. Don Gilman's colleague,
Speaker 1: Charles Temple, recognizes the name right away.
Speaker 8: He's talked about every meeting that we have now that guy, that.
Speaker 7: Guy, because he's our guy. We get him house like
Speaker 7: our whole.
Speaker 8: That drops our whole after time.
Speaker 7: Some of these clients, even if they're not up on
Speaker 7: the vulnerability index, they can be difficult people to work with.
Speaker 1: Some people need all kinds of help. Others really only
Speaker 1: need one thing. Housing But which.
Speaker 7: Which ones are? Clay County guy that's been out there
Speaker 7: for a long time.
Speaker 8: He's been on the list for over a year, and
Speaker 8: like you're saying, there's just nothing out there for him.
Speaker 8: But we bring him up every week, We talk about
Speaker 8: him every week, and actually just last week we may
Speaker 8: have identified a housing resource hud Vash might take him,
Speaker 8: make a waiver and actually accept him through.
Speaker 1: Every Tuesday at one o'clock in the same room where
Speaker 1: I'm sitting all the key housing advocates in Jacksonville gather
Speaker 1: and comb through this list, all the names one by one.
Speaker 7: What's happening? I mean, what is the barrier? Is it
Speaker 7: because they want to stay in a particular part of
Speaker 7: our community and there's not a whole lot of affordable
Speaker 7: housing there? Is it because they have a very recent eviction?
Speaker 7: Is it because they have a very recent or a
Speaker 7: violent felony at some point? And how do we who
Speaker 7: are our landlords that will maybe work with this person?
Speaker 1: The names on the jack list are arranged deliberately. Where
Speaker 1: they fall on the scatterplot gives each name meaning. And
Speaker 1: I was struck as I sat in that conference room
Speaker 1: by how similar that was to the names list at
Speaker 1: the nine to eleven memorial. The victims there suffer from
Speaker 1: the same condition of invisibility, and the list of the
Speaker 1: names around the top of the voids is supposed to
Speaker 1: give them permanence. Why not do it alphabetically like other
Speaker 1: memorials do?
Speaker 9: I think the biggest reason, at least in my mind,
Speaker 9: is you lose so much of the story of these
Speaker 9: people by doing that.
Speaker 1: The job of figuring out which name went where on
Speaker 1: the parapet fell to another architect on Michael Arod's team,
Speaker 1: Amanda Sachs.
Speaker 9: I think it's important to know if they were on
Speaker 9: a plane, if they were in the North Tower or
Speaker 9: South Tower, if they were a first responder. I think
Speaker 9: it adds a level of meaning. It brings meaning to
Speaker 9: their name as much as possible. I also think, you know,
Speaker 9: one of the other reasons, just a very basic reason,
Speaker 9: was there are there are a few people with very
Speaker 9: similar names. There are people with names that only the
Speaker 9: middle name is different. When you list these people alphabetically,
Speaker 9: I think it loses you lose the sense of people
Speaker 9: as individuals.
Speaker 1: The guiding principle of Sex's work was something Michael Arod
Speaker 1: called meaningful adjacency.
Speaker 9: What it means is that every person is placed along
Speaker 9: the parapet in a adjacency with one or two or
Speaker 9: sometimes three people also obviously other victims that they were
Speaker 9: in some way close with.
Speaker 1: Two nine hundred and eighty two people died that day.
Speaker 1: Their names are first grouped according to the floor of
Speaker 1: the tower they worked on, or the plane they were on,
Speaker 1: or if they were emergency rescue the latter company they
Speaker 1: belonged to. Then within those groups, each name of the
Speaker 1: dead was placed nearest to the people who meant the
Speaker 1: most of them. Sachs had to work out each of
Speaker 1: those relationships and determine the patterns behind all those long
Speaker 1: columns of names.
Speaker 9: I would say I spent two years to three years
Speaker 9: on this arrangement just trying to understand the relationships, trying
Speaker 9: to do these kind of tests and see how it
Speaker 9: would work.
Speaker 1: And were there any adjacencies that were particularly meaningful.
Speaker 9: I have to say, I think for me, the whole
Speaker 9: I mean, every every person on that memorial was I'm sorry,
Speaker 9: I'm getting emotional. I can't say that any any adjacency
Speaker 9: had any more important than than any other. I mean,
Speaker 9: some stories are, you know, you think the kind of crazy, like,
Speaker 9: for example, that there were two women on Fight one
Speaker 9: seventy five and there was another woman on Fight eleven,
Speaker 9: and I can't remember exactly what their relationship was, but
Speaker 9: I think one of them was the godparents of the other.
Speaker 9: And you know, Flight eleven went into the North tower
Speaker 9: and Flight on seventy five was went into the South tower,
Speaker 9: and the fact that there were people that knew each
Speaker 9: other on those planes is insane.
Speaker 1: Sax 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.
Speaker 9: We actually wanted them to be ad as adjacent as possible,
Speaker 9: So we wanted the one in the North pool to
Speaker 9: be on the lower right hand corner, and the South
Speaker 9: pool would anyway be towards the upper the north west corner.
Speaker 1: She tried a hundred different ways to plant it out,
Speaker 1: couldn't make it work.
Speaker 9: So, yeah, that's kind of sad. The one adjacency that
Speaker 9: we didn't get is the one that I'm that I'm remembering. Yeah,
Speaker 9: but I just, you know, as I said before, just
Speaker 9: every name, every person has so much importance. I can't
Speaker 9: really say otherwise.
Speaker 1: We have a memorial for the dead at ground Zero,
Speaker 1: arranged according to their relationships, and we have a memorial
Speaker 1: for the living in Jacksonville, a scatterplot of the homeless,
Speaker 1: arranged according to their needs. Two memorials with the same intent,
Speaker 1: because when we add context to names, names become real.
Speaker 1: But of course, once you start reflecting on the similarities
Speaker 1: between Ground Zero and Jacksonville, then inevitably you start thinking
Speaker 1: about the differences.
Speaker 2: Initially, I was actually drawn to eastern white pine trees.
Speaker 2: They're very tall, towering, and there was just some an
Speaker 2: evergreen and read somewhere description of them describe a sort
Speaker 2: of the towering giants of the forest.
Speaker 1: Michael Arod was told his original design for the nine
Speaker 1: to eleven Memorial was too bleak, two voids on an
Speaker 1: empty windswept plaza, so he decided to add trees.
Speaker 2: And I thought there was something beautiful about the idea
Speaker 2: of actually them directing your gaze upward toward the sky
Speaker 2: while you were there, and developed a design that had
Speaker 2: about seventy or eighty of them on the plaza, but
Speaker 2: that you know, didn't feel quite right enough.
Speaker 1: A Rod deliberated with his partner in the memorial's design,
Speaker 1: the landscape architect Peter Walker. They settled on swamp white oaks,
Speaker 1: a gorgeous tree, peeling bark, lustrous, lobed, two toned leaves,
Speaker 1: green with a silvery underside. But then, of course it
Speaker 1: was left to the port Authority, to David Tweety and
Speaker 1: Chris Ward to figure out how to plant a forest
Speaker 1: suspended atop a transit hub.
Speaker 3: So then adding all of these trees of these trees.
Speaker 5: Yeah, delayed for at least a year figuring out the
Speaker 5: engineering to put all these tree pots. It's hard to
Speaker 5: put all these trees in when it's not a dirt
Speaker 5: necessary and the moisture that goes into the.
Speaker 3: Dirt, and the weight because there's.
Speaker 6: A void underneath ten dollars of a different structure, of
Speaker 6: additional structural support on the hub buildings under.
Speaker 1: Forty million just to support the weight of the trees.
Speaker 1: And how many trees are.
Speaker 3: There, We're going to say three and sixty and sixty
Speaker 3: to each each tree. So here's a tree here? What what? What?
Speaker 3: What's between the box and there's literally man made.
Speaker 5: Dirt which is super light compared to nature made dirt
Speaker 5: with a material in it which allows it to capture
Speaker 5: moisture to be very efficient for maintaining the health of
Speaker 5: the trees.
Speaker 3: But each box has.
Speaker 5: Its own moisture reader inside of it, so they can
Speaker 5: tell you know when it's you know, the tree is threatened.
Speaker 5: So you've got in each little part of it. You've
Speaker 5: got this amount of technology to put anywhere else. You go,
Speaker 5: oh my god, this is These are just trees.
Speaker 1: But not just trees, perfect trees, peeling bark, lustrous slope,
Speaker 1: two toned leaves, trees that are fed and cared for,
Speaker 1: and each given their own place to live.
Speaker 3: How big is the box? Ooh? Probably out to like
Speaker 3: fear so like ten by ten, ten by twelve.
Speaker 5: And the problem was when you began to move them
Speaker 5: over areas where it was there was less infrastructure underneath it,
Speaker 5: it got even more expensive to build the box and
Speaker 5: then bring this infrastructure to support the.
Speaker 1: Box trees with an expensive, bespoke, carefully engineered social support system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but again that was driven from good will you
Speaker 3: turn that off?
Speaker 1: As suddenly a security guard came running up. Apparently we
Speaker 1: needed authorization to conduct our interview. The attention to detail
Speaker 1: at the nine to eleven Memorial extends even to when
Speaker 1: and how you are allowed to engage in recorded conversation.
Speaker 3: These are the guys who built this whole thing. I
Speaker 3: was the executive director of the port authority. They ran,
Speaker 3: if we just talk to a police officer real quick?
Speaker 7: Yes, But unfortunately the media department does not work and
Speaker 7: they but yeah.
Speaker 1: We ended up leaving the memorial plaza for the sidewalk
Speaker 1: fifty yards away. We stood in the rain and looked
Speaker 1: back 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: taking 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.
Speaker 8: We do measure our inflow outflow on a regular basis,
Speaker 8: and we want to see our inflow less than our outflow.
Speaker 8: But we are teetering pretty much on the same amount
Speaker 8: that we are exiting. We're the ones we are housing.
Speaker 8: It's the same amount that we are seeing. So it's
Speaker 8: pretty close. But I think there's still a gap in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're not over time. The rumber is not.
Speaker 7: It is shrinking, but it is painfully slow.
Speaker 1: There's no mystery why it's painfully slow.
Speaker 7: We would love to master lease one hundred one bedroom
Speaker 7: units that are at a price point that our rapid
Speaker 7: rehousing clients could reasonably maintain, and we just can't find them.
Speaker 7: There were a number of years, well where I've been here,
Speaker 7: I think while you were been doing this too, where
Speaker 7: we could find those they existed. They were out there,
Speaker 7: like many other places some of those older units. They're
Speaker 7: quirky and interesting. They're starting to get rehammed. The rents
Speaker 7: will go up, and then the people that used to
Speaker 7: 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 there
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 one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty dollars a month? Who has that kind of
Speaker 1: money lying around?
Speaker 7: We are hitting the wall. We really now as a
Speaker 7: community have to pay attention to this. If our goal
Speaker 7: is to have fewer people out on the street instead
Speaker 7: of more, we got to start figuring out how do
Speaker 7: we build more deeply affordable housing faster.
Speaker 1: Some portion of the people who do not get help
Speaker 1: end up dying on the streets. Almost every community in
Speaker 1: the country has a service for those who've fallen. It
Speaker 1: happens in late December on Winter Solstice. It's become a
Speaker 1: tradition in Jacksonville. The service is held at the City
Speaker 1: Rescue Mission downtown. A choir sings, a local pastor gives
Speaker 1: the homily, then don Gilman performs her final duty of
Speaker 1: the year.
Speaker 7: I've had the honor for the last ten years of
Speaker 7: reading the names, and the list is always too long.
Speaker 7: And before I read the name, I remind everybody that
Speaker 7: there are six categories of homeless people, and that someone's
Speaker 7: mother or someone's father, someone's son, or someone's daughter, or
Speaker 7: their sister or their brother.
Speaker 3: It's more than.
Speaker 7: Dots on a scattered plot.
Speaker 1: How many people were on the list last in December?
Speaker 7: This December thirty thirty six, thirty six.
Speaker 1: The optimist in me always thought that the ultimate purpose
Speaker 1: of memorials was that they were dress rehearsals for our
Speaker 1: collective memory, that in the course of building a shrine
Speaker 1: to the fallen, we reminded ourselves of our broader obligations
Speaker 1: to the vulnerable. You give the benefit of your empathy
Speaker 1: and generosity to the memory of someone who was on
Speaker 1: a plane hijacked by terrorists, or to the memory of
Speaker 1: someone who worked in a toppled tower, and then it
Speaker 1: becomes easier to extend that empathy and generosity to the
Speaker 1: lonely and the suffering who are still among us. You
Speaker 1: get good at meaningful adjacency for the dead, and that
Speaker 1: makes you better at practicing it on the living. But
Speaker 1: that's not what happens, is it. We go to any length,
Speaker 1: any length, to commemorate one person's death, deploy armies of
Speaker 1: architects and engineers, then, in the same breath, look the
Speaker 1: other way as we step over someone lying on the street.
Speaker 1: A gorgeous mausoleum for the dead, A scatterplot for the living.
Speaker 3: Crystal Ponzer, age thirty two. Sam Sadowski, aged twenty five.
Speaker 1: I went home from Jacksonville and spent an afternoon watching
Speaker 1: Winter Solstice services on YouTube. Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Spokane, San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Small groups of people huddled together in the cold of
Speaker 1: a December night, holding candles, singing hymns.
Speaker 3: Margaret, Josephine Thompson, Jacko Hudson, Margarita.
Speaker 1: Then he's reading the names of the dead, hundreds of them.
Speaker 8: George Randall Solivar, aged twenty three, Edward Wound age forty.
Speaker 3: Seven, unknown, unknown unknown.
Speaker 1: I watched until I couldn't anymore. Then I wept. Revisionist
Speaker 1: history is produced by Meela Bell and Leeman Gestou with
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton and on A naim Our. Editor
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by
Speaker 1: Flon Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: the Pushkin crew Heather Feine, Carl Migliori, Maya Kaynig, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell and of course Jacob Weisberg, and
Speaker 1: from everyone here at Pushkin, thank you for listening to
Speaker 1: another season of revisionist history. You other reason we have
Speaker 1: the privilege of revising history every year. I'm Malcolm glampadettor